More with rock beats using Syncopation

Going a little further with my earlier piece on making rock beats using— say it with me— Ted Reed's Syncopation. In doing this, there will be many duplicate beats, but that's not important— our purpose is not to create new beats, it's to apply a thought process: taking a melody line, converting it to a drum beat, and then doing basic modifications to it. It's the beginning of playing with creative control over what you are doing, rather than just playing familiar beats. It's all simple enough that most people will internalize the concepts quickly, and begin applying them purely instinctively.

Be sure to review the previous thing first, and be able to play it with Reed Lesson 4 (pp. 10-11 in the old edition), #1-15, straight through without stopping. The current exercise involves shaping your phrases by doing things with beat one of the second and fourth measures— omitting the bass drum, moving it to one side or the other, or bridging beat one by playing on both sides of it.

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Half-time feel rock using Syncopation

Extending my previous series on making rock/pop beats using Ted Reed's Syncopation, here is a way of making a half time feel using the same concept, except we play quarter notes on the hihat, and catch beat 3 on the snare drum, instead of 2 and 4. The tempo of the quarter note pulse should be bright:

Many of the resulting beats will be useful as conditioners and for gaining familiarity with the feel as anything else; some of them have very dense bass drum parts, and this has a much lower percentage of ordinarily usable beats than the regular rock piece did. You'll have to play a lot of exercises and find the ones that work for you musically.

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Listening example and explanation after the break:

Double time feel / half time feel

Hm, maybe being extraordinarily busy will force me to finally do some things that are actually accessible to people. Here's another easy thing, illustrating half time feel and double time feel using basic rock beats. Playing a double time or half time feel in this case means halving or doubling the feel rhythmically within the original tempo-- instead of playing the snare drum backbeats on beats 2 and 4, you play them on beat 3, or on the &s of every beat. A true double time or half time involves an actual change in tempo, and would be written the same as the original beat-- the first two measures of each line-- with a written notation telling you to play half (or twice) as fast.

Play each section with repeats and without, then play the entire page without stopping.

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Basic beats

Here's a rare bone for my younger/beginning-er readers. What we have here is a collection of basic "rock" beats- really they're good for many/most varieties of popular music using the drum set. The names I've given them are just for convenience- you can use any of these on any kind of music where this general type of thing is suitable. They're just what I call them.

For clarity, I've also given the snare and bass drum parts without the hihat, along with the combined rhythm of those parts. You don't necessarily need to practice those parts, unless you're having trouble with the complete beat.

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Things to do with a beat

Writing by making lists of things- it's just where I'm at right now. This is a quick run down of one of the main jobs/avenues for creativity on the drums- the manner in which you keep time. Often students will work through their books either thinking they've mastered the materials because they can play the patterns as written, or, better, feeling like they're missing something because they can't do anything but play the written beat. 

1. Play it repetitively at a comfortable volume and tempo. Like I say, just the first step.

2. Play it from a dead stop. This hangs beginners up- they'll often need to put a beat together one limb at a time, over several measures. Usually I have them play just the first note of a beat and then rest for the rest of the measure, adding notes as they can do them perfectly, until they are into the beat and can keep going on their own.

3. Play it from a count-off. Meaning you are to come in in the right place, and at exactly the right speed when someone counts off a tempo for you.

4. Punctuate phrases. Be able to keep track of the number of measures you've played without relying on hearing the tune, and place a marker (like a cymbal crash) at the beginning of a phrase.

5. Make fills. The fills themselves are a separate issue, but you need to be able to smoothly get from the groove to the fill, and back into the groove.  

Keep reading, the interesting ones are all after the break:


6. Make ensemble figures. Same as with the fills.

7. Improvise variations on it. Make little changes in the bass drum or sometimes snare drum part to give the groove the feeling of developing, of acting in conversation with the other parts. As you work through your books, try to relate beats to each other; notice that many of them are variations on a few basic forms. If you've worked through my methods, you can probably make the variations on the fly.

 8. Play it in a range of tempos. Anywhere it will likely be encountered in real music. Knowing the implied range of tempos for a given beat is also one of your jobs. Which leads us to:

9. Know what it's for. You should be listening to enough music to be getting an idea what calls for what type of beat. Today especially, anything you find in a book labeled "rock" or "funk" is going to be applicable across many genres.

10. Make common metric modulations. Many drummers (and some composers and arrangers) like to play mathematician, but usually being able to go into double time or half time (or double time or half time feel) will be quite sufficient. 

11. Play it in a wide range of dynamics, from very, very soft to pretty strong. Very few drummers can play as softly as they will often be asked to. Some drummers find it difficult to play as loud as they want to, though most have no trouble playing as loud as they will need to. Which is still usually louder than most people will want them to.

12. Make changes of intensity using timbre and orchestration. This can mean re-voicing, embellishing, or simplifying/taking away parts. For example, changing the timbre of the snare drum back beats by switching to brushes, or to rim shots, rim clicks, or flams, or by doubling them with cymbal crashes or floor tom hits. You're also doing this when you move your ride pattern from the hi-hat to the ride cymbal, or crash cymbal, or floor tom, or cow bell, or whatever. This is a huge area for exploration, especially as you get into more complex music, and music with a wide dynamic range.

Kristen's rock micro-syllabus

Here I've written up a thing I've been doing verbally with Kristen, one of my 6th grade students, to acquaint with some of the basic moves in rock-style drumming.

Our method has been to run each measure in a section, memorize them, then run them without stopping from memory, then improvise with them. I've written them mostly in 2/4 to isolate each idea; after the exercises are learned and the transitions are smooth, we begin to count them in 4/4. I've found that putting the snare at the beginning of the pattern can help clarify the coordination, so I've written some of the exercises backwards. We don't include those in our memorizing/improvising routine. Once the fill/SD variations exercises are learned, we practice putting them at the end of one or two 4/4 measures of a basic rock beat.

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By the way, for more of this sort of thing, at the excellent Bang! the Drum School blog there are a couple of pages of good basic rock beats available. If a few more people will start using the "monster mash" style font on our rock materials, we'll have a bona fide tradition going.

Two simple rock applications

You've probably noticed by now that I do a lot with Ted Reed's Syncopation? Here are two more methods which I have developed (along with my Rock beats with Syncopation piece) to introduce my intermediate students to interpretive reading, and to begin teaching them to think like improvisers rather than beat-regurgitators. The resulting patterns have a sort of 60's bubble gum feel, with a strong quarter note pulse throughout. Some of them will make good, simple grooves on their own, some can be used as fills, some are only good for reading practice.

Once you're able to play the exercises (including the 16/20 bar exercises) all the way through without stopping, practice improvising with concept, changing patterns every measure. To play the exercises as fills, play one or three measures of a rock beat of your choice, then one measure of the pattern, and repeat.

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Buy Progressive Steps to Syncopation for the Modern Drummer, by Ted Reed

Todd's Methods, pt. 3: Rock beats with Syncopation

Most drum books present their stuff fully written out verbatim for the drum set, which is fine for learning patterns, but not for thinking like a musician. This is something I made up to introduce the idea of taking a melody line (which could be the melody of the tune, the bass line, or a rhythm part) and making a drum part of it. It's simple enough that it probably exists elsewhere, though I've never seen it.

It's a good idea to already be able to play at least a few basic rock beats; that will isolate this as a thinking problem rather than a technical one. As always, we'll be using Ted Reed's Syncopation:

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