Survival chops: right hand lead

This is the second in an extremely short series covering the bare essentials of what you need for “drumistic” fill, variation, and solo material across a variety of styles— you can read the intro to the previous entry to get a sense of what I'm about here. Usually you arrive at these patterns via a Reed interpretation, but for my purposes here I wanted to present them in their complete state:

Play these with your right hand on the toms, snare, and/or cymbal with the bass drum in unison. Run them in a moderate-to-fast 4 (two or three notes per foot tap, that is), and in a moderate 2 (four or six notes per foot tap). Try to get off of the page as quickly as possible— there are actually only a few basic moves for each rhythm, and you should be able to improvise with these “by feel” pretty quickly.

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Alan Dawson's “Ruff Bossa”

We're laying it on pretty thick with the Reed interpretations right now, but I just went over this with a student, so I need to put up one more. It's a swing interpretation with partially filled-in triplets, using the 8th note rest and syncopation sections of Reed (pp. 29-44 in the old edition). Alan Dawson called this the “Ruff Bossa” interpretation for reasons I can't fathom— there are no ruffs involved, and I can't discern the Bossa Nova connection.

So here's how to interpret each written beat of the exercises, based on how the notes sound; after p. 32  you'll be dealing with rhythms that are equivalent to the ones below, but are written differently.

Play written 8th notes as alternating swing 8ths:

Play written quarter notes (or the equivalent) as an 8th note triplet with a RLL sticking, accenting the right hand:

Play notes sounding on an & only as a triplet with a RRL sticking, accenting left:

On beats where there's no note sounding— like if there's a rest, or the end of a tied/dotted note, or some combination thereof— use whichever triplet sticking you like, but don't accent.

Examples after the break:

Rudimental Reed: ruffs

Today's Rudimental Reed entry is pretty straightforward— just make a ruff out of any note that doesn't have an (untied) 8th note before it.  That's an awkward way of phrasing it, but I think you'll find it's very intuitive once you play the examples. The rudiments covered, or generated, include ruffs, single drags, and double drags, similar to a lot of the things in the Wilcoxon etude Roughing the Single Drag, from Modern Rudimental Swing Solos— I would recommed playing through that as a companion piece to this item.

As always, we'll first see how it applies to the first line of Exercise 1, p. 37 in Syncopation:

I've given both alternating and natural stickings— play it both ways, leading with either hand. I haven't included the multiple-bounce strokes in the stickings, but they happen with the opposite hand. Swing the 8th notes.

Here's a denser example, which is the first line of Exercise 2:

If you have questions about how to play a ruff, there's a pretty good video after the break: