Week 10 16th - 19th November

10 Weeks! ..... I just wanted to take this opportunity to formally say a huge thank-you to you all for taking the time out of your busy lives to come and have drum lessons. You're all doing so well and progressing at a fantastic rate - WELL DONE EVERYONE!

OK, we did some groove exercises this week. The idea behind this is that I want to get you out of the habit of following what I write on the board without really understanding what it is we're doing and more importantly why we're playing what we're playing ('Karaoke drumming' if you like).

What you play, in terms of a groove, is usually determined by what is going on in the song - what the bass guitar is playing or what riff the guitarist is playing etc. Our job is to make a groove out of what we hear and to give the song a pulse and drive it along. We do this with a 'BACK BEAT' on the snare drum usually (but not always!) on the '2' and the '4' and bass drum beats emulating the beat of the song.

However, what we play on the Hi Hat is largely our choice. We make the judgement call as to whether we play just the quarter notes - as in a Heavy Rock track, or a busier Hi Hat pattern with for instance 16th notes on the Hi Hat as we would in an RnB song.

Work through the following exercises playing four different Hi Hat patterns with the grooves. Watch out for some 'Back-Beat displacement', a Back Beat on '3' and I've snuck in a 2 bar groove at the end.

Week 9 9th - 12th November

Michael Jackson Week ...

This was the first of our one-off lessons featuring this time the music and grooves of Michael Jackson. We looked at 'Beat it' as played by Jeff Porcaro, 'Thriller', 'Rock With You' as played by John Robinson and 'Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)' as played by Ed Green.

Listen to the tracks and play along using the sheet below.

Thanks to Neil and Alex from Wednesdays and and Fridays for spotting that the groove for 'Beat it' was incorrect. Well done Fellas!

Week 8 2nd - 5th November 2009

Firstly, welcome back after our week off for half term. This term, running up to Christmas (and the Christmas Concert on the 20th of December - more on that later!) promises to be very busy and packed full of new and exciting lessons for you all.

This week we looked at playing Jazz and dropping some 'Be-Bop Bombs' on the snare drum.

Work through the sheets below, as we did in class - but remember with Jazz Drumming LESS IS MORE - you DO need to be able to play them all but NEVER put them all in one bar.

Week 7 19th - 22nd October 2009

The best fills you"ll ever play ......

All of these fills are based on the standard 16 16th note fill - 1-E-and-a, 2-E-and-a, 3-E-and-a, 4-E-and-a. Try to play a few bars of an 8th note groove  before launching into the fill - remember to make sure the tempos match. The 'numbers' and the 'ands' in the groove are the same as in the fill.

Week 6 12th - 15th October 2009

6 Weeks already! Again apologies for not posting up everything from last week, I'll try to cover everything in this post but if anything gets left out do let me know.

Firstly, 16th note triplets and 16th note triplet shuffle. With regular 16th notes, we would sub-divide each quarter note pulse into 4 beats and count it 1-E-and-a, 2-E-and-a etc. With 16th note triplets we are dividing each beat into 6 even beats with a count of 1-2-3-4-5-6, 2-2-3-4-5-6 etc. To play a shuffle but in 16th note triplet form we would play the pattern like this :- (Bold = notes to be played)

1-2-3-4-5-6    2-2-3-4-5-6    3-2-3-4-5-6    4-2-3-4-5-6

The best exponent of this style of playing is a drummer called Bernard Purdie. He has worked with many recording artists such as Aretha Franklin and Steely Dan. His version of this groove is now well known as the 'Purdie Shuffle' which incorporates 'ghost' notes played on the snare drum with your following hand (example below) as well as a back beat. This can be heard on 'Home at Last' and 'Babylon Sisters' by Steely Dan. This idea was taken even further by another drummer called Jeff Porcaro who often played this groove pattern over 2 bars incorporating a 'clave' pattern on the bass drum - examples of this groove can be found on 'Rosanna' by Toto and 'Any Foolish Thing' by Micheal MacDonald.

An example of this groove can be found at the bottom of this post.

Work through the sheets below at your own pace and if you can have a listen to a few examples.

Our second subject was 8th and 16th note grooves played one-handed and hand-to-hand on the hi hat - with 8th and 16th notes on the bass drum.

The first pattern we played was the 1 and-a, 2 and-a, 3 and-a, 4 and-a,  on the hi hat with on hand as show here or hand-to-hand as shown here.

The second pattern was 1-E-and, 2-E-and, etc on the hi hat again played with one hand as shown here or hand-to-hand as shown here.

The third pattern (the one you didn't like!) was playing 1-E a, 2-E a, 3-E a, 4-E a on the hi hat with one hand as shown here and hand-to-hand as shown as here.

The Purdie Shuffle :-

Week 5 : 5th - 9th October 2009

Again two topics were covered this week, but I think it's worth everyone having a look at the 16th notes under 8th note groove exercises below.

Week 4 : 28th Sept - 1st Oct 2009

Swing is the thing this week!

This week we looked at playing in a swing style - taking a straight groove and applying some basic principles to play it in a more swung, jazzy, blues-ie, funky way.

The first two sheets below cover all that we discussed in class - how you have two options when it comes to changing what you play to make it swing. Option 1 is to 'dot' the first played note, which adds half it's value to itself to make it 'last' longer. Now for us drummers that doesn't mean a great deal but it does mean that the next note that you'll play will be 'pushed' slightly to the right, closer to the next note, which in turn will be dotted an so on. This will give you that 'shuffle' feel that you hear in Jazz and Blues. Option 2 essentially does that same thing but this time you're going to change those straight hi hat beats to triplets with the middle one missing.

Work through the two sheets making sure you're OK with the concept then have a go at the sheet below.