Ideas and Exercises
For Jazz Drumming
In this section you will find a a lot of jazz drum exercises, looking at everything from applying jazz drum rudiments to jazz comping for drums. There are ideas for jazz drum fills as well as exercises for developing your creativity in playing jazz drum patterns and rhythms.
Triplet Triple Paradiddle Developments
Following on from the previous post, this idea contains a number of ways to create some musical phrases from the triplet triple paradiddle inversions that you can use in your playing.
Triplet Triple Paradiddle Inversions
The triple paradiddle as triplets provides a good coordination challenge and a foundation for developing some interesting comping ideas.
Uptempo Exercises for Developing the Upbeat
This simple set of exercises is an extension of the uptempo playing exercises you can find in John Riley’s “Beyond Bop Drumming”. As very few of those exercises deal with playing the up-beat, I wanted to write a set of practice exercises that focus on developing uptempo upbeats.
Moving a triplet figure through the bar.
This is another idea similar to #idea 41 that plays with moving a triplet partial comping figure through all the placements in a bar. The base pattern is a triplet voiced between the kick and the snare drum - kick, snare, kick - which can sound really hip.
Moving arount the kit with triplet accents
A simple idea for working on moving triplets around the kit while keeping a quarter note accent on the cymbals. The aim is to move around the kit creatively and freely all while keeping the accent.
Three over Four Triplet Comping Patterns
This idea follows on from idea 43. Here we look at how to apply some of these four-beat triplet groups to create interesting comping patterns.
The base pattern is one that you can find in John Riley’s Headroom Triplets as well as in a musical context with Jimmy Cobb on So What.
Three over Four Triplet Groupings
Playing three over four is a very common musical device, especially so with groups of triplets in 4/4. You can hear Jimmy Cobb playing something like this on So What, but it also crops up on many other records in fills and solos from many other jazz drummers.
Foot Coordination and Control
Most jazz drummers don’t play a double bass drum, but that doesn’t mean we should neglect the feet and the ability to use them in a similar way to the hands, far from it.
This is a simple idea for working on some coordination and control between the feet which can be added to your warm-up routine.
Triplet partial development
Here we are looking at developing some ideas with a triplet partial pattern. It uses four beats - two doubles on the snare and two doubles on the bass drum. We look at some different ways to vary and use it.
Developing Hand Technique through time playing
This idea works on building hand technique in the left, non-lead, hand using beat placements with time playing.