A Simple Phrase - Phrases and Unisons

Following on from last week's post. Here are some further studies to develop some ways to play this same simple phrase in time.

In someways it might be better to start here and understand how the phrase sounds and fits in time, and then working on the accents and stickings from the previous post.

Start playing the phrase on the ride cymbal, making sure you count and feel the space. Work on all these exercises as swung and straight 8th notes. Work on it slow, then against a slow blues.

Try the unisons and using the phrase for comping patterns. You can experiment with moving the snare drum part to other sound sources.

Make sure you start exercises 4A, 4B, and 4C, from beat four, and then resolve on the add of one.

Where it really starts to get interesting is playing this figure in 3/4 (Fig. 5 in the PDF), this gives you a 2 over 3 polyrhythm; you must count and feel the time.

The full set of exercises are in the PDF.

This was originally posted on "Jazz Drumming Blog" and in the "Ideas for Jazz Drumming" e-book (no longer available). This post has been revised from the original.