Blue Monk Voicings

This follows on from the previous post on Blue Monk Stickings. And, this time we are voicing the melody between the snare drum and the bass drum. You should play this with jazz time throughout and the hi-hat on two and four.

The first exercise is more or less voiced as alternating single strokes, except for bar nine.

The second exercise is voiced as doubles.

The third uses a mix of singles in the bass drum and doubles in the snare drum part.

Again try to sing the melody as you play and make each rhythm into a musical phrase.

There are many other ways to phrase this between the snare and the bass drum, so try to find your own. Alan Dawson would probably suggest playing all the long and tied notes with the bass drum and everything else with the snare, for example.'

You can reverse all the stickings; you can move the snare part around the kick; you can replace the bass drum with the hi-hat.

Not only can you get some interesting phrases for comping and soloing, you can also apply these ideas to any tune and see what comes out.

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.