Triplet 3/4 Co-ordination

I have been working on the idea of playing continuous triplets between the left hand and the right foot underneath jazz time, using John Riley's "Headroom Triplets" among other exercises.

Originally I wanted to come up with a way to expand this into playing more broken time with the RH over the triplets in 4/4 and the obvious starting point was thus to play the exercise in 3/4, but actually this is useful vocabulary building for 3/4 time too.

With exercise A, once you are comfortable with the initial pattern, practice starting the exercise from bar 2, bar 3 and bar 4 and looping back round. With exercise B practicing starting the exercise from bar 2.

Try other variations of the 3/4 cymbal pattern, as well as placing the hi-hat on both beats 2 and 3.

If you want to move into implying the 4/4 then simply try the hi-hat variation you can find in the pdf. Start slow and then try to play one bar of 4/4 time followed by the exercise (which gives a total of 4 bars in 4/4!).

These kind of co-ordination exercise don't necessarily sound very musical if you play them as is, and heavily! Play them light and use them for developing ordination, then apply them to musical ideas.

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 and expanded from the original.