More Hand Co-ordination for Latin Playing

In many ways this is an extension of Idea#11, and both ideas were inspired by Antiono Sanchez's playing on "Travelling Fast" from Pat Metheny's "Tokyo Day Trip" album.

The idea here is to develop cymbal melodies and variations against a snare ostinato. This is more common in latin styles and tends to be the opposite of straight ahead jazz where the cymbal pattern is more static and the snare drum part more creativity.

When playing latin music on the drum set, the drummer is often playing the parts of multiple percussionists, and this means the left-hand (for us right-handers) plays a more static part, clave or a conga-esque pattern, and the right-hand does more improvising.

For a lot of us used to straight a head jazz styles, this reversal of roles can provide a challenge to our co-ordination and independence. This set of exercises, then, is designed to work on freeing the cymbal pattern against a static snare drum part. 

The initial exercises with eighth notes (or quarter notes) seem easy at first, but once you start varying the bass drum pattern (samba, baiao, tumbao) and the snare ostinatos it starts to get much tougher.

The next level is to start mixing the the cymbal figures, until you are able to improvise the cymbal pattern freely.

There's a lot of work here...!!!

Start slow and really mind the unisons too!

The full set of exercises is 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.