Rehearsal today, and I am coming in with a triplet beat to share . I discover a lot of new beats to bring to rehearsal by learning from the past. Not copying the past. Learning from the past.

If I study some old technique, beat, idea, or pattern on drums, the same pattern occurs at practice when I am alone. I try to learn some old beat or fill as is, getting to about 50-75% close to it. Then my style gets antsy and wants some attention. I combine what I am trying to figure out with what I usually do, and it becomes a new thing I can do in my playing.

It happened that way with linear drumming. It happened that way when I tried to learn jazz drumming. It happens that way when I try to learn some legendary old beat.

Not being able to learn a beat completely isn't a fail. Coming out of a rehearsal understanding the idea or concept behind a beat is a huge win.

I can't play the half-time shuffle in the song "Fool in the Rain" note for note. My ghost notes noticeably leveled up from the fifteen minutes I sunk into figuring out the pattern. That's a huge win.

: RLR LRL (RLR is floor tom. LRL is on snare)

There is a drum beat called a Half-Time Shuffle. Lots of drummers crow about the difficulty of this beat. I will pause as you go look it up on Youtube or wherever.

[hold music]

I decided to get my head around this beat. When I stripped away all the ornaments and mythology around it (ghost notes, shuffle, clips of legendary 1970s drummers, etc.), it wasn't so daunting.

Pattern

RLR RLR BLR RLR
K

R = right hand on Hi-Hat
L = left hand on Snare
B = R an L at the same time
K = kick drum

Approach

1. RLR is the easy part. BLR is the tricky part. I worked on those two for a while separately.
2. Looped RLR RLR. Fun to zone out and do that part for a while.
3. Looped BLR RLR. Found it less tricky when you start with the both hands part.
4. Looped RLR RLR BLR RLR. Did this veeeeerrrrrry slowly at first. Let my mind and hands get used to when success sounds and feels like. Then ramped up the tempo.
5. Added the kick.

Tips

• Every L should be a ghost note. Didn't worry about that.
• This should be played with a shuffle feel. Didn't worry about that either.

Getting the beat up in the air is more important than making it shiny. I can polish it up later when the muscle memory is solid.

Beats like these are legendary for a reason. I may never use it for anything but the skills needed to play a beat like this level up my playing forever. Not a lot of chances to use half time shuffles in punk songs, but that "BLR" section in this beat is effing genius. It's one of those patterns that can reset your hands back to normal if you drum yourself into a corner.

Two things I need to get sorted out for the plain text drum tabs are accents and buzzes. I did a little soul searching and digging around in Unicode.

Accents are easy to do with inverted breves from Slavic languages.

L̑ (U+004C with U+0311 - combining inverted breve above)
Ȓ (U+0052 with U+0311 - combining inverted breve above)

For buzzes I realized that if I do them, they are natural so I probably don't need to clutter up the patterns. If I really need them in a pattern, I can type a note about it under the pattern, for now. This could change in the future.

When I am out and about, I get ideas for drum patterns. Sometimes I am without pen(cil) and paper, but I always have a device (phone, watch, etc.).

I could draw music notation in a sketch app; I can't do that on the watch. I could record the beat doing some sort of beatbox with a voice memo app, but I am not going to be doing that on a crowded train.

This means I need some way to get drum ideas out of the brain and into the inbox with plain text. Using R's and L's and any other characters to get them somewhere.

The patterns will live on their own page and there might be an RSS feed in the future. I am still trying to decide how to handle that.

Patterns

We are recording in a month which has my brain in recording mode. My vibe for this next recording is to try to document the place we are recording at. If we are going to travel all the way to a studio in the mountains of Kyushuu to track songs, the listener better be able to receive some of that mountain-ness.

How do we make a record that sounds "mountain-y"? We have about 30 days to figure it out.

The activities app that comes with the Apple Watch was recording when I play drums as an Outdoor Run. That was good enough for me to get some credit for the effort and didn't think any more of it.

I noticed the other day that a fitness tracker app I started using had "drumming" as a workout choice. That blew my mind because it was the first time I have ever seen that in any fitness related app.

Last night at rehearsal I hit the Drumming button for the first time. Today when I look back at yesterday's info, it's very cool to see the drummer icon.

Did the first rehearsal last night playing drums on iPad and the Koala app. I had to not bring drumsticks to force myself to not quit on the digital drum pads and jump on the kit 2 meters away. 60% of the songs were smooth and we both knew right away they worked.

The other 40% were clearly the wrong approach. Not a defeated vibe but more of a signpost to take this song a different direction. Also, the direction to take each song was pretty clear but I wouldn't have found it if we hadn't tried the original idea out.

I'm also glad I know to not try to force a music idea to get it to work. Try it, move on if it isn't happening, save your mental energy for the next song, and go rework back in the mental workshop with the notes from the rehearsal studio.

I've been watching random tutorials about the sampler app I love messing around with called Koala. I'm not watching the videos to learn the app but more for triggering any ideas I can use for our show on 06/30. Two things stood out to me as a drummer:

Grid

The sequencer in the app supports not locking to the grid. This is cool because you can place snare hits slightly behind or ahead of the beat. You can drastically change the vibe of the song if you rush or delay the snare hit in the right context.

Tuning

It's easy to overlook tuning your kit in a drum sequencer because it's so fun to just jump into it and start beat-making. If you take the time to tune the kit to the project it is in, the results are a definite level-up.

For the guitar-only project I am working on, the drums become the bass. When I tune the kick and snare to match the dominant notes in the song, the boost to the feel and power is noticeable. Things lock together better.
 

Our next show is at a place with no space for a drum kit. A good chance to bust out the iPad and get things done with the Koala app. The only tough decision I am facing right now is what kind of drum sounds to use.

The cool/difficult thing about digital drums is infinite possibilities. You can load as many drum sounds and kits as you want. That level of choice can be very overwhelming if you go down the rabbit hole of trying out every kit.

I've settled on my favorite drum machine which is the Roland CompuRhythm CR-78. It was made in the late 1970s and was one of the earliest drum machines ever made.

I setup an Apple shortcut that randomly selects a drum rudiment from a list of 80 stored in Data Jar. It's cool to have one rudiment to figure out each day instead of a huge, daunting list of all of them. I have a drum pad and sticks in the office so I can zone out and play the rudiment a little bit all day.

I find that if you do a minute here and there all day, the practice time really adds up. A fifteen minute practice session feels like a task. One minute micro sessions fifteen times doesn't.