Up Tempo Comping With Stick Control, Part 2

Once you’ve got Part 1 down and you’re playing it comfortably at a million bpms, add the bass drum.

Part 1 started with a paradiddle sticking, #s 5-8 on the first page of Stick Control, isolated the left hand and added a ride cymbal pattern over it. Now, In the style of Max Roach, “droppin’ bombs” as they say, add a bass drum before and then after each “single” from the paradiddle. Two and four on the hi-hat are assumed but not the rule.

You can do the same with the hi-hat for more of a Roy Haynes thing (I’m thinking Now He Sings, Now He Sobs era.) Here’s what that looks like with a different snare pattern taken from #6, RLLR LRRL. Here I would refrain from two and four on the hats to emphasize it’s role in the phrase instead of as background rhythm structure.

From there, experiment with placing two bass drum beats in each measure, or one bass drum and one hi-hat (again, refraining from two and four on the hats) or mixing and matching measures to create longer phrases. Again, is in Part 1, all of the stickings from the first couple pages of Stick Control, not just the paradiddles can be applied to this exercise.

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