A quick one today, no pun intended, though here we are. This is an uptempo exercise that builds off of yesterday’s idea of taking an otherwise “simple” exercise and forcing yourself to focus and balance by engaging your other limbs. In this case, the snare drum plays constant quarter notes against an uptempo ride cymbal pattern 2 + 4 on the hi-hat. The bass drum plays Ted Reed’s Syncopation in half time (credit here to Brooke Sofferman, we talked about this sort of idea a couple of weeks ago.) Note, I decided to write the ride/HH/snare in double time to preserve the original rhythms from Syncopation, it just didn’t look correct doing it the other way around.
While working through this I tried to really focus on keeping my bass drum stroke light, playing with a consistently smooth rebound on the snare and keeping the ride cymbal pattern as crisp as possible, not just mashing the stick into the cymbal to create. I found it was easier to achieve for the first 16 bars or so, I was a little ragged by the end of each exercise. This is definitely a long game sort of exercise, I can see it being very beneficial for balance of sound and smoothing out your feel if played consistently for a month or even a year, perfect for a quarantine I suppose.
What Should I Practice Today? 