Hello and welcome to the fifth instalment of the odd groupings series. In this lesson we will be looking at a slightly less obvious grouping of either 5 and 4 or 3 depending on how you feel or count it. When it comes to applying these patterns I have used a jazz approach but please do experiment and have some fun!
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I recently played drums with Mechanical Monkey for a couple of live session videos. I am planning on doing a couple of lessons over on the Istanbul Mehmet Blog soon to go over a few of the grooves and ideas behind the songs. In the meantime, here is the first of the videos. Hello and welcome, today I will be sharing with you a really useful hand warm up exercise that I not only teach but also use myself for loosening up my wrists and getting warmed up. Before we actually get into it (are you sitting down?) it’s not another iteration of the standard singles, doubles and paradiddles exercise that everyone knows a version of, although that is a great exercise there are loads of versions already out there. Not sure what I mean, then just watch Joe Morello’s killer exercise here for a great display of the basic idea. Ok so what are we actually going to look at today? Its a simple enough idea, treat the hands evenly. Almost everyone has a dominant hand and therefore a weaker hand. As drummers, we strive to lessen the gap between our hands as much as possible to allow us to fully express our ideas musically. As always, I have written this with a right handed player in mind, if you’re a lefty, just flip the sticking and enjoy.
I hope you all got something out of that and find it useful for getting your hands warmed up. To start with it can be a little challenging, but once you have mastered it, you will be left with a quick and effective warm up.
Welcome to a slightly different series of lessons. In this lesson I will be showing you a really good exercise for increasing your accuracy with 16th note bass drums.
1a) Ok, so I know when you see this you might dismiss it and not even bother playing it, but please do. Put a click on, something slow like 60 and play through it, focusing on playing perfectly in time and counting as you go. 1b) Now we add the backbeat on “2” and “4”. Try and continue to count and really focus on nailing the click. 2a) Now on to the 16th notes. Keep the click going and make sure you are counting. As you play this, also take care to make sure the bass drum is exactly in the gap and you are not swinging the bass drum. If you are counting the full 16ths this should happen naturally. 2b) As with 1, we add the backbeat in the second part of 2. Make sure you focus on keeping the hihat smooth and uninterrupted. Many students want to put the hihat on the “e” of 2 and 4 because your brain is used to following a snare with a hihat. 3) In this example we switch between 1b and 2b. Try and focus on the hands part as this is the same for both bars. We are simply shifting the bass drum along a 16th. Also take car when looping the two bars as you get two 16th note bass drums back to back. 4) This is a shortened version of 3. Instead of switching every bar, we change it up every 1/4 note. Not only is this a good exercise, it’s a cool sounding groove as well. Hope you had some fun with those and it makes some of the recent bass drum heavy exercises a little easier. Out of all of them, number 3 is the one to focus on. It will really help you to increase the tempo and accuracy of your bass drums. Hello. I feel a bit cheeky calling this part 4 of the series because it is clearly the second half of part 3. This lesson is an extension of what we looked at last time so if you missed that one, go and check it out. This time, we are still going to be focused on a three note grouping but instead of snare, bass, bass we flip it for bass, snare, snare. This is really going to loosen up your left hand for ghost notes. I have found a lot of students becoming more creative with their grooves after mastering this as it really helps build an independence between the hands. The steps involved are almost identical to the previous lesson. Stay focused and have some fun
Hopefully this will have been of some use to you. After talking to a few people, I realise that part 3 was quite tough to master at a higher speed due to the number of bass drums. Join me in the next lesson where I take a break from the odd groupings and focus a bit more on the core ability to play accurate bass drum patterns.
Welcome to part 3 of the series. In this lesson we are going to look at one way to play a three note grouping. Not only is this really going to help you strengthen your bass drum speed and independence, but it also sounds cool! It’s a short but focused lesson that should hopefully prepare you for some of the more intricate patterns to come.
Hello and welcome to the second lesson on odd groupings. In this lesson we are going to take a look at a few accents and get comfortable with the building blocks that we will need to progress through later lessons. We are also going to have a quick look at some groupings of 3, and two very simple ways of playing them.
I hope you got a lot out of this lesson. Make sure you take your time with each of the exercises as in the next lesson we are going to increase the difficulty and start looking at some more advanced groupings and combinations, and have some fun!
Hello and welcome to the first of my lessons for the Blog.
![]() I am going to end this lesson by saying that although this lesson is a basic introduction to one of the ways that you can make odd time signatures feel less odd and more musical, the core principles will really help your playing in 4/4 as well. So have some fun. |
AuthorWil Wainwright has been a student of the drums for well over 20 years and a teacher for over 10, starting his musical journey in the early ‘90s. He has been a part of many bands over the years ranging from Punk, through Rock, Prog, Math-Core, Math-Rock, Metal, Pop and Electronica. Although he is an accomplished performer, teaching is where his real passion lies. He now teaches at various schools and colleges in the UK including prestigious institutions like Ardingly College as well as smaller primary schools. Wil also does a lot of private tuition, really focusing on getting students to be the best versions of themselves possible. He proudly plays Istanbul Mehmet Cymbals and uses Vic Firth Sticks Archives
September 2017
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