Having already dug pretty deeply into Ignacio Berroa’s fabulous book, “Groovin In Clave,” which is to clave what Chapin’s famous work,“Advanced Techniques For The Modern Drummer” was to the jazz ride cymbal pattern, I’ve found that I need more interesting things to do with right hand clave. If you read my blog regularly, or if […]

Groovin In Clave, by Ignacio Berroa The goal of the book is to allow drummers to develop independence against the clave rhythm with the cymbal hand. Consistent practice and diligent work with the book will find the persistent drummer achieving this goal. I know because I’ve been working out of the book for quite some […]

Here’s an update to Clave Samba Independence Part 3. I’ve been working through the original, Part 3, and I found that I would break the page down into two bar exercises that I’d repeat, and then start stringing them together. The original page looked too dense to me so I came up with 3.1, which […]

The mission: play clave freely with one’s right hand, play samba with your feet, and play anything you wish with your left hand. So far, in Parts 1 and 2, we’ve explored playing common figures against the above patterns and tried out some musical examples. You can check out those two steps here: “Clave Samba […]