Recently, it’s come to my attention that there is a shortage of materials for drummers to work on playing in 6/8. It’s come up for me when working on things for myself as well as with students.
I wanted to introduce a student to playing in 6/8 and I really couldn’t find anything in-depth on independence in that time feel.
And therein lies the birth of this blog post. The attached PDF contains 42 measures of 6/8 time playing that will give you a serious independence workout.
I’m not saying it’s a workout because the exercises are difficult. Rather, there is a depth to the exercises because they are based on Gary Chaffee ideas that I stumbled upon when working out of “Patterns: Time Functioning.”
That book offers a very efficient approach to independence which I am using here. The idea is to take a time feel and write out every bass drum possibility that can occur before the backbeat and then every bass drum possibility after the backbeat.
Then, combine these two sets of possibilities to create a third set of exercises that yields every possible combination of bass drum patterns.
That is what these two pages of exercises contain. Note that these exercises deal in the eighth note grid only. There could be many more possibilities if we were to expand and include the sixteenth note grid. We’ll save that for later.
Here is the PDF: Six Eight Independence Part One
He first gained attention as one of the winners of Modern Drummer magazine's very first drum solo contest, judged by Rush's Neil Peart.
He's played with Alison Krauss, Curtis Stigers, Emily Remler, Joel Hoekstra, GE Smith, Andy York, Marshall Crenshaw, Tony Shanahan, The Drifters, The Marvelettes, Big Brother and The Holding Company, and many other artists.
His band, Mark Feldman's LEVEL5, released their debut, "The Sybil EP," in 2019. The EP features Oz Noy on guitar and Will Lee on bass.
For more info: linktr.ee/markfeldman
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