Monday, October 17, 2011

Max Roach: The melody as accents with paraddidles part 2

Getting Consistent Rimshots
Last week I posted exercise #3 from the Max Roach section of my forthcoming book, as well as videos of me playing it at various tempos.  This week, after some hard work and excellent advice from the helpful guys at the Drummerworld discussion forum, I have worked out the final step of the exercise.  In this step I am playing all quarter notes from the melody as rimshots.  Consistent left handed rimshots using traditional grip have been a real struggle for me, so making progress on this was very rewarding.  Here is a video of how it sounds at a medium tempo:


Two useful tips
The suggestion I personally found the most helpful from the Drummerworld discussion was to increase the angle of my snare drum.  In addition, one thing that I discovered really helped me improve my accuracy was to mentally visualize where on the stick I was trying to hit the rim on each rimshot.  Although this can be extremely tedious, I think that this very deliberate mental effort was the only way to really train my brain over time. 


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