Create An Arrangement Part 2

1. Now's The Time!

Charlie Parker

In this installment of the series I tried to take my drum arrangement to the next step by actually playing the "pitches" of the melody.  You can hear the melody played through twice starting around   after the brief introduction.  Although trying to get even a relatively simple melody like this across on the drums is a lot of work, it can can also inspire some really fascinating musical directions in your drumming, so in my opinion it is well worth it.  Here is the original Charlie Parker melody for reference:

Always inspiring

2. How to develop an arrangement

In addition to the overall idea of staying in the character/form of the song discussed in the last post here are some more strategies for developing your own arrangement.  

• Experiment with different sounds and use those sounds to dictate what/how you play.  For example in my arrangement I start with the open snare/tom sound.  This sound strongly influences my playing lending itself to less cluttered and more melodic style drumming.  After a couple of choruses of that sound I transition into a closed snare sound which leads me to more intense and busy playing that builds intensity. 
• Use rudiments thematically.  For example listen to how I use flams in this solo.  I am not playing a flam and then moving right on to another rudiment, I am really trying to explore the sound and feel of the flam all around the drum set.  Using rudiments this way can help you develop your solo in an unhurried way.  In general playing an unaccompanied solo like this can make you feel a lot of pressure to play everything you know right away, it is just you up there after all!  So combat this tendency by using rudiments in this fashion.
• Listen to the greats.  Max Roach springs immediately to mind, but there are many others.  I know I sound like a broken record with this, but the truth is that ear-training is the single most important part of learning the drums.
• Use call and response.  The idea of playing a simple idea and then responding to that idea is probably the single most common/helpful phrasing technique for drum soloists.  This kind of phrasing not only takes a lot of the pressure of improvising off, it creates a structure that listeners can easily grasp.  Communicating with an audience is always a challenge, particularly when you are talking about drum solos.  The conversational nature of call and response phrasing is perfect for confronting this challenge, so try incorporating it into your solo.
• Use mistakes and unintended things to grow your arrangement organically.  As you are practicing  you will often stumble across great ideas entirely by accident.  For example initially I meant to turn on the snare and leave it, but it slipped.  When I turned the snare on again I had the idea of alternating between the snare on/off sound.  The truly great improvisers can incorporate these kinds of ideas on the fly, but for right now just think of them as new compositional elements for you to incorporate into your solo over time. 

3. Overall map of my arrangement

Each section or idea usually divides along roughly the lines of the form, hopefully some of these ideas will be useful or inspiring to you!

• Short intro 
• Melody twice
• Solo with pitch
• With Flams/Pitch
• Pitches again, but more aggressive and with rolls
• Alternating between snare on and off sounds
• Press rolls and cymbal chokes
• Open playing around the drums
• Staccato rolls followed by looser rolls with right hand lead
• Floppy long roll
• Head out
• Short outro

Create An Arrangement

                                         
Practice by creating an arrangement
I was feeling inspired by a fantastic solo by Jeff Hamilton where he plays a whole arrangement of "Caravan" (it seems to have disappeared from the internet) on the drums, so I thought I would record my own version of "St. Thomas" as well as share some thoughts on how to play an arrangement in this fashion.  Making an arrangement of a song is a great practice tool for internalizing whatever tunes you are working on, soloing more compositionally, and often inspiring some great ideas that you wouldn't have thought of otherwise.



Here are some basic techniques to use when playing an arrangement:

1.  Come up with an overall map of the arrangement
It is important to understand the over-arching structure of the arrangement you are going to play so that you can anticipate what is coming next.  The map of my very basic arrangement goes like this:

• Brief rubato intro on the cymbals
• Max Roach inspired latin groove taken from the original Sonny Rollin's recording
• Melody twice- I tried to match the contour of the melody on the drums
• Solo section
• Melody twice again
• Ending- I tagged the last four bars three times

2.  Stay in the character of the song

In order for this style of solo to come across to an audience you need to spend some time thinking about how to keep your solo in the character of the song.  To accomplish this, when I am soloing I am constantly thinking about the melody of the song (for more on this check out my post about the two songs of jazz).  If you listen carefully to my solo you will hear me referencing the melody, playing off of the call and response structure of the phrases, and also outlining the form of the song.  

This is the most important part of this exercise, and is also the most difficult.  Start with simple ideas that come to you from the melody or structure of the tune and then build off of them.  Often using the most basic call and response style phrases is a great place to start.  Don't worry about trying to play your fanciest, most technical ideas, this isn't really the place for that.  Just play what comes naturally and take your time.  

For more inspiration on how to keep a solo in the character of a song, I would check out Max Roach.  As a matter of fact, his classic solo on "St. Thomas" is a great place to start:

3.  Try to give your solo a shape
Once you start to hear the song in your solo and you are feeling more comfortable, you can begin adding a macro dimension to your solo, a shape.  In the most basic sense you can think of your solo as an arc.  It has to start low and build intensity to some sort of climax before coming back down.  There are different variations of this shape, starting high before coming down and building back up, multiple crests and troughs, ending at a high point, but they all work on the same basic principle of tension and release.  

This deceptively simple phrase basically describes why music works, it builds up tension and then it releases it.  The important thing to take away is that if the shape of your solo is too flat for too long, you will lose your audience.  

There are a number of elements you can manipulate to build tension in your solo including:

• Dynamics- How loud or soft are you playing?
• Texture/Orchestration- What parts of the drum set are you using?
• Note density- How many notes are you playing or not playing?
• Rhythmic phrasing- Call and response?  Reference to the melody?  A groove?  Rudimental ideas?  

Essentially, the degree to which you use your musicality to control these elements will determine how much tension and release there is in your solo.  This in turn will effect what impact your solo will have on an audience.  More tension and release = Better solo.  

Newk The Bass Drum

Applying ideas from other instruments

As mentioned in a previous post, here is an exercise from my forthcoming book "Melodic Syncopation" that features Sonny Rollin's solo from "St. Thomas".  Just a friendly heads up, this exercise can be soul-crushingly difficult at first, so take your time! Max #5.pdf

Just for reference, here is the melody used in the exercise again:

Food For Thought: Rushing

Rushing isn't necessarily bad

Saying that rushing isn't necessarily bad may be a somewhat controversial opinion, but I believe we need to rethink how we use this word.  Here is a simple experiment to illustrate my point: 

The great bassist Hassan Shakur!

1.  Listen to the recording at the top (which features my great teacher Chuck Redd on Vibes, Ehud Asherie on Keys, and Hassan Shakur on Bass) straight through.  Ask yourself how it sounded and felt.  To my ear the whole things sounds pretty good and the band is swinging throughout.

2.  Now listen again, but this time skip from the head in right to the head out.  We were definitely rushing!

Here is the thing, human beings don't really experience or play music non-linearly.  We can and should only play what feels good in the moment, and in general, what feels good in the moment isn't necessarily metronomically precise.  If we go back and analyze a recording, sometimes what felt good in the moment is essentially a gradual increase in tempo over the course of a song.  In other words, rushing.  I have found that this tendency to rush seems most powerful in a live setting. 

Another more famous example from Max Roach, try doing the same listening experiment:

Again, to my ear this recording sounds great all the way through, but man are they rushing like crazy!

Winard Harper: This is also what I am talking about

This video of Winard Harper is another in a series of videos of great drummers playing and talking about the importance of melody that I have been bringing up through this blog.  The main things I wanted to highlight in the video are:

Winard at work

• Starting around 4:33, Winard talks about the importance of learning melodies
• More specifically (around 5:30) Winard talks about how all the great jazz drummers were "hearing melodies" when they were playing, even if they weren't producing specific pitches.  
• Winard connects this idea of "hearing melodies" with the even more fundamental idea of "playing musically"
• As an example of this he talks about Max Roach's playing and how he incorporates Max's ideas into his playing
• At 6:40, Winard points out that all the great jazz drummers would even sing melody when they were playing, using the examples of Art Blakey, Elvin Jones, and Billy Higgins
• He goes on to talk about giving the "idea of what the melody is", and shows some great examples of how to do this by singing the melody and playing around it (starts around 7:30, uses "Now's The Time" and "All The Things You Are")

I hope you enjoy this example of Winard's beautiful playing and teaching as much as I do!

Using Melody In A Solo

The melody as the basis for improvisation

In today's post I am going to use my own playing to demonstrate one of the themes of my blog, that is using the melody as the basis for improvising a drum solo.  One of my earliest inspirations for learning to solo using the melody was Roy Haynes' great solo on "In Walked Bud" (if you haven't checked it out already, I have a post about it here).  Some specific examples of how my playing in the video above is melodic are my imitation of the opening phrases of the melody, my use of repetition and space, and finally my adherence to the structure of the form.  If you want to read more about what I mean by melodic drumming, check out the post about Max Roach here.  

Ari Hoenig: This is what I am talking about

 

Soloing over form

This is an excellent explanation of some of the techniques of melodic drum soloing architecture from the earlier Max Roach post.  It also means a lot to hear this from Ari who is a real master of this type of playing.   

For more lessons from drummers like Eric Harland and Ralph Peterson check out jazzheaven.

Max Roach: Comping as soloing

Comping as soloing

In an earlier post I discussed Max's approach to soloing in a general sense.  In today's post I am going to zero in on a particular solo technique that Max used very frequently, and to great effect.  The technique I am referring to is using comping as a vehicle for soloing.  Essentially for Max this meant soloing using his left hand and right foot while keeping the time going in his right hand and left foot. 

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. 

Max Roach: Paradiddles with the melody as accents

I recently saw a great article on cruise ship drummer about different uses of the ever popular paradiddle.  In the spirit of collegial cooperation I thought I would add my approach to paradiddles into the mix.  

Max Exercise #3 Full

Here is a video of me playing the exercise:

And here is what it sounds like a bit faster:



Max Roach: Melodic Architecture and Phrasing

What makes a drum solo melodic?

Max is widely credited as being the first melodic drum soloist.  One question that I often get after people hear Max's soloing is, "How is that melodic"?  I think that this is actually a really good question, and goes to the heart of what this blog is all about. 

Using the architecture and phrasing of a melody

Unlike the last post about Ari Hoenig where the answer to the question is absolutely clear, since Ari literally plays the melody note for note, Max doesn't usually play melodically in this sense. Instead what he does is use the architecture and phrasing of a melody instrument to create tension and release in his solo.  For example "For Big Sid" from "Drums Unlimited":