Jazz course prospect?

This masterpiece didn`t end up in the course due to different drum kit?

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A jazz course will be made! I just have to find the time. Looking at my schedule releasing the new version of the website, as well as adding more funk songs and probably making a ā€œgrooving & improving 2ā€ course, itā€™s gonna be somewhere in 2021, but itā€™s a genre I want to discuss in depth for sureā€¦ I have to do it well though, which means actually studying some jazz drumming for a while. I want to figure out how they do fills and how to improvise in a nice wayā€¦ itā€™s gonna be a tough one.

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I am very happy to hear that!

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@Robert_Mathijs, it will be quite tough in that there are a variety of jazz genre to consider. There is the old school of the snare roll / tap and pedal hat, the brush technique as you have highlighted in your video which lends itself to mellow tones of a Sax and mood music, then you have swing and big band swing, Latin jazz and finally modern jazz which I canā€™t believe anyone really understands. I think that they will all have different drumming styles, kits and core elements.

Good luck, look forward to seeing the results one day. :+1:t2:

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I am looking forward to this course as well. I found your web site and became a Patreon supporter because of that one video. LOL. Iā€™m a web developer/content manager so I know how long web sites can take to complete. When the course is ready ā€“ Iā€™ll be here.

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Awesome. The jazz course is part of my plan for 2021 for sure now.

Iā€™m planning on doing the Jazz course as an in depth ā€œstyleā€ course, create one more course for beginners and one for advanced players.

All should be released between may and september since those are the months I have the most time.

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Iā€™d like to ā€œpile onā€ and add my vote for a course - or courses - specific to jazz. FWIW Iā€™d be more interested in bebop/swing/cool styles. i.e. jazz drummers of the 50s and 60s.

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I actually worked on a Jazz course in the beginning of 2021, but I have to admit that at this point in time I got a little stuck. I came up with a bunch of exercises, with the main focus being able to play that standard jazz pattern on the ride and hi hat with the dominant hand and then improvise hits on the snare or other parts of the kit with your non-dominant hand.

This is actually pretty hard to do, but possible for sure. The problem was that I practiced this for a couple of months, I tried to do some of the patterns in ā€œThe Art of Bop drummingā€ by John Riley, and after all of thatā€¦ I didnā€™t sound that great and definitely not that jazzy. When i use the simpler approach I outline in this video I actually sound betterā€¦ Finger drumming JAZZ tutorial - YouTube

The ā€˜dynamicsā€™ of jazz playing seem to be a bit of a problem on a pad controller, which has so little dynamic range. So some straightforward swing is doable (as I do in that youtube video), but besides that, itā€™s hard to make things sound good and not too blunt.

So that turned out to be a bit of a problem. If I cannot get things to sound good after practicing for months, I shouldnā€™t tell my students to go and practice this stuff until I figure out how to actually make it work.

That said, I have made some good progress with regards to improvisation and having more freedom around the kit. This has a lot to do with learning a bunch of rudiments really well and also switching between which of your two hands is the leading hand. I think for 2022, those will be the first ā€œadvancedā€ topics I will tackle and Iā€™m hoping that by the time Iā€™m done with that, I will have some new insights into how to actually make jazz playing work on a pad controller. Itā€™s one of the few things I really havenā€™t been able to figure out properly as of yet :frowning:

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Cheering you on as you figure out this uncharted territory. I for one will be so excited if/when you develop your technique to the point of transferability through an advanced course. I love jazz, not so much bop and beyond, but jazz in general.

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I might be able to give fans of jazz a breakdown of what I think needs to be done. I might make a small course about reading drum notation next year and after that, I really think trying to play the exercises in the ā€œArt of bop drummingā€ book will be the core of what you have to do. The problem is that that is a LOT of work.

My guess is if those patterns really feel like second nature, you can focus your attention to playing dynamically which will be a challenge in itself.

But thatā€™s as far as Iā€™ve managed to figure things out.

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@Robert_Mathijs Your diagrams are a nice gateway to reading notation. Maybe it was intentional how you laid them out to nearly mimic the placement on the staff. I read somewhere that the value of drum notation isnā€™t so much for sight reading a groove youā€™ve never heard before but rather to jot down ideas and to be able to play them again later and to share them. The only reason I decided to try to learn is so that I can have condensed notes to practice away from home.

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Well, you donā€™t wanna learn drum notation so you donā€™t have to remember the beats youā€™re learning :slight_smile: The problem with that is that youā€™re skipping over the most important part, which is being able to play an awesome groove that actually grooves because your hands know what to do and your ears are guiding them. Sheet music will not help you one bit with that. It is indeed to remember ideas or to learn new patterns that you then have to learn by heart and remember!

Also, a lot of the time drum sheet music will only have breaks written down. So basically it will say: ā€œPlay something that fitsā€ without writing it down and then in bar 8 thereā€™s an accent, or a break and the sheet music will tell you where that is. Itā€™s important that you yourself can come up with something that fits as a drummer.

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