Accent your drumming!

Getting bored with my normal practice routine I decided to invest in a few books to work on something new.  Luckily for me Amazon’s Kindle collection allowed me to download Joe Morello’s books Master Studies and Master Studies II.  I purchased Master Studies first and worked through Morello’s exercises daily for about four weeks.  Feeling comfortable with the lessons in manual one I decided to download and move onto Master Studies II.

Now Joe created his exercises based on the drumming bible Stick Control by George Lawrence Stone, and when you compare the two works you can see a number of similarities in the lessons, however Joe added something unique to his stickings, namely accents.

At first I chose not to include the accents in my practice routine as Joe’s stickings were hard enough, but over time I slowly added them into the routine.  For a while I didn’t think I was gaining any ground using Morello’s lessons, in fact I felt that the book did nothing more than help warm me up for the nights four hour gigs with my jazz quartet. 

Then, as all lessons go when you continually put the time and continued effort into them, I started to realize that my playing had developed into something new thanks to those accents.

Let me explain something to you about swing.  Fundamentally it is the same for all styles of jazz.  You have your basic swinging ride with the hat on two and four, your left hand dancing on the snare, and the occasional bombs dropped on your bass drum.  But when you start adding accents to your swing you develop a whole new sound.  In fact when you look at past jazz masters you can actually see how the simple addition of accents can make a world of difference.  Take these two swing patterns that I found in the pages of John Riley’s Jazz drumming book The Jazz Drummer's Workshop.

By simply changing the accents on his ride cymbal Elvin created a whole new sound spectrum.

For me I started to notice that thanks to my work with Morello’s manuals I was able to add accents to my ride swing patterns in various locations.  These simple accents allowed me to mimic my bass players walking rhythms and pianists comping.  The introduction of these accents allowed me to add more depth to my swing and to become a better jazz drummer.

For you rock, fusion, country and pop guys adding accents to your playing can help you give the music your own unique sound while not getting in the way of the song.  I suggest that you try out Morello’s exercises and see how you can learn from one of drumming’s greatest masters.