Drum Solo - using Gary Chaffee concepts

This year I took the opportunity to compete in the Drumeo drumsolo contest, it was a lot of fun, a bit stressful but all in all a great accomplishment to all that participated (the winner will be announced on April 15, 2016). All videos were to be posted to the groups Facebook page which gave everybody an opportunity to see what they were competing against, the best part was that because of the accessibility of Facebook you could easily start a conversation with anybody that posted. I have met several people through this which I didn’t expect, but what I really didn’t expect was people actually asking me what I was playing, so I thought that I would do a blog post to dissect some of the “licks” that I used in my solo.

I have be influenced by Vinnie Colaiuta since the day I watched a VHS tape of him playing at the Tribute to Buddy Rich Concert. I mean this guy just blew me away and I started to buy every CD that I could find with him playing on it. Eventually I found out that Vinnie was a product of Gary Chaffee at Berkeley School of Music, I also learned that what Gary taught Vinnie (and others of course) eventually became the first two books in a series of 4 called the “Patterns Series”. These books have become a part of my life as much as Stick Control is to most drummers, I dedicated almost 20 years of practice to these books and I feel that they are the most comprehensive books written on the topic of the drumset.

If you’re not familiar with these books, the short synopsis is that they deal with playing different rates against the quarter note (3,4,5,6,7 and 8 notes), artificial groupings, figures against multiple beats (poly-rhythms) and subdivisions of poly-rythms – to be fair the books cover a lot more topics but what I’ve outlined is relevant to what I played.What I would like to do is outline some key things that I played, not the actual orchestration but just the sticking or concept behind so that you can explore and find your own way of using some of this material in your own way (which is really Gary Chaffee’s concept to begin with). What you’ll find is that much of this is very simple to play if you understand how to play different rates against a quarter note, if you don’t than this can be a great place to start as all of these figures are pretty straight forward from a sticking stand point.

For the full description see the blog post here http://rhythmicvocabulary.com/drumeo-...