Hello students and parents. I’d like to apologize for slacking on the homework posts lately. It has been a slow couple of weeks at ABC and a busy couple of weeks everywhere else, so I let this slip a little bit. But these posts are back for the duration!
Ezra – Please work on the worksheet I gave you RE: Ghost Notes. Practice each bar on a continuous loop (repeated) until it is comfortable, then move on to the next one. If any are especially hard to play, circle them and we’ll talk about them next week. Remember to keep a contrast between the ghost notes and the accented notes; ghost notes must be played quietly in order for accents to really ‘pop’. If you get frustrated/bored, stop and come back to it later. To hear and see ghost notes in action, check out some live videos on YouTube. All drummers use ghost notes, but funk drummers use them more than anyone. Bernard Purdie, Clyde Stubblefield, or David Garibaldi are all good for this. Here’s Garibaldi playing live with Tower of Power – watch how his left hand is in CONSTANT MOTION. You can barely hear the ghost notes, but they’re there! https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKPxOz4Dd4A
Chloe – Try to get on the kit at least twice this week! Practice the basic rock groove while counting out loud. Pay special attention to making sure that you don’t flam between limbs – when two drums are meant to be played at the same time, play them EXACTLY at the same time, not slightly apart. Use your ears. Spend half your time at the kit playing around (improvising, experimenting, ‘telling a story’), and half your time seriously practicing the groove. You can also work on adding an 8-note drum fill at the end of 4 bars, like we’ve been doing. Don’t just mimic my Right-left-foot-foot-right-left-foot-left-crash fill, make up some of your own. A rest also counts as a note, just crash on beat one!
Brad – Practice the basic rock groove. But also, put on a metronome (https://www.metronomeonline.com/ here is a free online metronome), and practice the rhythmic subdivision exercise we’ve been doing. You can put the metronome on at many different tempos. Every time you hear the click, you should be saying a number (one, two, three, four). After each time you say ‘two’ (with the click), you should be saying and clapping a subdivision: “one, two and three, four. One, two and a three, four. One, two e and a three, four.” Remember that we are fitting two, three, or four EVENLY SPACED notes into the space of a quarter note, at whatever tempo your set the metronome. Because you set the metronome tempo, YOU decide how easy or difficult this exercise is!