Playing a Jazz Ride Cymbal in 12/8: Part 2

Video Transcript

"Hi, this is David Pakman on behalf of Expert Village. In this video series, I'll be talking about the fundamentals of jazz drumming. Okay, now that we're familiar with this counting, one and a two and three and a four and a one, you really want to practice that as much as you can. You can't practice that too much. Even if you just spend fifteen minutes in a row just playing that, you can take out a metronome, set it as slow as you need to and just play and one and a two and a three, to play that jazz beat on the ride and on the hi hat. You can't do that too much. The next step that we're going to be doing is adding in the snare drum and adding in the bass drum. Then before we do that, we really have to understand that there's two ways to think about this jazz beat. One, is in the triplet form. As I said, one and a two and a three. The other is just a swung eighth note, one and two and three and four and one and two and three. Which way you count it is really going to be determined by the type of exercises that you're playing. If I am playing exercises on the snare drum based in triplets, one and a two and a three and a four and a one, it doesn't make much sense to count swung eighth notes. At the same time, if on the snare drum, just playing a shuffle pattern, one and two and three and four and one, I can count eighth notes and I can get away with it, no problem. For our exercises, we'll be counting in triplets and next we'll do some exercises with the snare drum."