Making Ride Patterns Easy
If there’s one thing that makes a jazz drummer amazing, it’s their approach to the ride patterns. Besides the basic swing beat, jazz drummers often alter the ride cymbal pattern to adjust for the tempo.
What’s the fastest you can play, and what’s keeping you from getting faster?
For me, the problem when I would play uptempo was that I could not play the “chang-a-lang” faster than about 320bpm. My hand had a lot of trouble articulating each beat at that speed. Now in no way am I saying that sticking with the chang-a-lang” is a bad thing. In fact more often than not, that’s the way great drummer’s play uptempo!
Take for example the song Milestones from the Miles Davis album Milestones. It’s a medium up tune with a simple riff melody. The bass player is walking and the drummer is swinging with the cross stick on 4. This is a high swing situation and sounds great like this. Now if a drummer were to be playing complicated ride patterns over this song, it would pretty much sound like junk. For this situation, the strict “chang-a-lang” works; it’s what’s appropriate.
As the tempo gets faster however, it gets a lot harder to play only the “chang-a-lang”. Instead of keeping a rigid ride pattern as you increase your speed, it works to create different patterns by using the ride cymbal notation below.
I created this notation to teach a different approach of playing fast. What this notation essentially does is break up the standard jazz ride beat into two units. Then by simply moving these units around, you can come up with very interesting ride patterns that flow and also that are appropriate for fast tempos.
To see how this works, see the excerpt from my book below:
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Now that we’ve defined the two units that make up the standard jazz cymbal pattern, how do we construct different ride patterns?
You can hear what pattern I want to play, then figure out how it translates with notation, or just orient A and B randomly and see what you come up with. Besides being fun, randomly creating ride patterns lets you decide what works and what doesn’t work.
One thing you need to notice as you begin learning more about this notation, is how different patterns affect accents within the ride pattern.
Take this for example:
A B A B A B
Tap this pattern out and notice how the A sticks out and establishes an accent within the beat. Also as you begin to practice all the different ways of organizing A and B, notice how you throw the stick for the letter B, as compared to A.
A is a simple hit of the cymbal
B is more of a throwing motion
Take this notation and apply it to very fast tempos and observe how much faster you’ll be able to play, with a lot less effort.
Related Entries: The Jazz Ride Cymbal
