Developing Coordination With Afrobeat Drumming Pt. 4
This is the final post of a four part series of exercises to help develop your coordination with Afrobeat drumming inspired by Tony Allen’s first Afrobeat groove.
This is the final post of a four part series of exercises to help develop your coordination with Afrobeat drumming inspired by Tony Allen’s first Afrobeat groove.
If you haven’t seen them already, Check out part 1 and part 2. So let’s continue to develop our coordination with Tony Allen’s first groove of Afrobeat. Now that we can play a bunch of different ride and snare patterns, it’s time to do some work on the left foot. A unique aspect of Tony Allen’s style is the way he creates an interesting interaction between his hi-hat foot and his hi-hat hand patterns. I missed this facet of his… Read More »Developing Coordination With Afrobeat Drumming Pt. 3
I’ve been spending a fair amount of time working on my Afrobeat chops. I’ve been listening to a lot of Fela Kuti and his artistic descendants such as Antibalas and Abayomi Afrobeat Orquestra. I am slowly starting to grasp the complex style of Tony Allen’s drumming in particular and it’s a lot like developing jazz chops. Anyway, I wrote myself a sheet of exercises based on Tony Allen’s first groove of Afrobeat. There’s a bunch of tricky stuff I wanted… Read More »Developing Coordination With Afrobeat Drumming
Here’s a sheet of exercises I wrote to develop the facility to play open hi hat splashes on the ee’s and ah’s using the left hand. These exercises are based on the famous Bernard Purdie lick you can hear in Aretha Franklin’s Rocksteady and which is a staple of funk drumming. If you watch Purdie play the lick, you’ll notice he plays the open sounds with his right hand but I find that when you use the left hand it… Read More »Funky Left-Hand Open Hi Hat Splashes
Here is a very insightful post from Inspired Practice about working on coordinaton. Sometimes I think that a teacher is just a person who isn’t afraid to say “slow it down” a lot.