Jazz Drum Transcriptions - an educational resource - newest transcription: Birdland - drums: Alex Acuña

oswaldo said:
Hats off! It's a great tune for getting into Elvin Jones' vocabulary.
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Thanks a lot! Transcribing is one thing but to copy the feel of Elvin is soemthing else and I'm only scratching the surface here, if at all.
 
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Dear Community,

my educational YouTube series continues, please take note of my latest transcription.

For this video, I've included the first 16 bars of the track "D Natural Blues" from guitarist Wes Montgomery's album "The Incredible Jazz Guitar of Wes Montgomery," released in 1960 and recorded at Reeves Sound Studios in New York City. The album is considered by many fans and critics to be the pinnacle of Montgomery's studio work. The drummer for the January 1960 session was Albert "Tootie" Heath.

"D Natural Blues" is a quiet, unagitated ballad, which was played with pleasant restraint by Albert "Tootie" Heath with brooms. "D Natural Blues" is excellent for newcomers to broom playing.


I hope you like it!

Please subscribe to my channel for more free drum content and drum videos.

Thanks a lot!
 
Dear Community,

my educational YouTube series continues, please check out my latest transcription.

For this video, I have transcribed the first 76 measures of the piece "The Sidewinder" from trumpeter Lee Morgan's album "The Sidewinder" released in 1964, recorded on December 21, 1963 at the Rudy Van Gelder Studio in Hackensack in New Jersey, with Billy Higgins on drums.


"The Sidewinder" is one of the style-setting pieces of soul jazz and became a much-played jazz standard. The feel of the song moves somewhere between even and ternary eighth notes. Still, it's worth a try for advanced beginners to tackle "The Sidewinder," as the ride pattern and repetitive snare drum make life a little easier for the player.

I hope you enjoy it!

Please subscribe to my channel for more free drum content and drum videos.

Thank you so much!
 
I decided to change the title of my YouTube series to:

"song name - artist - Drum Transcrption & Performance"

I think that better reflects the content of the videos.

By the way, on Saturday I'm releasing my next video, "Easter Parade" by Roy Eldridge with Kenny Clarke on drums. I would be happy if it meets your interest.
 
Dear Community,

there is a new transcription in my YouTube series "Real Book Drumming". It is the first 40 bars of the track "Easter Parade" from trumpeter Roy Eldridge's 1952 single of the same name, recorded in 1950, on drums Be Bop pioneer Kenny Clarke. Kenny Clarke swings away quite wonderfully lightly on this jazz standard.


"Easter Parade" was a popular song in its time, written by Irving Berlin and released in 1933. Berlin originally wrote the tune in 1917 under the title "Smile and Show Your Dimple" as a pep song for a girl whose husband had gone off to fight in World War I. In 1918, a recording of "Smile and Show Your Dimple" by Sam Ash had only moderate success. Berlin later picked up the tune with some changes and gave it the now-familiar lyrics for the 1933 Broadway musical revue "As Thousands Cheer." It was first sung by Marilyn Miller and Clifton Webb.

Hope you enjoy it!

The transcription is available for free download to subscribers of my site www.deinschlagzeuglehrer.de.

Feel free to subscribe to my channel for more free drum content and drum videos.
 
Dear Community,

after some time of waiting at my educational YouTube series "Real Book Drumming" got again growth. For this video I transcribed the first 20 bars of the piece "Fall", composed by Wayne Shorter, from the 1968 album "Nefertiti" by trumpeter Miles Davis, recorded on July 19, 1967 at the Columbia 30th Street Studio in New York City. On drums none other than Tony Williams.


"Fall" is one of three Wayne Shorter compositions on "Nefertiti" Davis' last fully acoustic album. It's a slow number, with a relaxed Tony Williams, almost fragile here and there and exploding now and then, working quite finely dynamically and adding important accents. Although it's so slow, it's hard to transcribe Tony's playing, mainly also because of the swirls and the accents therein. Tony Williams proves once again here how musical he is.

I hope you enjoy it!

Feel free to subscribe to my channel for more free drum content and drum video

Thank you very much!
 
Dear Community,

I've taken on a classic for my "Real Book Drumming" YouTube series, one of my all-time favorites: Moanin' by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers.


I transcribed the first 36 measures of the piece "Moanin'", composed by pianist Bobby Timmons, from the 1959 album "Moanin'" by Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers, recorded on October 30, 1958 at Columbia 30th Street Studio in New York City. On drums, of course, the band leader Art Blakey. In this video you will find an alternative recording. The first part of the video is a transcription of what you can actually hear from the original recording, the second part is an interpretation of the groove in the B-part and the solo based on a live video of Moanin', in which you can see Art Blakey playing his famous shuffle, which suggests that he also performed it on the original recording, but due to recording possibilities and frequency overlaps you don't get to hear every nuance. Especially interesting are the ghost notes on the beats '1' and '3' and the fact that Art Blakey doesn't play through the shuffle in the style of a "Chicago Shuffle" on the snare drum, but puts the ghost notes before the backbeat.

"Moanin'" comes off in a question-and-answer form. One sense of the composition's origin says that Timmons wrote Moanin' on the advice of saxophonist Benny Golson, since Timmons often played the first eight measures between different pieces, but he didn't compose a B-part for it until Golson suggested it.

I hope you enjoy it!
 
Dear community,

for my "Real Book Drumming" YouTube series, this time it should be a little Christmasy.


It's not exactly a Christmas song, but it's a song often associated with Christmas, "Linus And Lucy" by the Vince Guaraldi Trio from 1964. I became aware of this beautiful song again through an interview on the Drum History Podcast with host Bart van der Zee with drummer Jerry Granelli, who has sadly since passed away, who recorded this piece at the time.

I transcribed the complete piece "Linus And Lucy'", composed by the pianist Vincent Guaraldi, from the album "Jazz Impressions of A Boy Named Charlie Brown" released in 1964, on drums Jerry Granelli, who very discreetly makes his contribution to this groovy number. The changes from brushes ms to sticks and back again are not so easy, try it!

I hope you enjoy it!

Merry Christmas to you all!
 
Dear Community,

my "Real Book Drumming" YouTube series is going into a new round.


In this video, it's the first 36 bars of the track "Doxy," composed by saxophonist Sonny Rollins, from the 1954 album "Bags' Groove" by the Miles Davis Quintet, recorded June 29, 1954 in New York City for Prestige Records. On drums, bebop pioneer Kenny Clarke.

Kenny Clarke's tasteful underpainting on the hi-hat in the theme and his "dropping bombs," or use of the bass drum, are typical hallmarks of his style. Likewise, the unagitated swinging accompaniment in the solo stand for Kenny Clarke.

I hope you enjoy it!

Feel free to subscribe to my channel for more free drum content and drum videos.

Thanks a lot!
 
Dear Community,

my educational "Real Book Drumming" YouTube series has grown.


For this video, I have written a complete transcription of the piece "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy," composed by Austrian pianist Joe Zawinul, from the 1967 album "Mercy, Mercy, Mercy! Live at 'The Club'" recorded by Julian "Cannonball" Adderley's quintet on October 20, 1966 at Capitol Studios in Hollywood. On drums, New York drummer Roy McCurdy.

"Mercy, Mercy, Mercy" has always been one of my favorite songs and it was one of the first pieces ever that I listened to out note for note more than 20 years ago in preparation for my music studies. It's interesting how listening patterns change over the years, because now I've heard things that I didn't notice or perceive differently back then.

I hope you enjoy it!
 
Dear Community,

my educational "Real Book Drumming" YouTube series has grown.


In this video, it is the first 42 bars of the piece "Equinox", composed by saxophonist John Coltrane, from the album "Coltrane's Sound" by the John Coltrane Quartet, released in July 1964, recorded for on October 26, 1960 at Atlantic Studios in New York City. On drums Coltrane's longtime companion Elvin Jones.

I hope you enjoy it!

Feel free to subscribe to my channel for more free drum content and drum videos.

Thanks a lot!
 
Timo - lots of great stuff here. What a tremendous amount of work.

My only criticism would be your habit of having everything stems up (in Finale speak... only using one layer). IMO it makes them extremely difficult to read - and for anyone learning to read will do little help them get better. I know it is certainly more work to do them on two layers - but nearly a 100 years of drum set notation convention just can't be ignored. While, of course, the information is there regardless of notational "correctness" - but being able to "get it" in order to make use of it is just so much more difficult.

I notice you have been doing some stems up/stems down, making them immediately more readable.

I cringe to write this because I completely get the amount of work that would be involved with fixing them - at this point.
 
@dcrigger: Thank you for your kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed my content and appreciate the amount of effort I put into it.

Drum notation is still one of the biggest points of discussion in our community, and I very much expect that an international standardized notation will not be defined either. Unfortunately! I'm coming out here as a fan of the monophonic notation. Contrary to your opinion, I am actually of the opinion that especially inexperienced readers of sheet music are more likely to get along with this variant of writing down. Gladly I would like to justify this. In monophonic notation, for example, it is immediately clear which instruments are played together, since they share the same stem, and the sequence is also clearly recognizable through the linking of stems and staves. The single-voice notation also saves rests and punctuation, making the rhythm more compact in its presentation. With two voices, on the other hand, the player is confronted with two different rhythms, which must be read independently of each other at the same time, and more signs must be notated. In fact, it would often be easier for me to write down two voices because then I could do more about paste and copy. But let's talk about it, I can still learn a lot and of course I want to get better and better. It would be exciting to hear what other drummers have to say about it, especially drummers who are not yet so experienced in reading music.

Unfortunately, it's also the case that even if I wanted to, I can't change anything, at least on the uploaded videos, because Youtube doesn't allow you to edit things afterwards, once uploaded means uploaded.

Thanks again for your comment, I think it's really cool to get to talk to so many great drummers.
 
I 100% agree with David. Stems down for feet, all the time. Orders of magnitude easier to read.
 
Timo-Germany said:
@dcrigger: Thank you for your kind words! I'm glad you enjoyed my content and appreciate the amount of effort I put into it.

Drum notation is still one of the biggest points of discussion in our community, and I very much expect that an international standardized notation will not be defined either.
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Actually it is not a big point of discussion at all - because the lion's share of "standard practice" has been long ago codified into thousands of pieces of music written for the drum set. Sure academics still pitch the need for a standard notation set - but those discussions are entirely based on "which lines for which instruments" and "which kind of note heads to assign to which sounds".

None which has anything to do with what we are talking about here.
So frankly I could simply leave it at that and say, it is what it is. What it has been since before we were born. And it's not going to change. There is no voting. It is literally not up to debate.

Notation is about communicating the musical information to the player. And the standard practices came to be from being tried and tested in the field - the real world of players reading actual pieces of music.

So that said - I'll attempt to shed some light on why this works and why 99% of the time "monophonic" style writing doesn't.

The reasoning behind writing drum set parts this way actually predates the drum set by 100's of years. This idea to not smoosh everything together into one monolithic layer comes from keyboard notation. Keyboard playing and drum set playing share one major thing in common - both most often require playing to separate musical ideas at the same time. Imagine trying to read "The Beer Barrel Polka" with all of the notes connected into one "stems up" combined idea.... the oom-pa, oom-pa of the left hand intermingled with the melody of the right hand...

I question your idea that combining to easy to read ideas into one single idea makes it easier to read. I believe what it is does - actually the only thing it does - is to make the independence required to play it easier to see.

And yes, sometimes when confronted with an independence challenge, it is helpful to break it down into "RH+BD - RH - RH+LH - RH+BD - RH+BD - RH - RH+LH - RH" - but that's not reading - that's learning independence. After working on independence a bit - we start thinking more in terms of layering changing parts over ostinato parts. Making what I wrote above... playing 1/8ths in the right hand (HH) and playing Boom - Dat Boom Boom - Dat on the BD and SD.

And I don't believe it is always "Hands Up - Feet Down" (though that is obviously exactly how all early drum set parts were written - most of the time exactly mimicking the stems up and down, snare/bass drum parts of Sousa marches - 95% of all swing era charts were written this way - heck I played charts written that way in the 70's with Don Ellis - Whiplash was notated that for instance - just a snare and bass drum part that didn't dictate what was to be played, but conveyed the rhythm ideas to creat the part from.)

So in the example above - it's just important to separate the two musical ideas. So the player can read them each easily and then play them together. That could be hands up - feet down.... in other words, 1/8th notes on the hat with the snare married into that on 2 and 4. With the bass drum written as an independent part - stems down. Or as just the hi hat stems up - with the bass and snare written as a single melodic idea.

As simple as it is, I would probably write it the first way. But if the snare got more syncopated linearly with the BD, I would put them together. Eliminating rests isn't the concern - making each idea as easy to read as possible is.

This is why there isn't one exact way to do this all of the time - it depends on the music. But the foremost idea is that when there are two ideas happening - write them so the player can easily grasp each of them. Leaving it to the player to fit them together - independence-wise.

So is there ever a place for all stems up - frankly only rarely. Even when notating a single specific rhythm - like stop time hits - to be played by BD, SD and HH together. The convention is still to convey that the early separate parts have come together to play in unison - thus hands up-feet down.

Again - this is not debatable - it really is considered right when done this way. And regardless of how you may feel otherwise - it is considered wrong with the steams all pointing one direction.

Oh... so a place for all stems up - Again just like a piano part, when there is only ONE idea being conveyed. On the piano, this might be a run of 16th notes alternating between notes two octaves apart - 1st note in the treble clef, 2nd note in the bass clef, 3rd note treble, etc. - one linear idea. This is what cross-staff beaming is for.... to clearly indicate that those disparate notes are actually one single idea.

On the drum set - that would apply to again, very linear ideas. like say 16th's in 5/4 - H H S H H B H H S H H S () S H B S H B S

Isolating those BD notes serves no purpose - as the idea is a single line, not layered parts. So an appropriate place to write all stems up.

But I'm sad to say, that's about it. Because layered parts should be written as separately discernible parts. Because that's how everyone was taught to read them. That is the way that everyone that can read is good at reading them. And the way new players are taught to read. Not as slaved to tradition - but because it actually works best.

Really - I've only scratched the surface of how quickly a monophonic writing approach to drums falls apart. What about open hi hat notes that stretch across notes being played on the snare or BD. What about playing 1/8ths on the Ride and playing a beat of triplets against it? (We're supposed to somehow read that simple idea - after it's been smooshed into a syncopated collections of 16th note triplets. Even something as straight forward as a samba BD with a cascara rhythm played over the top with the hands in unisons become virtually indecipherable. Just a collection of "apart - together - apart - apart - together - together - etc" instead of two easily recognizable rhythms.... easily readable rhythms.

So I'm sorry if in reading this you feel I'm being ridiculously opinionated - or dictatorial. I'm really not. I'm just sharing the reality of having been playing drum charts - reading drum music - for a living - for literally 50 years. From high school jazz band - to dozens of pro big bands - sessions in TV and film - Broadway type theatrical shows - production shows - artist tours - literally an unimaginable amount of drum charts.... and not one.... ever.... written monophonically.

As I alluded to before - I cringed to point this out, seeing how much time and effort you have put into doing it this way. And I'm not saying you should do anything to change it. And assumed it was something you were either unaware of - or saddled with a notation program that couldn't do it (those do still exist). I honestly don't know what to say to your believe that this monophonic approach is a valid alternative - except to point why I don't see that it is. And the degree that musical community at large is in agreement with that.

Anyway that's my very wordy to cents on the matter - I wish I could say more of what I think you'd like to hear - but I just don't see how that's possible.

In any case, best of luck with your endeavor,

David



Timo-Germany said:
Unfortunately! I'm coming out here as a fan of the monophonic notation. Contrary to your opinion, I am actually of the opinion that especially inexperienced readers of sheet music are more likely to get along with this variant of writing down. Gladly I would like to justify this. In monophonic notation, for example, it is immediately clear which instruments are played together, since they share the same stem, and the sequence is also clearly recognizable through the linking of stems and staves. The single-voice notation also saves rests and punctuation, making the rhythm more compact in its presentation. With two voices, on the other hand, the player is confronted with two different rhythms, which must be read independently of each other at the same time, and more signs must be notated. In fact, it would often be easier for me to write down two voices because then I could do more about paste and copy. But let's talk about it, I can still learn a lot and of course I want to get better and better. It would be exciting to hear what other drummers have to say about it, especially drummers who are not yet so experienced in reading music.

Unfortunately, it's also the case that even if I wanted to, I can't change anything, at least on the uploaded videos, because Youtube doesn't allow you to edit things afterwards, once uploaded means uploaded.

Thanks again for your comment, I think it's really cool to get to talk to so many great drummers.
Click to expand...
 
Timo-Germany said:
Okay, 1:0 for @dcrigger. :) Does anyone take my side as well? <_<
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Having said that -- I do find using the stems-up version in the first few exercises in a beginner-level can be very helpful -- get students to think explicitly about how those limbs line up. But once you move past the basics, you're thinking more in terms of rhythmic "words" or "sentences", not about the actual 16th note grid of each limb. Scan it quickly "oh, it's upbeats on the left foot". "8th and 2 16ths kick pattern". For me, the increase in scannability (specifically, it's SIGNIFICANTLY easier to pick out those "words" when you don't have to look "through" the hand notation to get to the note flag) is so extreme that I easily come down on the "100% bottom" camp.
 
@dcrigger

Hello David,

thank you very much for your very detailed statement. I must admit, from so many angles I have not looked at it at all, a thousand thanks for that! I also see it absolutely not dogmatic and am very happy to read the experiences of such a seasoned drummer.

I fully agree with you that rhythmic relationships are of course much clearer when they are presented separately from each other, you mentioned 3 against 2 as an example of this. There I am completely with you!

You write, if I understood correctly, that you prefer to read the feet with note stems down and the hands with note stems up. How do you feel about combining the feet and, for example, the left hand of a right-handed person in order to notate, for example, a swing rhythm with stems up and the corresponding second voice with the note stems down? Wouldn't that also help the readability of the different rhythms?

Thanks for taking the time to do this, it's not a given and has actually broadened my horizons.
 
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