A transcription of Max Roach’s trades and drum solo on Jordu from the 1954 record Clifford Brown & Max Roach:
Tag: drums
The Dilla Feel, Part III: The Grooves (Real-World Examples and Dilla’s Influence)
This post is part of a 4-part series on the rhythmic style of J Dilla.
Part I: (History) · Part II (Theory) · Part III (Grooves) · Part IV (Application)
In this post I want to take a look at some transcriptions of Dilla feels found in the wild to break down what they’re doing.
The transcription methodology for these tunes was to pick a four bar section where the beat is clearly audible and align it to a beat grid in Ableton. I then recreated the grooves on separate tracks by looking at the waveform to determine where individual hits occurred. When the waveform was unclear, I placed a sample in the approximate location and then adjusted it until it no longer made an audible flam against the track. For some of the songs with sampled drums, I isolated the samples and aligned them via phase cancellation.
This post includes screenshots of the Ableton live sessions and standard notation for each tune. For the standard notation, I focused on creating intuitive and easily digestible summaries of the grooves rather than notate them literally. I experimented with a couple different approaches for notating subdivisions and microtime including written descriptions, approximating to the nearest subdivision, and using special symbols to mark when notes fall behind/ahead of the written beat.
Continue reading “The Dilla Feel, Part III: The Grooves (Real-World Examples and Dilla’s Influence)”
Steve Gadd Drum Solo on “Samba Song”
A transcription of Steve Gadd’s drum solo on Samba Song from the 1978 Chick Corea record Friends:
This is a prime example of how note density and orchestration can be used to provide shape in a drum solo. It can be roughly divided into four- and eight-bar sections, the first of which contains very sparse rhythms orchestrated between the snare and cowbell. New pieces of the kit are introduced and explored one by one, starting with the hi-hat, followed by the bass drum, toms, and eventually cymbals.
Each section layers on more rhythmic density and complexity. Mm. 1-17 move from separated notes and figures to long streams on 16th note paradiddle patterns. Mm. 20-24 features a highly syncopated pattern of off-beat 16th note accents. 32nd notes are introduced at m.29 in the form of a hemiola pattern of alternating 16ths and 32nds. This is followed by an unrelenting stream of sextuplets at m.33 (mathematically slower than the 32nd notes, but they are played continuously rather than broken up). Finally, at m.37, there is a rhythmic simplification back to 16th notes to close out the solo.
Note: I notated mm.29-32 with flams instead of 32nd notes to emphasize the swiss army triplet nature of the figure. It sounds like straight 32nd notes when played by Gadd.