rhythmic training by robert starer

A book I used a million years ago at the College-Conservatory of Music in Cincinnati (for a guitar sight reading class): Robert Starer's Rhythmic Training. I'm giving an amazon link here because you can look through some of the book there, but of course buy it at your favorite vendor of music scores...

Anyway it's an excellent book to go through from time to time, and especially if you're having particular difficulties (e.g. switching between triplets and sixteenths while keeping a steady pulse). The last few exercises are still brutal for me...

the beat makes a difference

The idea of a beat (or a "tactus") -- that is some regularly recurring accent that sets up a meter -- is interesting. Without such an accent or focal point there's no way of telling where the downbeat is needless to say, which means, consequently that determining where any given rhythmic pattern starts and ends is made impossible. Take the following rhythm which recurs ad infinitum:

Without a downbeat there's no real way to distinguish what the rhythm really is. For instance any of the 3 notes could be thought of as beginning the pattern:

Which would produce the following (the gray area encloses the same notes which look different due to beaming).
Actually one good benefit of this is that if you can play the first one you can play all of them (for me #2 was always very, very hard to play...it's not!).

drum rudiments

I recently had to coach a drummer who was learning some rudiments like the rough half-drag and nine-stroke roll. Rudiments are really cool -- in fact I think anything is really cool that bumps up one's technique. But here's a site that not only does the rudiments on the snare but also in the context of a beat and a fill...nice applications!

rudiments from freedumlessons.com

On this page you can access all of the 40 rudiments offered, plus (scrolling down) there is a good description of each. Many, many thanks to Lionel Duperron for playing!