Palindromes are words, phrases, or sequences that read the same backward as they do forward. They can be numbers (12321), letters (rotator), or sentences (Go hang a salami; I’m a lasagna hog!). Palindromes have even shown up in album titles, such as Miles Davis’s Live-Evil. We can mirror rhythmic patterns on the drums just as easily as letters and numbers, and in this lesson we’ll apply this concept to the drumset. Let’s start with a simple 16th-note groove in the first two beats of a 4/4 measure. Once we get to beat 3, we’ll copy our initial counts of “1-e-&-a, 2-e-&-a” in reverse order: “a & e 2, a & e 1.” By doing this, the original snare accent from beat 2 won’t fall on beat 4, where it normally sits; instead it will be one 16th note earlier, on the “a” of beat 3. Single-stroke stickings become interesting when […]

February 2019 Issue