In March I went to New York and took some lessons with Billy Ward and Robby Ameen. One of the things Billy got me to do was play a groove then begin to gradually embellish it without losing the basic underlying groove. He specifically wanted me to hear in my head what I wanted to hear on the kit BEFORE I played it - rather than just throwing my arms around and hoping for the best.At one point he came over to me and started singing rhythmic phrases for me to try and implement. This was his way of simulating what it's like when you're playing live with other musicians. Perhaps you're on a gig and the guitarist plays a rhythmic phrase and you want to mimic that on the toms, or the bass player does something cool and you want to answer his phrase with your bass drum.
Practising in this way is very useful training but it's difficult to be surprised or challenged by your own ideas. It was great having Billy there shouting phrases for me to mimic but once I got home and was practising on my own I struggled to come up with new ideas.
My lesson with Robby Ameen involved a similar idea. The two of us played a slow songo groove then Robby would play a 1 bar rhythmic phrase which I then had to repeat. Once I'd got the hang of that he'd extend it to 2 bars. It's challenging remembering what was played then executing it all while keeping a left foot clave going. He'd switch between 8th notes, triplets and 16ths and came up with things which I'd never have come up with on my own.
When I had some time off over the summer I started looking into a way of creating some software to do the rhythm generation for me. I found a program called 'Max' and I managed to write the Rhythm Machine in the 30 day trial period.
The program is pretty flexible and there are many ways you can use it. Unfortunately it sometimes gets out of sync with itself on slower machines. I think this is an inherent problem with way Max. Still, it can be a very useful tool and it's worth checking out.
Download it for free here and let me know how you get on with it.
Cheers,
Joe
