My approach to writing a drum book is always to create the method I could never find. I own dozens of them, but for some strange reason I always had a hard time finding a good book about drum fills. I ended up looking for great licks in my favourite albums, and learning to transcribe them.
Phrasing is a topic of fundamental importance for every drummer, as it constitutes at least half of what we do. However, the study of this subject tends to easily disorient drummers, due to the large amount of options, directions and solutions available.
That’s why I have tried to organize the materials collected over the course of many years in a gradual and coherent program, with the intent to provide a go-to manual full of musical ideas and effective phrasing techniques.
The end result is lots of practical and ready to use fills, and also a number of powerful tools and methods essential to learning how to invent your own licks, so that you can use these studies as a starting point and as a reference to get inspired and work on developing your own style and vocabulary.
The book is arranged in clear sections, one for each main topic. You will be guided step by step through an effective course of action, while trying to stick to extremely useful and musical applications:
– Phrasing Cells: lay the foundation for the development of your own language, using alternating hands phrasing, rhythmic figures, hand/foot combinations and sticking ideas.
– Permutations: achieve a much deeper understanding of each of the notes involved in what you are practicing, know everything inside out and get more creative with it.
– Phrasing Ideas: enhance your phrasing with exciting subdivisions, dynamics and orchestrations.
– Different Length Fills Catalogue: quickly expand your vocabulary with more than 200 cool and modern fills of all durations.
– One Fill Study: discover new ways to study any fill, and learn how to transform it, personalize it and make it original and yours.
– Over the Barline Fills: tired of fills always ending on ‘1’? 😉
– Ideas Workout: learn how to add many layers to your phrasing and develop your unique style with this effective approach (used by all great drummers to work on their ideas).
– Improvisation: become able to phrase spontaneously, without thinking, and interacting in real time with what’s happening musically around you, creating from a position of complete freedom and fluency.
In total it’s more than 110 pages and 4 hours of videos, and in it you are going to find all the concepts you need to built a strong, vast and personal vocabulary, an also express yourself and create something exciting.
It’s cool to have it all organized, so that you can use it to work on your phrasing from scratch or go back to these studies any time you need to get inspired with something fresh to practice.
In this free excerpt I’d like to share with you 37 examples picked from the 600+ fills included in the method. I wanted to arrange this booklet so that it’s like a mini crash course, that you can use to instantly boost your phrasing skills.
You will also get an idea of how effective this approach is.
You can download it here:
The transcription of all exercises, as well as the table of contents of the method, is included in this 15 page PDF.
Each example is linked to its video demo, which you can access by clicking on the transcription. If you want to check out the whole 13 minute video demo on YouTube, click HERE.
To find out more and to buy the method you can visit the dedicated page here:
‘Phrasing & Fills’ – Altitude Drumming – Volume 5
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