AMOGH RAO
RHYTHMIC ALPHABET
THE LANGUAGE OF DRUMMING
I
’ve always been fond of concepts and structures in
the world of drums that go beyond rudimentary
exercises and mechanical effort. Rhythm
and percussion deal with an entire dimension
of texture and sound that cannot be mastered
by just playing rudiments over and over.
I was terribly lucky to have come across Benny Greb’s
Language of Drumming very early on in my drumming
education. Initially devised as a set of exercises for
himself, Benny went on to create a system so elegant
that it challenges and inspires every individual from the
novice’s first drum lesson to the master’s improvisation.
The Binary and Ternary systems are essentially
just a kind of morse code, combinations of dots
and dashes in groups of 4 (binary) and 3 (ternary).
The structure is pictorially represented below.
This structure seems to be unassuming and almost
incoherent at first, but the beauty of symbolism
is that it’s as powerful as your imagination.
For starters, assume the dots to be accented notes and
dashes to be ghost notes. A simple exercise would then
be rotating accents within a 4-note or 3-note grouping.
For example, the first 4 bars would be - Rrrr, rRrr, rrRr,
rrrR where ‘R’ denotes the accent and ‘r’ denotes the
ghost note. You can do the same with literally any kind of
rudiment. Dots can be RL, dashes can be RR or LL. That
becomes an exercises in alternating single and double
strokes. If the dots are flam taps and the dashes are
single notes, the structure becomes an exercise in flams.
The opportunities for creativity and complexity are
endless. Feeling comfortable? Replace the dots with
16th-note Hertas and the dashes with 16th-note triplet
single strokes. Play the entire structure over an 8th-
note pulse on the hi-hat. Want an even bigger challenge?
Replace the dots with 16th-note triplet six-stroke rolls
and the dashes with 32nd-note paradiddles, over an
ostinato of your choice on the feet. And of course, there’s
always the option of speeding things up. However,
don’t forget to keep accuracy and feel in mind.
The thought process behind a system like this is
to give you a ground-zero on which to build your
practice. It directs you towards approaching the
drums as endless permutations of possibilities
instead of just notes put in different places.
40
The
Score Magazine
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