House of Drumming.com

Posted: **Tue Nov 24, 2015 3:27 pm**

Timbata wrote:
Matus wrote:That's a great clarification, Timbata! The only thing I don't really share, and is just a matter of which "school" you come from, is the interpretation of drags. Traditionally, a drag, just like a flam, has no actual rythmic value. They're all grace notes. It kinda loses power as opposed to practicing them very separated from the actual note group and makes it a whole different thing.
In fact, in classical music there are two kinds of grace note: mordente and appoggiatura. The first includes flams and drags and have no rythmic value so they're always played the same, no matter the tempo. The second does have a value and is usually 1/2 the value of the "real" note.
It just makes more sense to me this way.

I think that strictly metering the grace notes works best if you are playing with more than one snare drummer and you want it to sound super clean. If you are playing by yourself you have a lot more freedom in how you interpret the grace notes. You sound great. Keep up the good work!

It makes a lot of sense, yeah. Perhaps you could meter the notes closer than 32nd notes so it's exact and yet retain that "close drag" element. It just sounds so beautiful to me that way... Thanks for the input!

Posted: **Tue Nov 24, 2015 3:35 pm**

Here goes another run!
It's pretty cool to take a look back at the whole bunch right now. It really reflects the playing mood of each day and how the level actually varies from day to day, independently of the difficulty of the solos. #22 felt great, #25 was heavy as hell and today's #27 felt awful, the house was as cold as it gets and couldn't really make it happen so well. But that's also the nature of the experience, to keep it real. You can't be perfect every day and it's good to display that.