Warning: this might be a really bad idea. Be careful.
Alright, got that out of the way — anyhoo, linear drumming. It’s a hot item in the 21st century drumming world, often referred to by the hipper phrase “gospel chops,” which… whatever.
I wanted to include some linear ideas for my “quintuplets 101” article, and while it’s easy enough to move around one single kick drum note (or even two), for more intricate patterns, I realized that I was going to need a system to help me include everything that I wanted.
What I ended up doing was breaking up the quintuplet into a 2 + 3 feel before writing out all the ways you could play those groups. Seriously — here’s my chicken scratch:
Naturally, it didn’t take long for the wheels to start turning, and I wondered, “How does this work with other subdivisions?”
Well, for 16th notes, it’s pretty simple. Focusing on 8th notes, there are four ways you can play an 8th note with the kick and snare:
Let’s assemble these into quarter note fills. Now, you might be getting traumatic flashbacks to math class, but this isn’t too complicated. If I’m not mistaken, this calls for a permutation with repetitions, and with two ways to arrange four things, our equation is 4², or 16.
Of course, some of those combinations are redundant; I don’t want four notes on the kick or snare, nor do I want anything with a triple stroke on the kick. So in practice, there are 12 combinations:
That’s it. Those 12 beats represent all of single-pedal linear drumming with 16th notes. Neato.
The idea is to put them on your music stand and try to combine them on the fly, ad-libbing the orchestration around the drums. If you really have the muster, you could try to jumble up the 8th notes, but that’s quite an abstraction. I’ve been messing around with this for a week or two, and it kinda works, even as a coordination workout if nothing else.
It is somewhat taxing, and there is a limit as to how much extrapolating I can stand to do with my practice materials. I also wish I had a robust system for orchestrations and accents, but we might be here all day if I did.
So that’s 16th note linear drumming squared away, but what about 16th note triplets? Focusing again on 8th notes, there are seven “building blocks”:
Actually, there are eight (three notes for two drums, or 2³), but I left out three consecutive notes on the kick.
You can probably tell already that we’re pushing this idea, as we now have 49 total fills. Even after cutting the aforementioned problems, we still have 43. Which is a lot. This system doesn’t work too well with that many fills, as you have to learn the fine and otherwise totally useless art of reading a measure and then “reading ahead” by jumping to a random bar somewhere in the score.
What can you do? This was a thought experiment, and it kinda works, and also doesn’t. Oh well. Maybe you’ll still find it helpful to see all of the possible 16th note triplet linear patterns presented.
