This week has been both busy and draining, and in my quest to expand and diversify the content on my site, let’s pivot and talk a little bit about a classic drum book, A Funky Primer for the Rock Drummer, by college professor Charles Dowd. Books have been an important part of my life since I first picked up the instrument, and I'm starting to build up a heinous collection of them.
My copy of A Funky Primer says it was published in 1985, but copyright lookups report that it was written earlier, around 1972. This was one of the first books I went through, and as the name suggests, the book is meant to bring a funkier edge to a drummer’s standard rock playing — breaking the mold that comes from playing straight-ahead 8th notes grooves.
The meat and potatoes of A Funky Primer are basically lessons on how to play steady 8th notes on the cymbal while playing kick and snare notes that are in between the cymbal notes:
The book starts with a page of warm-up exercises before two pages of different funk rhythms on the snare over quarters on the kick, in a Syncopation-like style (although it doesn’t necessarily fill in the gaps from that book). A Funky Primer then goes through basic 8th notes grooves before breaking down some denser patterns with cymbal and snare only. Interestingly, there’s no similar section focusing on just cymbal and kick — afterward, it’s on to full grooves.
A Funky Primer does work quite well in building you a better timekeeping vocabulary, and it works nicely as a method book; I dug it up for the first time in years when I was a senior in high school, when I had totally forgotten much of it. Just farting around with the text was a lot of fun, as there are some interesting patterns in here.
After getting down the basics of playing backbeat-oriented grooves, this is a great next step towards evolving your playing. A Funky Primer also has a well-executed difficulty curve throughout its ~23–page main section. Most of the stuff is built around 8th notes and 16th notes, but 16th note triplets are introduced in the final pages.
Some of the grooves are presented as one-bar exercises, while others are two bars long. I’m not really sure why the book delineates between them; you’re probably better off combining the patterns as you please.
I must point out how the book has several grooves that are difficult to find the potential musicality in, at least as they are written:
Some of them might work better as fills more so than a groove you would use to drive a 16–bar phrase.
To that end, many of the grooves will feel very dense without judicious use of ghost notes on the snare, such as in the following:
Obviously, a drummer can add in the ghost notes themselves, although this may prove more challenging for a beginner. Unfortunately, there isn’t even a discussion about ghost notes in the book; despite a lengthy foreword and afterword, articulations aren’t mentioned at all.
Another ostensible limitation involves the cymbal: since it just plays straight-ahead 8th notes, it’s not quite possible to learn gnarly, David Garibaldi-style grooves. But I suppose that’s beyond the scope of the book; it is a Primer after all. The final two pages of exercises involve playing gallop and triple-beat patterns on the cymbal, but it’s ultimately lip service.
The prose of the book has some largely unnecessary discourse about double bass, which is largely absent in the world of funk. There’s also this nugget: “always remember to tune tom-toms, snare, and bass as one would like them to be heard in the audience… not as they sound at the set.” Another section reminds us that the professional drummer “does not allow his drums to scoot away from him and fall off the stage.”
I’m also a bit befuddled by the grooves that are marked with an asterisk. According to Dowd, these grooves are used by “top professional rock drummers and recording artists.” I don’t really know how to interpret that; some drummers online think these patterns were lifted directly from different songs, but it seems like three-quarters of the grooves are marked.
One last thing to bring up: it appears that the copyist made a few blunders for the final published version. It would be nice to see a new edition with some corrections, as well as some proper engraving with updated drum set notation. But compared to older drum books, such as Realistic Rock, this isn’t too problematic.
All in all, A Funky Primer is a pretty good book if you want to get to grips with the independence/interdependence of funk drumming, and revisiting it has been fun. Better yet, it will give you both a usable material for your own playing.
There is a follow-up of sorts, A Funky Thersaurus, which is not as well-known; we’ll get there someday.
