Filling space and freeing your hands

"Ghosting" is a useful way of developing your internal metronome and gives you a certain structure to learn from. It is useful as a learning aid, but it can also lead you to being overly dependent on one hand leading.

It is also important to be able to play with "walking hands" though (IE- left hand then Right hand) and it is essential to be able to play with your weak hand leading (which hand is hitting the drum on the beat) and to be able to easily swap between left hand leading and right hand leading.

Flams

The following exercise uses flams. They also alternate between left and right hand leading as a result of a flam.

Play the following while saying 1 e & a and while tapping your foot.

(TT)SSS

(SS)TTT

Roulements

The same patterns with roulements are nearly identical excepts there is a more even placement between the first 2 quarter notes and roulement doesn't start before the time or point of emphasis. There is a ripple effect as the roulement makes it sound like there is even more notes being played that there is.

Play the following while saying 1 e & a and while tapping your foot.

TTS S S

Then shift the beat and complete the exercise for (S TTS S), (S S TT S) and (S S S TT)

Now try SST T T

Then shift the beat and complete the exercise for (T SS T T) (T T SS T) and (T T T SS)

Then shift the beat and complete the exercise for S(Tt)SS, SS(Tt)SS and SSS(Tt)

Now swap the tones and slaps

(Ss)TTT

Then shift the beat and complete the exercise for T(Ss)TT, TT(Ss)T, TTT(Ss)

You can also play flams where one hand plays a bass and the other a tone or a slap, experiment with (Bt)SSS and (Bs)TTT etc.

Some ideas for djembe solo >>