Snare Drum Comping - Drum Lessons

In this video lesson, I want to share with you some jazz snare drum comping. Now you may have heard the word before, comping? What does it mean? Essentially, comping is a jazz term for a drummer that means to accompany or to compliment the music. A lot of times you might be seeing jazz drummers playing, and their doing various things with their left hand on the snare drum. Well that’s comping, what they’re doing is they’re listening to the other players around to see what’s going on. See how they come accompany or compliment the melody, soloist, filling in the holes, etc. etc. Let’s start with some basic jazz comping for the left hand. Now if you look at exercise one on the sheet music provided, what we’re going to do is we’re going to play our hands in unison, so you can notice that they jazz right symbol pattern is being played on the right hand on the right, left foot is being played on two and four. Your left hand is just going to play together or in unison with your right hand. Check this out. [Demonstration] Exercise number two is a consistent pattern. Now what I mean by that is your left hand is going to play the trip and the lit of every bit. So you’re going to not play the left hand of the quarter notes just on the last two triplets of every beat, watch this one. [Demonstration] Beat number three. This is a cool one. Take a look at the sheet music, you’ll notice that much like what we did in exercise number two we’re going to have a snare drum on the last two triplets of beat one. And if we move over the beat three you’re going to notice there are three eighth notes triplets back to back on three triplet. I would suggest starting this one slow just to make sure the left hand is lining up properly with the right foot. Check this speed note. (Demonstration) Exercise number four. This is great because the left hand is actually playing a shackle and if you’re not sure shackle is, it’s the first and last triplet of every quarter note, triplet two, triplet three, triplet four, triplet one, triplet two, triplet three, triplet four. This groove is also known as a jazz shackle, watch this. [Demonstration] Exercise number five, take a look at this one. This is cool we’re going to put the left hand on the middle triplet of each beat. This one you might want to start slow count out loud to yourself whatever it helps. This one is a little bit tricky, but be patient with this, you’ll need to count, watch for this one sounds. [Demonstration] Exercise number six we’re going to take the left hand and come on the last triplet of every quarter note. Triplet two, triplet three, triplet four, triplet that your left hand. Ready? Here we go. (Demonstration) This concludes the portion of jazz snare drum comping. Now what I will suggest is make sure you practice in to the metronomes start slow. If you’re having a hard time with this maybe eliminate the high hot for a while and just work on the right hand and the left hand, and try to bring that in a little bit. Never calls too much stress on yourself when you’re practicing and practicing is supposed to be fun. I wouldn’t get too crazy or too fast without the bat because you don’t want to jeopardize the right symbol pattern when you’re playing jazz. Most important focus when we play music is to keep time and to keep it good groove happening, so the idea is to take it slow, also when you’re working on comping try to play soft as you can. One of the biggest assets that the drummer can have is to real play extremely soft especially when playing jets. Head off to your drum set start working on this one.