Partido Alto

The next few posts are going to be zeroing in on a few Brazilian grooves we’re going to work and arrange for a small ensemble (drumset and a few percussionists).

I have no idea what the history of Partido Alto is, it’s from the endless creativity and variations of new ways to play samba. I know you can hear it in some 1960s samba and it’s likely far older than that.

The main part is a syncopated part, which starts just off the beat. Then, you can fill it out and voice it as you choose on your particular instrument. I found a few good videos with variations (below), and then I summarize a few thoughts for the group.

Folkloric / Traditional Percussion

There are also a few more on this channel: more in a pagode style, and here’s a cool one with two pandeiros playing different parts.

My first pandeiro was a really heavy, nylon skin style, which wasn’t what I need for choro, but is exactly what you need here to get those big loud slaps.

Drumset

Here’s one by Sergio Reggiani, not in English but his videos are still pretty clear to hear what he’s doing – and I dig his little, all-business kit.

The second one is a bit more in depth, by a master’s student from UT, and judging from this video, he’s getting a fine education. This one gives a few variations, and where they come from. What’s interesting is some variations put the partido alto pattern on the left hand and keep a more “samba” bass drum, the 1-uh pattern played by a lot of American jazz drummers in a samba or bossa nova.

More on this in a minute…

With the last (Airto) version, the bass and snare make it almost a funk backbeat, except nothing is on a downbeat.

More drumset treatment and practice materials on Cruise Ship Drummer:here and here.

Congas:

This video is good. The three conga groove is cool, but might be too complicated for us. The other two variations, by voicing the melody on two congas, or just playing open/slap on a single conga would fit better with other instruments. He’s playing what would be the tantan (small surdo) on one hand: what you could do, is have one percussionist playing this more straight surdo type of pattern, while the other player plays the melody, or trade.

Closing Thoughts:

This is a nice groove with a lot of possibilities in voicing for a small percussion group. Most of these videos try to play as much as possible with a single instrument, but you could break it up among instruments: when you do that, you can voice melody and the surdo separately among instruments so they aren’t all playing on top of another. Another thing I realized last night, was that you can fill in all the spaces with ghost notes, on conga or drumset, but if you do that too much, the groove gets too busy and loses the laid back, syncopated feel.

Every Spring Reverb in production or DIY that I’m aware of:

What do we want our spring reverb to sound like? The nicer ones supposedly approach the sound of a plate reverb – nice for warm vocals. Cheaper ones might be more guitar-amp-y – maybe what you’d want for dub.

Cool Links:

Another nice article (music thing) – geared more for modular synth guys
https://medium.com/music-thing-modular-notes/everything-i-know-about-spring-reverb-1fb4b32abf87

Accutronics History – before Hammond, it was a Bell Labs invention!
http://www.accutronicsreverb.com/main/?skin=sub03_01.html

Reverbs I’d Buy:

Radial Tank Driver

This is a 500 series unit. I haven’t found a good demo of it online, but the reviews were good.

Best points: lets you use a variety of existing tanks (any tank in your guitar amp should work).
Features: rudimentary eq, blend control (can use as an insert effect)

Drawbacks: only useful if you’re already into 500, kind of messy cabling, mono

https://tapeop.com/reviews/gear/107/tank-driver-500-series-spring-reverb-interface/
http://www.radialeng.com/product/tank-driver/

Vermona

Vermona make a range of spring reverbs, including some nice rack ones and even a tube unit (
https://www.vermona.com/en/products/effects/).

But the one I am most interested in is the weird one (https://www.vermona.com/en/products/effects/product/retroverb-lancet/), which has a synth filter, envelope follower, LFO, and reberb. The germans who designed it must be my kind of people, it has features like a dedicated button to crash the tank (like kicking an amp). Probably less useful on smooth vocals. Relatively inexpensive used, I’ll eventually have one of these.

Kits

BYOC Pedal

this isn’t a spring exactly, it’s a weird thing using some analog delay chips which aren’t actually analog, either.

Spring Reverb Kit

Hampton Spring Reverb Kit

Unbalanced, based on Tape Op article

http://hamptone.com/sr1/

Weber Revibe

An interesting kit which updates the classic Fender Tube Spring Reverb – adds a tube driven tremolo circuit based on Fender’s rare “harmonic tremolo” circuit (different from the 50s (bias tremolo) and late 60s (opto) tremolo circuits).

https://www.tedweber.com/5h15-c-kt

Paia Hot Springs:

http://www.paia.com/proddetail.asp?prod=6740K&cat=27
I’m not sure if PaIA still exists, but the web page is still up. This circuit actually uses two reverb tanks.

The Wave:

tube driven, looks like a guitar style effect

https://www.modkitsdiy.com/kit/wave

Interesting other commercial reverbs:

Zerotronics

Interesting design which is actually passive: it drops the signal level down low, then gives you a signal you can run into a mic preamp. Also uses two reverb tanks like the Paia Hot Springs.
http://www.zerotronics.com/coolsprings/index.html

Demeter

Might be the most high-end rackmount spring reverb.
https://tapeop.com/reviews/gear/109/real-reverb-d/
http://www.demeteramps.com/index.php?route=product/product&path=63&product_id=79

Hamptone

I don’t know anything about this, but it looks fancy.
http://hamptone.com/spring-reverb/

MÁRCIO BAHIA

A great Brazilian drumset player, ..

Found a rare lesson with him (in English) on youtube:

 

A few more resources on his playing:

Nice blog post and transcription at That Drum Blog.

Andy P Smith wrote a PhD thesis on contemporary brazilian jazz drumset, and distilled a lot of it into a Pasic Clinic in 2016 (writeup on his site).

HOW TO SET UP DRUMS

A few articles on how to set up and tune for particular sounds:

Two articles by Garrett Haines for Drum! Magazine about 70s sounds and 60s sounds. These articles are great cuz they cover the whole chain from setting up and tuning all the way to mixing. A related article from Modern Drummer covers eras of Jamaican drum setups https://www.moderndrummer.com/2012/06/in-studio-jamaican-drum-sounds/ – the full version of the article had more details going by historical era but even the abbreviated version they posted online has a really nice before and after sound demo so you can hear what they’re talking about.

The big differences here are heads, tuning, and muffling. Originally everyone was coming from Jazz, and they had drums with single ply heads, and no muffling, like the Remo coated ambassador.

Later in the seventies the sound is associated with a lot more close miking and having the the drums muffled – this is often made even more extreme by recording in a totally dead room.. but in Haines’ article he also points out that not everybody in the 70s did this with the notable exception of John Bonham, who had a kit just setup like a jazz guy would and the microphones pulled back so you can hear them in the room.

Here’s another article on bass drum tuning that has examples on what the different sounds are like, and also on bass drum a Cool vintage article from Modern Drummer.

32nds for bahia

We’re learning some Bahia style grooves in our samba group this week, and I had some trouble with the 32nd notes in an Ile Aye pattern, so I wrote out a little exercise to help with them.

 

 

also as a pdf  bahia32.

Afrobeat Drumming

Tony Allen was the drummer with Fela Kuti. There are two videos, a newer one:

and this one:

He recently came out with a good autobiography, although information on his style and technique is a bit hard to come by. I just found a blog called Afrobeat Drumming Explained which has a bit of a lesson, and transcriptions of a few grooves.  Another blog, Joe The Drummer, had a whole series on afrobeat drumming, 1, 2, 3, 4, and a series of coordination exercises, starting with this one, and also 5, 6, 7 and 8.

Finally, there is an afrobeat drumming book, which I just ordered after reading a good review.

 

Ifa – more Brazilian Afrobeat

Independence and Syncopation

I wrote some grooves that I realized I can’t play and so it’s time to work on some of the independence and syncopation exercises. Many of these build on the same book. 

The basic idea is there are pages of rhythms, and you play them with your left hand while keeping something like the traditional jazz time keeping on the cymbals. The rhythms are syncopated and off beat, but idea is more to use them for reading, not memorization, so that later you can improvise around the melody on a chart.

There are lots of people that have taken this idea and developed all kinds of variations on it: Todd Bishop at Cruise Ship drummer for example has all kinds of exercises based off of creative reading of this book.

More examples appear in this video by Antonio Sanchez 

There a three things that I took away from that video lesson:

• playing syncopation with ostinato patterns like afro cuban, samba, or baiao
• playing in double or half time  ( a lot of what I’ll end up doing is sixteenth note based because it’s either Funk or Brazilian)
• playing each note beat individually: starting with the 1, then the 1&, cycling through until you get back to the beginning

Sanchez makes a good point that these are not the same as having vocabulary in these styles, they are just exercises. He has another lesson on soloing which is a bit slow, but also more deep/meta than these videos usually are (I think he teaches at NYU). It has some good insights one of which is just to steal as much as possible especially when you’re really starting out.

Towards that end: there are also some good independence exercises in Victor Rendon’s timbale book.

 Some of these have you playing Rumba clave or cascara while you play against those patterns. Another one (related to my last post) is varying bell patterns, or combining the mambo and bongo bell patterns. Towards the end Rendon’s book also has some solo phrases (very thoughtfully divided into ones which are clave neutral and ones which are aligned to the clave). Rendon had another book of timbale solo transcriptions, and two Manny Oquendo transcriptions also appear in Different Drummers , which is a book of famous jazz drum solos and commentary  to get you to understand how those guys were thinking.

And then to build Brazilian vocabulary, I’ll probably spend time playing tamborim  patterns in the left hand. And finally to get back to what inspired this whole thing was wanting to play more linear, David Garibaldi style funk 

Some cuban things

Friend asked about the rhythm in a particular song, and it is easiest to describe things with some frame of reference, so I start by describing a common style, and how this track is different from that style.

Son Montuno

Son is a cuban style that comes from an earlier form, Changui (there’s a great young band in LA, Changui Majadero, dedicated to this style). There’s a lot to say about the history, but basically son evolves from something rural into something more urban and funkier, and eventually reaches New York to become “Salsa” (and also by the 1950s made it Africa, to become soukous – if you check out this recently posted archive of vintage african pop songs, there are a lot of covers of cuban songs in spanish, including a few versions of Guantanamera : or read about in in Rumba on the River)

I like to use this song to introduce people to the style, because the tempo is slow and it’s very cleanly recorded (and written by the single most important person in this genre, Arsenio Rodriguez – see this annotated history, with musical examples, to learn how he made it much funkier and more syncopated, particularly in the basslines)

Things to listen to here: the clave first of all, because everything hangs off of it. Second, the congas are playing a solid rhythm (tumbao) over it the whole time, while the bongo is soloing (when not soloing, the bongo plays the martillo pattern, which happens to also be what the bongos play in bachata).

The other big thing, that I’m trying to introduce to my band, is that there are very clearly two variants of the rhythm: when the song picks up, the timbales switch to playing a syncopated cowbell pattern, and the bongo is playing a more straight cowbell pattern – like how in the chorus of a rock song, the drummer might switch from the hi-hats to the ride cymbal.

This Michael de Miranda video (wow, 18 minutes long) goes through all the individual parts.

This is the style we learned in school, or if you read books like Rebecca Mauleon’s Salsa guidebook, this is the style described. But you don’t need all those instruments: the instruments were added to the son one at a time – first the bongo, then Arsenio added the congas (until then, used to play rumba in the street in the cities), and then the timbales were added (timbales were part of a whole separate ballroom tradition). As with any big band, using the full instrumentation is expensive. There are many sub-genres of cuban bands (conjuntos, charangas, orchestras, etc) differing mainly on the instrumentation: not just in the rhythm section, but also many groups have strings instead of horns, which threw me at first, having been used to NY style horn-heavy salsa (especially the trombones).

Conjunto Rumbavana

There are no timbales on the track in question – this happens in the Conjunto format, there is just a bongo and conga player. A great band in this tradition is Conjunto Rumbavana, 

– here on cuban standard “Lagrimas Negras” – the bassline is transcribed in The True Cuban Bass.

(sometimes, like in Tipica 73, the timbalero will double on bongos: with no dedicated bongo player, the timbalero can play the bongo bell part on another cowbell, playing both at once – you kind of have to, because the part is a melody between the two bells. In the Rumbavana track, notice that the bongo player does play the cowbelll when the song picks up, but it’s only the simpler, on-beat bongo bell part).

here is a Rumbavana rhythm taught by Michael de Miranda

Rumbavana doesn’t sound like anyone else – in the Cuban groups the players usually are associated with one band, so each group has a very unique sound and some rhythms are exclusive to a particular group. During the 70s groups like Los Van Van, Irakere, Ritmo Oriental built on the traditional Cuban styles, but also pushed it : doing things like writing more complicated breaks, or rhythms that might last a few bars until they loop, and introducing the drumset (see Timba.com for tons of history and this video of Changuito, from Van Van).

Pilon

I think the rhythm in question might actually be a Pilon, because the conga melody is different : the open tones are in a different place than they’d be in the son, but it’s also a steady 8th note rhythm, there aren’t spaces like in a guaguangco [now that I listen to it again, it might just be that the band is playing something like a son, and just doing a lot of variations with the rhythm]

And there’s another variant I’m writing a track around, which comes from Anga, the percussionist from Irakere, which has drumset and timbales

Here you can see Anga explain it:

Rhythm Tech Bells

Rhythm Tech is a company that makes some cool instruments but they don’t advertise them very well. I’m not sure if any of the stuff in this post is even still in production. But they’ve made three of my favorite cowbells so I thought I would mention them, (actually I should probably buy another agogo before they become completely unavailable: edit, just got the handheld one).

First of all the agogo is awesome. You can see in this picture with it side-by-side with another drumset Agogo. Two things that make the Rhythm Tech much better: 1) it just is built better. The black one is the same as some of the tourist grade ones that I’ve seen and it’s just not going to hold up. But that doesn’t even matter compared to 2) the most important feature of the Rhythm Tech which is that the mount is welded to the Bell so that you can bolt it onto the set, while the cheap one (and they are by no means the only manufacturer that does this)  has a separate Agogo and mount which means that as you play it it is going to twist  and it’s going to eventually fall off and it’s just an inherently stupid design. Review: built better sounds better and actually makes sense: done.

(Update: just got the handheld versions, which is the same thing except you can squeeze it to click: another thing that you can’t do with the cheap ones because they’re too stiff. 

The next Rhythm Tech Bell is   the Clave Bell. It is actually built the same way and pitched just right above the agogo Bell so you could mount it to the same rod and have a triple Agogo which is cool. On its own it’s pitched really really high way higher then my LP ChaCha Bell. So I don’t know exactly why I need it, but it’s definitely cool.

The third one and starting to get into the really weird stuff is the lens drum. This one for sure and maybe the others too come from the Peter Engelhart line. The description said it sounded like a brake drum (like, from a car) which is what I wanted, some of  my friends play in a Calypso band where they they play the brake drum or as it’s called the iron, and I wanted that sound, and I also wanted something I could play that could sound kind of like a triangle. Hit the thing on the bars you get that sound but they ring out for a really long time. The bars are tuned a third apart so you could play agogo parts but it does have a little bit of sustain which is fine because I can always muffle it. I’m not exactly sure what I’m going to use this for but it’s weird and it’s cool and I’m sure when that moment comes around I’ll be glad I bought it.

The lens drum for sure, and I think all these bells, are designed by Peter Englehart. I found an interesting weird mention of these instruments in this video with Brazilian Jazz drummer Airto. He has all the same stuff, including  what Rhythm Tech would later mass-market as the Crasher, and Airtos’s half drumset half percussion table setup is so awesome and inspiring.