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Strong beach Snare Solo

Sheet music for this piece and a ton of other content is included in my book Drumline Essentials. You can buy an instant download PDF at www.drumlineessentials.com

Back Story:
A few years ago, when my friend Makana and I shot my videos for the Vic Firth Hybrid’s feature, we also recorded some other stuff that I never did anything with. Here’s a video we shot that day of me playing through a piece called “Strong Beach”.

In 1995, I taught the newly formed Long Beach City College drum line under Tom Float. I also played in the line as center snare. At that time, the school didn’t have enough drums for a full line so most of the line would bring their own. When word got out that Tom was teaching at LBCC, great players just started showing up. When we first started, we were really a reading drum line. Tom would hand out some of his drum solo classics like “Paradox” or “The Devil Went Down to Georgia”, and we would read them down and play them at the end of the night. We had lots of recent age-outs from Blue Devils, and also guys from the University of North Texas that were flying out to march Velvet Knights that summer. It was definitely a line full of talent. We had so much talent that I really wanted to challenge these guys to play some material that I had never had the chance to play in a line. 

The first version of this Ram was called ‘Wrong Beach’. I had lots of crazy odd time signatures all over the place, and a weird ride cymbal section in the middle to show off some independence. It was maybe a little too weird, because no one ever learned it. Years later, I had an epiphany. It was all about 4/4 time. I thought that in the marching activity at that time, there was a lot more emphasis on odd time groupings than on syncopation. That’s not to say you can’t be syncopated in odd time, but to me, it just felt like people were muddying their waters to make them appear deep, as if writing a passage in 15/16 time was some kind of major accomplishment. I wanted the things that I wrote to be able to be played with music that I liked, so that I could work on my connection to the quarter note pulse. You know... Groove. 

I went back and re-wrote the piece and changed everything to be in 4/4, except a phrase or two that I couldn’t figure out how to beam without changing the time signature. Those phrases sill add up to bars of 4/4 when you add up all the counts. I had to keep those measures in different time signatures because of the ‘over the bar’ groupings, and the limits of the notation software. I named the new version “Strong Beach”. 

Towards the end, there’s a phrase with a sextuplet that begins on the “A” of beat two and ends on the “A” of beat three in the 16th-Based Version. The way it is written may be confusing at first. Usually sextuplets will start on a downbeat or an upbeat. It may feel awkward at first, but once it’s mastered, that phrase flows nicely.

I was listening to a lot of Stevie Wonder at the time of the rewrite, and some of that made it into the piece. Try playing this along with “Superstition” by Stevie Wonder and you may be able to notice some rhythmic connections.