 Hello everybody, Aaron Walker-Loud here. I'm the director and founder of Big World Breaks, and I'm brought here to you today by the creative advantage. We're going to be studying rhythm, percussion, technique, cultural innovation, and improvisation. You may have seen one of the other videos we've done, you may not have, but this one is Level 3 Challenge. So we look forward to pushing ourselves, myself included, because I always love a good challenge. I also want you to remember that no matter what equipment you do or don't have at home, it's totally fine to use whatever's available. Whatever the adults in your family feel is okay for you to use as a striking object. I'm using a table because this was my first instrument I ever used, a lunch table, and you may have pots and pans and wooden spoons. Use what works for you and make sure to get permission from the family. You may have a snare drum or a hand drum. Whatever is going to work for you, make it happen, and we're going to have some fun today. So as a teaching artist, I get the opportunity to study with other educators, work with students, work in the studio, work on stage as a performer and a producer, collaboratively writing curriculum with other educators. So I'm all over the map, stage, studio, and classroom. And I love the balance and working with students helps me become a better artist and working in the arts allows me to have more information and more inspiration to bring back to my students. So I'm very thankful to live this life that I do. And we've talked about rudiments in the past. We're going to do a quick review of some of the rudiments we've done before just to get our hands warmed up and to connect our brain to our hands. So we're going to combine all at once singles, doubles, triplets, and paradiddles, and we're going to do it at single time and then double time in sequence. So follow me, we're going to do it together. One, two, one, two, ready, and doubles, triplets, paradiddles. Okay, nice. Now let's try that two times in a row and see if we can keep up the momentum. If you prefer using the lowest pitch on the table, the fist, or knock, the highest pitch is fine. I'm using my open hands, the middle pitch. Here we go. One more time, twice in a row. One, two, one, two, ready, and it's okay. Now, now that we've done that, we're going to move over to the snare drum and start doing a little bit more advanced work with some rudiment technique that I've learned. Now, the five-stroke roll we haven't talked about yet, essentially like it sounds, there's five notes. So right, right, left, left, right, or left, left, right, right, left. Let's try that together. One, two, one, two, ready, and let's increase the tempo, the speed. One, two, one, two, with me. Okay, now we're getting a little more comfortable. What we're going to do is do three layers of single time and double time, and then we're going to eliminate the rest in the middle. I'll do it a couple times, then I'll pause just so we can clarify, and then I'll do it one more time. Here we go. I made a mistake, and that's okay. We're going to keep rolling with it. I'm human too. Here we go. One, two, one, two, ready, and okay. Now, that's a little bit better. Here we go. Let's try it again. One, two, one, two, ready, and all right. Now, I encourage you to find more rudiments. There's so many. We've dealt with singles, doubles, triplets, paradiddles. That was a five stroke roll. Let's revisit the paradiddles before we move on to something else though. The thing about my learning is that I've been blessed with a lot of teachers in my path, and when I got to community college, I met Mr. Brian Kirk, and he gave me so much knowledge, but specifically one of my favorite things is he showed me how to change the accents on a paradiddle so it makes it more challenging to where we can have accents and ghost notes almost like what we discussed in video number one. So doing paradiddles where we make the accent on every downbeat, and then we move the accent forward one note at a time every four repetitions. I'm going to do it once, and then I'll start speeding it up to make it more challenging. Here we go. One, paradiddles with rotating accents. One, two, ready, and so we got that. We know what we're doing. So now we're going to play most of them quiet and one really loud. Here we go. One, two, ready, and okay. Now the accents keep moving though. Instead of hitting the downbeat on the second time we hit on the third iteration, we hit the third note with the accent and the fourth iteration, same thing, the fourth note. Okay. Now I'm going to attempt to do that in sequence. Try that with me. Here we go. One, two, one, two, ready, and all right. So try that in different tempos and feels. It's really going to help your control with picking where you can hit accents on the downbeat and the up beats. Now what we're going to do is we're going to move back to the table to talk about a concept called 3 over 2 feel, and then we're going to apply it with some music on the jambé a little bit after that. So when someone says 3 over 2 feel, they're not talking about time signature 3 over 2. They're talking about a feel that's implied in music, right? And usually that's implied by the drums, percussion, or the rhythm section. Now if we were to take our lead low, whether it's your left or your right hitting the lowest pitch on the fist, that's going to be where we hit our downbeats on one and two. Then I'm going to show you how we apply 3 against that with our alternate hand using slap. Here we go. One, two, with me play along. One, two, then with our other hand. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, nice. Now let's switch hands to challenge ourselves but also to realize the closer we get to being ambidextrous, the stronger we're going to be overall as percussionists. Leading with the left hand now on the fist. One, two, one, two, adding three. One, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three. Now another level of challenge we can do is rotate. You've seen I like playing with single time and double time. Let's try it with the three over two concept. Follow me. Here we go. Double time. Now for those of you who might be like, what just happened there? Let me just show you with one hand at a time. One, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two, three, just so you can see but the trick is combining them. Let's try this one more time. Here we go. One, two, with me and double time. And last time double time. Not bad. Not bad. If your hands are getting a little sore from whacking on tables, understand, stretch them out, loosen them up. All right. We don't want to beat up our hands too bad, but stretching and hydration will always help. Now that we've reviewed some of the three over two feel, we're going to move over to the jambé and try some of it live with some accompaniment as also using some improvisation as well. So there's some music that I put together with my team that I think would be a fun accompaniment for that. Follow me over here. So there's a lot of influences that came together for inspiring us to put this one together. Artists like Celia Cruz, Hector LeVoe, the Fania All-Stars, Yerba Buena, there's more than that, but that's a good starting point for you to check out some of their work. So we're thinking about the three over two feel against this. Let's start with tone, the middle pitch. Whichever hand you want to use, let's switch it where we have one of them playing on the two and the other three. One, two, ready, and okay. So once again, bass, middle, tone, slap on the edge. All right. So the idea is we're going to do single time and double time right now. So what we just did, and then switching it to double time, we're going to go back and forth. Follow me, play along. Whether you have a table, a drum, a snare, anything you got, it's totally fine. Here we go. One, two, ready, and double time. Let's try that again. Ready again. Free ourselves up. Let's do some improvisation. So rather than copying me, just do whatever comes naturally with your hands, with your sticks, whatever you got. I'm going to play a rhythm first, and then you fill up the rest. I'll show you where to go. Here we go. One, two, one, two, after me, freestyle. Two, two, three, back to me, and two, three, and let's do a couple more. All right. Nice. Back to me. All right. One more after this. All right. Okay. Nice. Cool. Now, as this music fades out, I'm going to return back over to the snare, and we're going to start looking at some more complex rudiments, subdivisions. When we're looking at subdivision at a greater level, the rudiment of doubles, which we've heard some of, start to get a lot more rapid to create what we call the roll. Have you ever heard of drum roll? When someone says drum roll, please. Okay. So there's different types of rolls, but essentially the fundamental DNA of a roll is two quick bounces at a time, back and forth. So instead of we increase our speed and our ability to bounce the stick using the force of gravity. So an easy way to start developing that for yourself is increase your tempo like a train, right? We end up, you know, getting a day at a time, you know, a little bit better, a little bit better. You got to be patient with yourself. So keeping in mind, we've done some of the other subdivisions and rudiments. Now we're going to get a little more complex. We're going to look at eighth note triplets, sixteenth note triplets, thirty second notes, thirty second note triplets and sixty fourth notes. Okay. So follow along with me. If you feel a little overwhelmed or whatever, just laugh at the mistakes and have a sense of humor and keep pushing yourself. All right. Here we go. Follow me as best as you can. One, two, one, two, ready. Okay. I've given you some clues about diving deeper into the challenges of subdivisions and rudiments, but you could have nine lifetimes and not learn at all. All right. So keep pushing yourself every day. We're going to be moving forward now, looking at a different concept, playing three against four, not three for time signature, but three against four feel. So we're going to move back over to the gym bay and we're going to pull up another one of the productions from Big World Breaks to help as an accompaniment for that. Follow me over here, please. So the song here that we put together has a lot of influences. I'm blessed to have been listening to so many types of music, had great mentors and family that was open-minded to what I was listening to. So all in a nutshell, I hear elements of Kendrick Lamar in this. Jimmy Hendricks, who was from my neighborhood, the Central District in Seattle. Buddy Guy, another great blues artist. Dungeon Family, OutKash, Goodie Mob, Janelle Monay, Buti Collins, Parliament Funkadelic, you name it. It's a big potluck of all kinds of sounds, right? And what I love about working with something like this is hearing the subdivisions and possibilities. We're going to focus on three over four first. So if I'm looking at 16th notes, counting it at this tempo would be one E and a two E and a three E and a four E. And if I take every third note, it would sound like how it doesn't carry over to the one every time, because it's odd going against even. Now what if I hit another sound in between that accents here, every third note, and then ghost notes in between, like this. Now that we've done that together, let's try and do it single time, then to double time. You know how I roll. We're always trying to figure out how to challenge it and switch it up. One, two, one, two, ready. Now there's a lot of variety. I would just use, but imagine, in your right and the different pitches here on a gym bay or a table or snare, there's a lot of options, all right? Now that we've gotten through all of this technical stuff and discussing, I'd like us to just get completely free. And now what you're going to do is you're going to battle me. There's no cash prize, there's no trophy. It's just about pushing each other to get better. So we're going to go back to the table, then come back here and go to the snare to finish, all right? So follow me over here to the table and we're going to do a little table battle. We're going to trade two bars at a time, just so you know what's going on. I want you to know the parameters before we battle, all right? So we'll be one, switch. All right, you guys ready? I know I'm ready. You ready? Here we go. Repeat after me anything you want. Be free. Ready? Then we've done a little bit with the table. Let's switch back to the gym bay and we'll start using some of our three against four concepts where you're three over two field. Do what you want. We'll keep freestyling. Here we go. Follow me back to the gym bay. I'll count us in. Battle round two. Ready? Here we go. After me. One, two, one, two. Let's get back to the snare. No matter what you got at home, it's all good, but let's get it. Follow me to the snare. Here we go. Time to shine. Here we go. Definitely burn some calories. This song fades out. I'm just going to help us review back over here at the table of some of the essentials we've talked about today. So it's been quite a journey. I'm really excited about everything that we've gone over. So once again, we've talked about some extra subdivision today, looking at quarter note triplets, eighth note triplets, sixteenth note triplets, 32nd notes, 32nd note triplets, 64th notes. We talked about some alternating ways of looking at rudiments with doing five stroke rolls at different tempos and eliminating the rest between the five stroke rolls. We looked at how to take a paradiddle and flip it inside out and add accents that move around. And you saw it was challenging me, so it's always good to review things, especially when they challenge us, right? We also talked about playing two different ways of three over two feel, looking at where your tempo is at, and then trying double time to see how your hands can keep up, alternating left and right leads, and looking at playing three against four, finding different ways to push odds against evens to develop tension and suspense while you're leading through improvising or creating your rhythms. And ultimately, as Mr. Nat, my original music mentor always told me, is that there's no shortcut in music. It's really important to be patient with yourself to remember that you're human and you can get better a minute at a time, but you can't get better just because you want. You have to decide what you love and put your time into it, and just be patient with yourself. And if you feel like you're not growing quick enough, find a way to put more time into it, all right? And I'm really excited to see what comes of all this work we have together and hopefully we get a chance to work together in person in a classroom on a stage sometime. Once again, my name is Aaron Walker Loud, director and founder of Big World Breaks, and this has been brought to you by The Creative Advantage. Thank you again.