Help! Left hand doubles in jazz comping

Left-hand doubles are a pretty common tool in jazz comping. Usually they're the trip-let part of the "down-trip-let" count, either ghosted to give the beat some body or loud (on solos).

I have never felt comfortable doing this at tempo. Specifically there are two issues hanging me up:

1. When filling triplets with the left hand as ghost notes, I find past around ~150 or so the right hand doing the swing pattern doesn't quite match up with the left hand filling triplets. This is an old issue, everyone learns that past a certain tempo you stop actually hitting the swung eighth as 'let' and instead make it more of a slightly-swung 'and'. But the mismatch between the two hands throws me off.
2. When soloing, when I have the courage to try filling in the triplets with the left hand, I find I end up doing a lot of the 'bounce and pray' approach, particularly at higher tempos. I'm just kind of buzzing that second note out. I was just watching Thomas Pridgen's Drumeo video (really cool BTW) and he specifically calls this out as a weakness.

Most of these kind of problems have one solution: keep practicing. And every day I'm on a pad or a snare doing doubles from 80bpm up to whatever my max of the day is (hint: it's never very high).

But I'm curious to know if anyone can offer some specific exercises to improve this technique: to really get and feel that you're controlling that double with your left hand no matter the tempo.

I feel your pain. I have mixed results on different days with this issue. I seem to have reached my own level of incompetence

Traditional Grip FTW

Practice moving an accent around each of the 3 notes in all possible combinations of a triplet when playing the triplet with one hand is helpful in later dropping the 'un-accented' note.

Same applies outside of triplets, of course.

Otto said:

Practice moving an accent around each of the 3 notes in all possible combinations of a triplet when playing the triplet with one hand is helpful in later dropping the 'un-accented' note.

Same applies outside of triplets, of course.

Click to expand...

Thanks, I'll give that a shot. Reminds me of a technique someone mentioned for better doubles - accenting the second stroke rather than the first.

I always thought that if you want good doubles, practice triples or quads. Not sure if that applies here.

Only my opinion and my approach....

You need to look more to your touch and finger control and move beyond the initial wrist stroke.

As far as tempo and what works. At a certain points things do begin to blur and become more of a "buzz" (though I hate that term). best way is to listen to Philly Joe, Blakey and others and you'll also hear that things begin to "change" in terms of speeds.

Try the paradiddlediddle in the following format.... RLLRLR RLLRLR. This defines the right hand as the swing pattern and the left hand just plays the off notes. It isn't a solution to your problem, but a handy work-around.

Your problem is that your LH doubles get shaky at 150 bpm. It is a technique issue. How are you playing them? Are you playing them as a combined stroke or as two separate notes? I'm guessing the latter because 150 would be able the limit of doing it that way. There are a lot of ways to play double strokes - maybe try learning a new way to move? Alley-oop, push pull, Moeller, etc.

Otto said:

Practice moving an accent around each of the 3 notes in all possible combinations of a triplet when playing the triplet with one hand is helpful in later dropping the 'un-accented' note.

Same applies outside of triplets, of course.

Click to expand...

Agreed with all this. to it I would add practicing paradiddle diddles as triplets and Stick Control (first page or so) interpreting all rights as RLL and all lefts as LRR in triplets. If you are really into making the left do what the right does, take two paradiddle diddles followed by a single paradiddle; this will force the left hand to take the lead as well. The single paradiddle as a triplet was a huge problem for me; it took forever to get that worked out.

These exercises should sort out the structure of all that. But make sure you can comp effectively with just one or two swing 8th notes in a row, or close to each other-- with either the snare or BD; that's were most of your actual playing is.

Oooh... That looks like a fun exercise. Thanks for sharing Todd. I have a long road trip this week so I'll have some time to shed this.

Been working on 3 Camps to increase my hand speed like you recommended in another thread.