Jazz On Zendrum

Contributed by Jeremy Slead

I discovered yesterday a new way (at least new to me!) to play realistic swing jazz on the Zendrum, and since a few people have previously asked about it, I thought I'd share.

I assigned a ride cymbal to my normal ride pad (E2) and a foot hi-hat sound right next to it (E3). I normally have the ride bell there, so I put a ride bell in the top level of crossfade on the ride pad. My closed hi-hat is assigned to T3 and open hi-hat is on E1.

I play the typical swing ride pattern with right pointer/right middle in this pattern: P P M P P M P P M P...etc. (the pointer is playing straight quarter notes, and the middle finger plays the last triplet eighth notes of beats of 2 and 4) and I play the foot hi-hat with the ring finger on beats 2 and 4. I then play whatever I need on bass drum and snare drum with the left hand. I find that I can pretty easily do some variations with the ride while keeping the hat on 2 and 4, and I can play the typical open and closed swing hi-hat pattern by moving my right fingers over one pad to the open hat pad instead of the ride.

I find also that to have a "jazzy" sound, I change my sound module's settings slightly so the drums are tuned higher and lower in the mix.

I also have been doing the rudiments with pretty decent success. I found that the main things I do on drums that I cannot play on Zen have to do with things like drags, diddles, and rolls. So I got out a great rudimental snare drum book by Charley Wilcoxon called the All-American Drummer, and have been playing all those rudimental solos on just the snare drum pads on the Zendrum. I use the first 2 fingers of each hand in different combinations to play 5 stroke, 7 stroke, 9 stroke, etc. rolls, paradiddles, ruffs, ratamacues, etc. I think with some work this will greatly improve my Zendrumming as a whole! I also find that with just an hour or two of work on this I can already feel some better rhythmic coordination between fingers and hands.