I hope I can explain this clearly enough without sheet music.  It's a small thing, but it causes me a world of grief when I'm trying to swing.

When I play series of 4-stroke rolls in "first position", the phrasing is like this:

(1e&2)   (3e&4)

Simple enough.  (I'm using brackets to separate the phrases.)

When I play them in "second position", I can phrase them "as written, like this:

(1  2e&)  (3  4e&)

Or I can phrase them "across the bars", so the first three notes are almost like a ruff or drag, thusly:

(1)  (2e&3)  (4e&1) (2e&3) etc.

How do you recommend phrasing these?

Similarly, the following pattern can be phrased two different ways:

(1  2e&)  (3e&4)

(1) (2e&3e&4)

In the second interpretation, the "2e&" acts a bit like a ruff leading into the "3e&4".

Which would you go with?

My emphasis on phrasing comes from playing woodwinds.  Playing a bit of woodwinds has really helped me understand why other musicians can't play like metronomes.  So that much I get.



That makes sense, since that's the way I hear it when other people play it. 

Unfortunately, though, when I play "across the bars" I tend not to execute things as cleanly and I tend to lose my grip on exactly where the down beat is.

Thanks for the advice.

I guess my next project should involve learning to be more comfortable playing "across the bars".  Any advice about that?

Thanks again for the advice.


I've been planning to identify a collection of songs recorded at different tempo settings (60, 70, 80, etc.) to play along with so I can progress through different songs as I develop speed, instead of just notching up the metronome.  This could be a great first project to work through with that approach.


The problem is that when I play a roll across the barline, everything before the barline gets "crushed", like a ruff or drag or flam.  Feels natural, sounds awful and throws off my timing.  Gotta work on that.


Exactly.  It's like my new avatar, where you can see a vase if you look at the "figure", or you can see two faces in profile if you look at the "ground", or background.  Some people see one, some the other.

To play across the bars and keep a good strong beat at the same time is a bit like always seeing the vase and the two faces at the same time, or like hearing both parts in a counterpoint piece at the same time.  Confusing.  There's a natural tendancy to focus on one and lose the other.


To my ears, at least, it seems a lot of Jazzers escape this problem by losing the beat entirely, playing all over the bars, and then coming back to the beat.  4/4 time becomes, for a while 1/8 time while they wail away, and then they find the 4/4 pulse and wander back into it.  (I think the book Drum Wisdom called that the "1/8 flow" or the "8/8 flow".)

That may be a great approach for improvisational music, but it's not so great for, say, a dance Rock band.  It's brilliant, but it doesn't have the same level of commitment to the beat.  And as Arethra Franklin once said, Rock & Roll is all about commitment.

I think you're right.  I've gotta learn to keep counting while playing across the bars.

Is there a particularly good book of exercises for playing across the bars?