Every time I sit down to practice drumming - which is not nearly often enough, I admit - I discover something new. I'm not trying to be a pollyana; I'm a little overwhlemed that there is so much to discover. But it's also great that these insights and lessons are accessible to me without needing an expert to point them out - its all right there, just beneath the surface. To be fair, since I tend to play alone alot (snif) I focus more on what I'm playing and how, much more so than if I was jamming with others.

Last week, after several months of neglect, I picked up the caxixis again.  I was playing the classic MOP (Mother Of Polyrhythms) and discovered I had picked up a bad habit.  The short version is that I was synching the upbeat notes right before the main downbeat, as well as the main downbeat .  And if you think about it, when a 4 meets a 3, these shouldn't synch.

To illustrate: in the typical 3-meets-4 rhythm, you see this pattern:

(For some reason, I always play the fours on my left hand with this rhtyhm - gotta work on switching....).

Of course, with caxixis, you have the upbeat to contend with.  So you double your notes on the 4 and the 3 (or 6) side.  It becomes more complicated to illustrate on a chart because you have to extrapolate to the right common denominator.  But it serves my point:

(The small "x" is the natural upbeat for each tempo)

So Point A is where the 3/4 and 4/4 notes synch up. But I was also synching together the notes on Point B and Point C, so I ended up with two sets of notes in synch - the top of the bar and the pickup right before. Though I've done this on caxixis for a couple of years now, it was only this time I realized that they shouldn't line up except for the first note of the bar.

And boy did that screw up my caxixi playing for about 15 minutes. Try to avoid synching up consciously, and all is lost. You have to simultaneously avoid thinking about synching those notes as well as avoid thinking too much about not synching them up.

Part of the challenge is that caxixis, like all shakers, have a long attack (and long finish, depending on how you play them). So you can't just focus on precise notes, you also have to contend with the wind-up of the note. What finally helped me was focusing on the 3/4 rhtyhm, and my 4/4 hand would naturally keep its own rhyhm.

The effect is that the 4/4 windup approaches quickly behind the 3/4 one, and the two notes will come very close together - maybe even land at the same time - but the attack will be different.

Good luck with that one.....