I just heard about the death of Mitch Mitchell, one of the best drummers ever… In my opinion.

He was one of the original members of the Jimi Hendrix Experience and for those who haven’t heard of him, your missing out on some amazing drumming. This guy was a jazz drummer who fuzed his amazing jazz drumming technique with Rock n Roll. Wikkipedia says that he was the guy that started fusion music (mixture of rock and jazz). I’m not sure about that claim but who knows, It was the sixties after all.

The first time i heard the Hendrix songs “Fire” and “Cross town traffic” which he played on. I freaked out! The drum fills and use of rudiments in his playing blew me away to the point where I started a quest to learn as many rudiments as possible and figure out cool ways to apply them to the drumset. One of the rudiments he liked to use quite a bit was the “Single stroke four”. the sticking is as follows with upper case L being played as an accent (meaning louder than unaccented notes) r l r L the first r l r should be thought of and played as a 16th note triplet starting on beat 1 and ending with the accented L on the “and” or “+” of beat 1 … The “single stroke four” fits perfectly between beats 1, 2, 3, and 4. Each “single stroke four” starts on the quarter note beat and ends on the “and” or “+” of beats 1,2,3 and 4. they would fit in and be counted as 8th notes 1+ 2+ 3+ 4+ . You can use this as fills on the snare or start the fills with the first note on a tom and finishing on the snare…. Hopefully this makes sense to ya’ll…

Have a listen to Mitch Mitchell’s playing and know this… The Jimi Hendrix Experience are now back together again but you gotta die first before you can catch their next show.

RIP Mitch Mitchell….