I've always referred to Earl Palmer as the "architect of rock'n'roll drumming," because he was the first (or one of the first) to play many of the rock drumming conventions that we take for granted every time we sit down to play (straight 8th grooves, sixteenth note fills, crash on beat one, syncopated bass drum patterns, etc.).

It boggles the mind to think that the basic rock beat we all learned at our first drum lesson can be traced back to Earl Palmer, who first popularized it in both New Orleans and Los Angeles on recordings with 1950s icons like Little Richard, Fats Domino and Ricky Nelson. Earl - like all drummers of his time - had been raised on jazz, and so his early attempts at creating what today we would call a "rock groove" still included some degree of swing.

Yesterday, I introduced you to the Straight-Swung shuffle. Have you begun to get a handle on playing "in-between the cracks" yet? To help you become more comfortable with this tricky feel, I want to share a FREE play-along track from my book, "The Commandments of Early Rhythm and Blues Drumming."

"Palmer's House" (dedicated to the great Earl Palmer, himself a pioneer of the Straight-Swung Shuffle) is a funky New Orleans-style piece that lines up somewhere between a straight and a swung shuffle.

The download package includes a chart and two MP3's of the song - one with drums and one without. To get yours FREE, click the links below, which will take you to a landing page. Click the "Download" icon in the upper right corner of that page, and follow prompts to get your download.