La Pompe, long-short vs short-short

Bones

Yeah def hear the long-short in many 'western swing' style recordings.

Jazzaferri

In the words of a number of great musicians

Let teh song lead the way

Buco

Nothing like a pompe question to get the forum to wake up.

Bones

Well I guess that's the long and the short of it.

Sorry....

Jazzaferri

Hah, was waiting for someone to say that one

Bones

I know, it was too obvious but it needed to be done.

Buco

Actually what I've seen some pros do on the faster than fast tempos is instead of pumping with the left hand on each quarter beat they pump on 1 and 3 and more or less mute the 2 and 4 (which is different than pomping on each beat but semi muting the 1 and 3). This is isn't the easiest to do though and make it sound good too, but it would certainly give your left hand less of a workout.

Jazzaferri

@Bones ROFL glad you did it

MikeK

I appreciate the helpful tips, all of you. I think my approach to la pompe from now on will be like this:
-rake-pop (short-short) on most tunes.
-on some of the ballads, tastefully do some long/short comping.
-on the really fast tunes, either practice and get better at my la pompe at fast speeds or try Buco's suggestion. Or both.
I particularly like the notion of letting the song lead the way. Thanks for a good discussion.

AndrewUlle

I think it was Robin Nolan who has a quick lesson on rhythm for really fast-tempo songs where he strummed both up and down stroke, so it was half the effort of ALL down stroke strumming. You still need to dampen the left hand appropriately, but that's not too hard.