Berj Fazlian - Berklee as Hogwarts, 32nd Notes, and Life As a Young Drummer

I’m going to stop hiding the fact that I fancy myself a bit of a “next hot thing” whisperer for the drums.

Can barely dress myself, can’t cook worth a lick, but amongst my friends I have a decent track record of saying “have you peeped this drummer” a few years prior to their becoming a household name. So it was with Ari Hoenig among my classmates in music school, Nate Wood a few years later, and pre-Butcher-Brown Corey Fonville.

So it was with December’s podcast guest, Diego Ramirez, who I believe in a few years will be on the tips of young drummers’ tongues, and so it is with today’s. Someone you might know if you’ve seen any of my videos on what I call “clave flow”.

At the age of 18, he’s already become synonymous with a style that’s sweeping drumming, more than practically anyone else. And if there is a such thing as “prodigies”, he’s that in every sense of the word, having played for only 10 years. (And his description of putting in 8-hours-a-day of practice both tracks with past guests like Chris Turner, and should give you an idea of the work required to make that kind of meteoric rise.)

I’m speaking of Berj Fazlian. Son of an orchestra conductor, Berklee student, and, already, a sensation.

In person, Berj is amiable and warm. And can’t hide his enthusiasm for the drums. It’s no wonder that, like Turner, drums never felt like “work” to him.

In this meandering conversation, we speak about Berklee-as-Hogwarts and navigating the world as a young drummer, with strong undertones of finding a voice in the wilderness and trusting your own tastes, even as a “prodigy”.

Hope you enjoy!

P.S. did you know you can sign up to be the first to hear when we open up new slots for Impossible to Fail, my flagship 1:1 coaching program? Just click here to sign up for the waitlist.

If You Can’t Do This, You’re Not Truly Improvising on Drums (But We Can Help!)

First things first - get 30 days free at JP Bouvet Method (until May 3) with the code FLOW, and support 8020 in the process.

Improvising on drums contains a “great filter” - a chasm with a narrow passage across. On the surface, it seems simple, inevitable that if we simply practice enough rudiments and listen to enough drums, we’ll be able to cross it. And given enough time, that’s probably true.

But we underestimate the challenge.

Crossing this chasm requires doing 2 things at once: combining “asymmetric” phrases - phrases that cross the bar, or at least “syncopate”, and keeping the “big beat” in our heads.

If you think this is easy, try clapping 4 quarter notes, with beat “1” a normal clap, and beats 2-4 with the back of the lead hand, and singing combinations of 2 and 4 16ths - choose any syllable you want to represent each, but I might humbly recommend “2” and “4”. Now, you have to syncopate, which is to say make phrases including odd numbers of “2s”. And you also have to land confidently on “1” after 4 bars of 4/4.

If you can do this, the rest of drumming is just adding technique. Obviously a lot of steps, but you’ve cleared the “hardest filter” to improvisation.

If you can’t, you’ll struggle to improvise interesting phrases. You’ll be able to play “pre-composed” licks and loops, and you might be able to improvise “non-syncopated” rhythms that never violate the quarter note downbeat.

But fear not, because I’ll tell you 2 reassuring things.

The first is that practically everybody struggles with this. It requires practice. Just like riding a bike, it’s a complex skill. Even musicians who seem to have been able to do it from birth likely learned it early in life from exposure to music. If this is hard for you, that doesn’t mean there’s something “wrong” with you. It’s hard for everybody at first.

The second is you can learn to do it.

And you don’t need to spend years tackling rudiments, though in certain arrangements they obviously help.

No. We think we have a faster way. An easier way. A more fun way.

“We”, by the way, is I, with friend of the channel JP Bouvet. And credit-where-credit-is-due, when we set out to tackle this problem in parallel, it was he who developed the easier, more intuitive method. And that’s why I’ve adopted his method as a step in my teaching.

He calls it the 2s and 4s.

Any phrase that “syncopates” (which is to say “includes upbeats”) at the 8th note level can be deconstructed into groups of 2 and 4. And you can build any syncopated phrase at the 8th note level with them.

That’s why the key to learning to improvise on drums might boil down to understanding deeply how 2s and 4s interact, and memorizing - “getting in your ear” - their sound.

In this video, JP and I attempt to give you a crash course into the system: to show you how to “test” your ability to syncopate, then show you the basics for adopting this system.

And if you want to go further, JP’s Paradiddle Course, and my coaching both include more advanced, comprehensive versions.

Hope you enjoy! Below is the complete mini-conversation with JP.

The "Foundational" Drum Rhythm That's Everywhere Again

First things first - download your free transcription here.

The jig is kind of up on “modern drum whatever that’s suddenly everywhere.”

As it was with the “tom reversal”, so it is with this week’s phenomenon: you can find clips of Art Blakey doing it back in the ‘60s. Which is to say it’s not exclusively modern.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t seeing a big resurgence.

Bring it in, you guys. Super quick “stoner thought” - for all the chaos it’s wrought, for all the “homogeneity” it’s encouraged among musicians, social media has poured 100 years of drum innovations into a large hadron collider, allowing the pace of innovation to skyrocket.

That might be why, when one speaks of today’s innovation, you can say Art Blakey “did it”, and Bill Stewart “did it”, and Virgil Donati, Dave Dicenso, and Keith Carlock “did it”, but Marcus Gilmore and the modern generation of drummers “did it and did it and did it”.

(The “did it” thing was ironically originally a joke about Marcus’ grandfather, Roy Haynes, and triplets.)

The lick, of course, is dotted 8ths in the left foot. Something that, once you notice, you can’t “unhear”, and which has a funkiness that’s difficult to fully explain, and my final stoner theory of the day is that that’s because ultimate it comes from West African drumming, and that we as humans find intersecting rhythms inherently funky.

If you feel like joining me today on a journey that includes all those drummers we mentioned, with honorable mentioned Tony Allen and Danny Carey, and not incidentally a pretty intensive lesson on how to get started using these rhythms in your drumming, I invite you to watch.

Hope you enjoy!

P.S. did you know you can sign up to be the first to hear when we open up new slots for Impossible to Fail, my flagship 1:1 coaching program? Just click here to sign up for the waitlist.

Great Drummers Don't Suffer From This, But Beginners Do

First things first - download your free transcription here.

Many drummers suffer from the “if a tree falls in the woods” conundrum.

Sound great by ourselves, then turn a camera on, or take the stage, and…we can’t find it.

Beyond the fact that this is normal, and not a sign you’re a “bad drummer” - indeed, “good in private” is a necessary first step before “good in public”…

…it’s also something we can use in the practice room.

There’s something I jokingly call the “3am test” with my students. Sometimes people will ask “when do I know when I’ve truly mastered this exercise?”

The answer: “when you can play it at 3am, fresh out of bed, in the rain.”

The experience of finding our performance lacking in public or on camera can be a tool we take back to the practice room, to inform the level our playing needs to reach. Which is why it’s so important, in my opinion, that drummers seek opportunities to perform in public, or on camera.

Onstage, not only are “people watching”, but acoustics are weird, setups feel different, and umpteen little factors all add up to take us out of our element.

Our favorite “pros”, obviously, don’t suffer the same falloff of their performance as we do. Beyond “making our best so great that 80% of it is still good”, there are things we can do to make sure the public performances are 80%, instead of 50 or 60. Then 90. Then 101.

Sure, there’s no substitute for raw experience. But “experience” doesn’t mean on tour with your favorite band. It can mean coffee shop performances, or jam sessions. It can even mean recording yourself and posting it on Instagram. Or, for the more industrious with fewer local ordinances, busking in a local park or square.

Finally, I share some experience from my past in which I’ve had that “in public falloff” of my playing, and how I moved on from it.

Hope you enjoy!

P.S. did you know you can sign up to be the first to hear when we open up new slots for Impossible to Fail, my flagship 1:1 coaching program? Just click here to sign up for the waitlist.