How Anika Nilles Filled Rush's "Impossible" Drum Chair

I haven’t “gone to school” on the classic repertoire of a band in so deep a way since I used to do the “could I do the gig” challenges.

But in today’s video, there’s zero of me playing.

And I did not school myself on the most beloved songs of the Rush catalogue in order to record them myself, but rather to understand, as much as possible, the stakes facing Anika Nilles when she agreed to take over Neil Peart’s fabled Rush drum chair.

I say it’s one of the most difficult-to-fill drum roles in the world not because Rush’s catalogue is necessarily the most technically-demanding - Dream Theater, Meshuggah, and Frank Zappa probably have a stronger claim - nor only because its former drummer was universally-beloved among fans, nor even because those same fans know every note of his intricate and “composed” (as opposed to improvised differently every time) drum parts, but rather because it’s the rare combination of all 3.

When Mike Mangini stewarded Mike Portnoy’s drum chair in Dream Theater, he took his own original approach to the band’s demanding repertoire. The same can be said of Zappa’s drummers.

Phil Collins has one drum fill everybody waits for. The Police have a few.

And beloved bands like Snarky Puppy, Pearl Jam, The Mars Volta, and Nine Inch Nails have all had several great drummers, each adding their own unique spin.

Over the past 41 years and 18 albums, Rush has had one. The Professor. Who didn’t just drum; he has lyric credits for 94% of Rush’s non-instrumental songs.

Rush fans know hundreds of his fills, across the band’s expansive catalogue, by heart.

And the music, while not Dream Theater or Zappa, is also not Maroon Five, no offense to them. This is not “boom chick verse chorus”. One listen to Xanadu or La Villa Strangiato, and you understand the scope of the task.

So when you get the call to audition for Rush, you swallow hard. You check your schedule. You say to yourself “I’ve got a pretty good thing going. Do I really want to go into a cave for six months SEAL-training every nook and cranny of Neil Peart’s legacy?”

And Anika, beloved by drum fans since way back for her own many projects, not-to-mention being Jeff Beck’s last drummer, understood the full weight of the decision and, without hesitation, said “yes”.

Indeed, you can tell she’s having fun.

Different audiences will hopefully get different things from this video.

I imagine my list is a mix of Anika fans who know of Neil but haven’t gone too deep with Rush, Rush diehards who know of Anika but mainly because she replaced Neil, and OG fans of them both.

In the video, I attempt to illustrate why the gig is so difficult in spite of not being Zappa, introduce its new drummer, and examine what about her made her uniquely-qualified to take on the role, not only as a drummer but as a human.

I hope I did an decent job.

The REAL Reason Your Kick Drum Feels Sluggish

First things first - download your free transcription here.

I’ve had a number of new coaching students for whom fixing the kick drum was a priority in recent months.

For one, I recorded a mini-youtube-lesson off the cuff, which ended up being almost 8 minutes, and which we titled The Kick Drum Crash Course. This video got passed around so much in our coaching discord, I decided it was time to update my Youtube kick pedal houvre.

At issue: students often complain of a “sluggish” feeling. But everyone thinks the solution is improving their speed. It’s a reasonable assumption, considering that 98% of the kick drum material online or otherwise promises more speed, usually with multiples of BPM in the thumbail.

And while it’s true that you can’t go faster without solving some of the underlying technical, it’s also true that pure speed, which is to say reducing the space between consecutive strokes as much as possible (and maybe doing as many of them in a row as possible) is only part of the issue.

My humble thesis is there’s another part entirely to feeling dextrous on the kick drum, which is only tenuously related to speed, but which many drummers and most instructionals ignore: placement precision.

If speed has to do with how few mili-seconds are between your doubles, precision, (or “agility” I’ve heard it called) has to do with how many mili-seconds off the grid any individual stroke is.

If you don’t think they’re different or important, just listen to Clown Core’s Computers, which I demonstrate in the lesson. Isolate the kick drum part, and there’s nothing terribly “fast” - no two of the strokes are closer than an 8th note. But put them back in context in the beat, and if any one is more than a few mili-seconds off, the beat loses its “snap” entirely.

So what’s this mysterious bass drum skill that can fail you, even if, once in the rhythm, you can play reasonably fast doubles, or even triples?

It’s some part technical - so we want to eliminate technique as a bottleneck - but after that, primarily “calibration”. Because of course time elapses between when you think “I’d like a bass drum note”, and the signal traveling to your ankle muscles, your muscles making the movements, overcoming the inertia of the machinery of the kick pedal, then finally the beater “winding up” and traveling to the head. But our nervous system can compensate and anticipate that delay. Provided it’s well-calibrated. So we’ll hit you with some exercises to do that.

Finally, you’ll have to overcome something I call “the dead zone”, a tempo range where doubles naturally feel sluggish, because you’re in between “individual stroke” tempo and “elided stroke” tempo.

We’ll show you exercises for all of it.

P.S. If you like the theory and material in this video and would like me to take you through it one-on-one, I’m doing a quiet 2-seat enrollment in my coaching program. (SHHHHHH.) More info and the link to apply here.

The REAL Reason You Can't Flow Around The Drums (Updated)

First things first - download your free transcription here.

Two years ago I made a video called The Real Reason You Can’t Flow Around The Drums. In that video I discussed a specific sticking that allowed me to access the rack tom with my left hand, and “restored balance” to my playing.

At the time, it had genuinely been a “zero to one” for me, opening up all kinds of new avenues for my improvisation.

Since then, I’ve had two additional years to coach students, and realized something big: I was playing at the wrong level of abstraction. Which is to say I was concerned with decorating my new apartment in a hypothetical extremely polluted city rather than moving first. Sure - when we’re ready for them, hip stickings can help our improvisation a ton. But if we’re not, they’ll cover over a more fundamental issue.

That’s why I decided this video needed an update. “The actual, REAL reason you can’t flow around the drums.”

And that reason? We’re learning things out of order.

Worrying about stickings, and orchestration before we address something much more fundamental. Phrase structure.

Put more artfully, we’ve learned a ton of elegant ways to continue to phrase in groups of 4 16ths.

Because that’s what happens when you don’t put phrase structure first. Or, more fundamentally, realize that phrase structure is a more powerful lever than sticking or orchestration.

You can strip everything else away, and just use groups of “2” and “4” 16ths on the share, with accents to highlight the phrase shifts, and if you know how to arrange them musically, without losing the “4/4” in your head, you’re already cooking.

Or, you can learn Rllk, RLKK, RLRK, Frlk, and a million other ways to land on “1” and “3”, and it won’t sound like flow.

The Container Primacy - I’m terrible with names - also means we’ve solved the second most fundamental level of abstraction: subdivision changes.

It used to be that you’d learn a bunch of licks in 16ths, and a bunch in sextuplets or triplets, then practice 2 bars of each. But it felt like switching languages in mid-sentence. With the…ahem…CP…system, you can now substitute triple subdivision, i.e. a “3” or a “6”, one-to-one with a “2” or a “4”.

So that’s how we got it wrong, and that’s why we’re wasting time pecking around the edges instead of drilling into our phrase structure and subdivision substitution, and that [inhales] is why we can’t flow around the drums.

But hopefully this lesson will help get you closer.

P.S. If you like the theory and material in this video and would like me to take you through it one-on-one, I’m doing a quiet 2-seat enrollment in my coaching program. (SHHHHHH.) More info and the link to apply here.

The Drum Technique Lesson That Would Have Saved Me Years

First things first - grab your study guide here.

This past month I had one of those “synesthesia” moments you see depicted in movies by the music crescendoing with a wash of disjoined voices and a suspended cymbal roll until everything stops abruptly and there’s just a bright light.

It wasn’t exactly as depicted.

But the realization was around hand technique. And the fact that drum hand technique is not one thing, but two things.

I would see it from both directions:

Player has a speed limit because they can’t activate their fingers, so they “wrist” and “force” everything above a certain tempo.

Player complains of “pinkie out”, and has “mushy” singles or doubles at slower tempos.

We all kind of intuitively know that there are two distinct drum techniques. As a kid, in drum lessons, once I learned you could bounce double-strokes, the teacher would ask me to practice them “slow-fast-slow”, and we could see there was a point they went from “articulated” to “bouncing”.

But I’ve yet to hear anybody really talk about this except in passing. Which is especially interesting, considering that this might be the. single. most. fundamental. property. in. drum. technique.

As in, day one of lessons: “Jimmy, I’m gonna cut through a lot of potential confusion. You need 2 techniques. One for slow, and one for fast. The fast one is harder. Then you’re gonna have to transition seamlessly between them. This is the way.”

Then Jimmy would say some secular equivalent of “amen”.

So - what am I talking about?

I call it “walking” and “running”.

When we move, walking means we keep one foot on the ground all the time, whereas when we run, we’re airborne for brief periods between one foot touching the ground. And similarly-to-drums, if we try to walk too fast, or run too slowly, it’s awkward. We need two techniques for personal locomotion, and we need to transition seamlessly and intuitively, as we break into a jog to catch a bus, or slow to a walk once we’ve missed it.

For drums, “walking” means the stick returning to the heel of the hand after every stroke. That simple.

“Running” means it does not. The strokes are fast enough that it’s more efficient to have the stick “floating” between the energy of the rebound and the fingers returning it. Or loud enough that the stick height is creating the same effect.

This introduces two issues: how do we practice the individual techniques, and how do we transition between them.

The video covers them both.

Hope you enjoy.

P.S. did you know we’re doing a pilot enrollment for my new fledgling membership? It’s called the 8020 Academy, there’s a “new member” deal until Friday, and you can check it out here.