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.