First things first - grab your free transcription here.
We spill a lot of ink and occupy gigabytes of SD cards talking about “secrets of pro drummers”, like subtle stickings that you wouldn’t see are the same unless you slowed them down, or weird “below-the-surface” muscle memory stuff you won’t understand until you feel it.
Today’s video is not about that. Today’s video is about something everybody sees great drummers do every day, then promptly forgets about when we go back to our own drumming.
I’m talking about bog-standard, stupid-simple, boilerplate, block-and-tackle subdivision changes.
Like, “use a sextuplet for once Seamus! It won’t kill ya!”
Then Seamus screams “nevaaaaaaaah!” Across his pint, then steps out into the rain and shuffles away alone, to a sad violin soundtrack. And scene. I’d like to apologize for any negative Irish stereotypes in this vignette.
But I bet if you added up the variety of subdivisions our favorite drummers use in their improvisation and compared it to the average drummer, they’re doing it way more. And I’m not saying “spam” it. Just, it’s like we all have an obvious musical tool, and they use it, and we always forget.
Why?
Well beyond simple “this is how I’ve always done it” inertia, I can think of 3 reasons. 3 reasons we’ll try to “de-claw” in this video:
They seem faster, which is “scury”.
They have a base of 3 or 6 instead of 2/4/8, so we worry our existing ideas won’t work.
We worry we’ll get lost with the counting.
Beyond this, there’s also one “secret” reason people don’t think about, but which I think is actually the biggest issue. But you have to watch the video to hear about it. Woooooo.
But in all seriousness, let’s normalize the musical use of subdivision. We wouldn’t talk in monotone, at the same speed always. So why not make our playing more fluid, so we can make better music?
Hope you enjoy!