Don't let being stuck at home go to waste

Beginner Exercises

We're stuck indoors for at least a few weeks.

If we're healthy enough to be bored, we've got an opportunity: get a head start on the drums.

This week's video is "how to stop sounding like a beginner", but that's a misnomer.

At every point up to the present, I could use the material in this video. After graduating from music school, when I was playing professionally, throughout my teaching arc. The basics never get less important.

But what are the basics?

Maybe it's stick control and coordination exercises. And if you've got years to inch your way up the skill ladder, those resources are great.

But what if we used the quarantine as a "forcing function"? What if we "parkinsoned" ourselves?

(Parkinson's law states that a task will swell in size and complexity to fill the time you allot to it.)

Short deadlines focus the mind. If you've got only 90 days to set fire to your "beginner" ships, and chart a new course, you now no longer have the luxury of focusing on the trivial many things. You have to choose the highest-leverage few.

I've been like a broken record about this, but I believe those few are playing clean (or kit control), feel (which includes time), and improvisation.

Those are the "necessary and sufficient" skills of "high level drummers".

They're necessary, because you don't find any greats without them.

They're sufficient because they're the only skills greats have in common.

(Try telling me Will Champion and Tony Royster play the same type of solo. Or that either of them isn't great.)

Great - so we focus on those 3 things. But how?

Well...video.

Please enjoy:)

3 Levels of Drummer Play One Song - Can You Tell The Difference?

It doesn't take much comparison to know Nate Smith is good.

Whether with Dave Holland, his own groups, or Chris Potter's Underground, Nate's playing sizzles from the first beat.

But what if you had to explain why?

Let's come at this another way. When I was in high school, I assumed that what made great players great was immediately obvious, and obvious to all.

If I and my cohorts could do the surface level of that whey did, we'd have it. So we spent a lot of time learning their licks and their tunes.

We'd play a pretty faithful cover, just like the "beginners" in this video, who cover Rumples, a tune Nate's played on for years, practically to-the-note.

Then we listened to a recording of ourselves next to the original.

The differences we subtle. But countless minute differences added up to a Whole that seemed a universe away from the original.

It was then that I realized music making was subtle.

As I'm constantly striving to give viewers of this channel a way into the same insight I had, it occurred to me that side-by-side comparison might do the trick. Look at a Chrysler Town and Country, then describe to me how it's different from a Honda Odyssey.

Pretty hard, right?

What happens when they're parked side-by-side. It's much easier.

I was lucky enough to stumble over not just many covers of Rumples, but many *levels* of cover.

By juxtaposing the "beginner", and "advanced" covers with the original, I attempt to unpack the subtle things that make the original so amazing.

Check out the video here.

Hope you enjoy.

How to ditch the structure and "mess around", and still get better

Is structured practice overrated? It depends.

When I was 17 years old, I attended "band camp", and came away with the disquieting conclusion that I wasn't practicing enough. Surrounded by people who had spent their lives practicing 3, 4, 5 hours-a-day, I felt like I'd barely scratched the surface.

I knew I had to catch up.

The easiest lever to pull was "quantity". I started with a blank slate of 3 hours-a-day (minimum), and found things to fill it with.

I maintained that through the last years of high-school, into college, into grad school, and for many years after graduation.

I think two things are true of long, structured practice routines: first, everybody who wants to be a "black belt" needs to put in those hours at some point in her career.

(I'm *not* saying I'm a black belt, by the way.)

Second, you can't *not* get better when you're putting those kinds of hours. It's a brute-force approach. What's more, learning to practice efficiently is a skill in its own right, and probably requires that you spend years practicing *inefficiently*.

But what happens when we take a look under the hood?

As you might suspect from the name of my channel, you likely discover that not everything you've been practicing has equal value. A small number of things, 20% or less, is probably responsible for 80% or more of the results.

So - first conclusion: if you stay with the 20%, you can spend less time, and rely on less *structure*, and still get better faster: hence the "mess around".

In the interview I play at the beginning of the video, Nate Wood told me he mostly improvises in the practice room.

But what are those 20%? How do you know you're not just continuing to mostly waste time, but just getting fewer potent hours?

That's certainly the fear. "I'm doing a whole hodgepodge of stuff, and I don't know what's working and what's not, so I'm gonna keep it all."

Tantamount to "we know we're wasting half our advertising dollars. We just don't know which half."

But you can have reasonable hypotheses. In today's video, I put forward 4. The "4 Cs". These are core skills that, as long as you're working on *one* of them, make it almost impossible to waste time.

Can you see the complexity of the narrative thread I'm trying to weave here? (Not that I'm saying I'm succeeding:P) That's why this video is 20 minutes. And we haven't even gotten to feedback loops.

Ok, so why does 80/20 "messing around" work. One good hypothesis is feedback loops. If you want a pure illustration of feedback loops in action, just loop a bar of John Coltrane (a slow solo), and try to whistle it. The first few reps will be atrocious. If you repeat it enough, it will get better, little-by-little, without your conscious brain needing to do anything.

That's a pure feedback loop. So we want to spend as much of our practice session as possible engaged in feedback loops toward goals we want to achieve. Simple, right?

And that's why Stick Control and the 26 Essential Rudiments work so well. They're tailor-made for those feedback loops.

But they have to adapt as your needs change. Which is why: The 4 Cs.

Hope you enjoy.

What Matt Garstka Can Teach Us About Odd Meters

There are videos that I hope catch on with a broader audience - i.e. those I hope/figure have at least a chance at "going viral".

THEN there are videos like today's. Videos I make just because I want to.

I don't care if only 450 people watch this, I had to get it out there.

Kepler, from Matt Garstka and guitarist Josh De La Victoria, has been on my mind since I first watched the video. I've been a fan of Matt's playing since the Berklee Jam days, and I've seen plenty of Matt Porn, including last year's VF Jam, and the collaborations with Henrik Linder.

But Matt's playing is synergistic with this track in a way that recalls Oli Bernatchez and Le Havre - they sound like a band.

And it's my suspicion that Kepler will be a classic in a way that other videos/recordings won't precisely because of the "lightening in a bottle" element that's part math-metal schmorgasbord, part rootsy rock guitar, and part vibe-in-the-room-on-that-day.

Whatever the reason, we love Kepler.

But there's more than meets the eye. Sure, maybe you've admired the solos. Maybe you've figured out some of the meters. Maybe you've even played along.

But the hope with this video is to expose you to some of the subtle elements of the arrangement/performance that you may NOT have noticed before.

Hope you enjoy!