Ten surprising things about playing the drums in New York

So over the years I’ve kept getting the same questions:

“Why don’t you change your snare head?”

“Why don’t you repaint your wall/clean your door?”

“Why don’t you slap new heads on ‘your’ kit?”

“Why don’t you use a wing nut on your cymbal stand?”

It’s worse than that. Not only haven’t I changed the heads on the shared drum kit that featured in so many of my videos...

...I take a perverse pleasure in playing it exactly as I found it. Like found-object art.

And I’m not alone.

If you haven’t encountered them in the wild, New York drummers come across as an odd bunch, with idiosyncratic behaviors. Until you live here for a couple of years, then you’ll understand.

In suburbia, where I grew up, space is abundant, parking is convenient and cheap, people live in single family homes with distance between, cars are cheap to fuel and insure, and there’s always more time than you need.

In such an environment, a “utopian” drum culture evolves.

People play elaborate kits with permanent mic set-ups. Everybody plays their own kit, which is exquisitely maintained, with well-tuned new heads.

And almost every suburban drum YouTuber has a dedicated room in their home, which they’ve painted, decorated, and essentially turned into a professionally lit television studio.

The forces that force New Yorkers to evolve differently come from a few directions.

As living space is scarce and expensive, and neighbors just a wall away in the same building, home studios are rarer. Most everybody rents shared practice studios, a habit we started developing in music school.

Cymbal stands are missing wing nuts because they’re not necessary enough for anybody to put in an effort that outweighs the ease with which they can cavalierly be stolen or misplaced.

Nobody changes the heads because they don’t want to be the one guy stuck buying heads everybody else is going to use and abuse.

Both in practice studios and on gigs, drummers develop an appreciation for anything that allows them to carry less, spend less time setting up and tearing down, and leave less personal equipment on the kit for others to steal, abuse, or complain about. (In just the last 2 days of setting up and tearing down at my new studio I decided changing the cymbals and hats on the house kit “wasn’t worth it”, and started playing the house ones.)

Whereas in the suburbs having a modern-drummer-cover-ready kit for a gig is a flex, in the city playing somebody else’s ancient four-piece that hasn’t had a head change since the Ford administration and making it sound great is often more respected.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of New York drumming, in this week’s video.

The REAL Difference Between Good Drummers and Mediocre Ones

At times, when I flatter myself, I think I’m a heterodox thinker.

In reality, I’m a small-time YouTuber with no gigs.

But let’s just pretend anything I say is important. Many of my favorite heterodox thinkers have a “signature issue”. For Nassim Taleb, it’s probably “trust risk models less and skin-in-the-game more.” For Daniel Schmachtenberger it’s positive-sum dynamics and “Game B.” For Elon Musk it’s “actually we can go to Mars and have electric cars.” For Rob Wolff, it was “hang on - what if the food pyramid is actually making us unhealthier.”

And for me, to the degree I have a tiny platform where people care about anything I say, it’s “hierarchies in ability are real, and beginners aren’t able to perceive all the ways in which good drummers are better than they are.”

It’s in that spirit that I “continue to make the same video,” to a degree.

Last August I made a video called Five Subtle Ways Pros Can Tell if a Drummer’s “Legit”.

In it, I argued for…well…five…lessons I’d learned over the years about what really separates good drummers from mediocre ones.

Sure - there are obvious things. Anybody can tell Vinnie Colauita is better than I am.

But everybody already knows that stuff. I was trying to advance the conversation.

The five things I argued for were kit control - the ability to adapt to any kit instead of rushing or dragging because the kick pedal feels different, learning tunes quickly, “lock-up” - the ability to play together with a band, the ability to catch figures without losing the groove, and the ability to “keep the 1”, even in complex music.

I guess I wasn’t fully prepared for the scope of the “push back”.

“Who are you to say who’s good and who isn’t?”

Even “there’s no good or bad”.

So I feel like I keep making a tighter loop with this argument.

The next time out of the gate, I had beginner drum covers: novice bands covering famous recordings of great drummers. By setting the two side-by-side and controlling for “chops”, could you tease out some of the differences?

I thought so.

But there were still naysayers.

“It’s the recording quality. If the novices had access to the same mics and mix, they’d sound as good as the ‘pros’.”

Next weapon: bootlegs of pros. By watching great drummers with their bands from things like iPhone recordings, I reasoned, we could control for recording quality.

Think that stopped them?

“Of course the ‘novice’ drummer doesn’t sound as good. He’s playing with beginners. If he were in a better band, he’d sound better.”

That’s why: great-drummers-sitting-in.

Will that end the argument, or will I have to continue making iterated versions of this video?

I’m not naive. But, as I say in the video, there are worse things to be than the “secret ways to get good” guy.

Anyway, hope you enjoy.

Sick of Boring Drum Rudiment Practice? Try These 4 Shortcuts

First things first: Download the transcription below 👇👇👇

Rudiment Rut

In 2018 I made a video called "Are Rudiments Still Relevant in 2018", and I figured it was time for a refresh.

I've softened somewhat on rudiments over the years.

If you caught me 2012/2013, I was literally pissed off about the "lie we'd all been told": "Practice your rudiments, then you'll be great."

I've made countless videos about how Anthony Lee, Mark G, Sean Wright, and others finally convinced me that that was dead-wrong, and that the real differences between great drummers and the rest of us were the three things I tout endlessly throughout my marketing materials and videos: time, cleanliness, and improvisational flow.

Years later, when I watch Instagram ads, and see people "forcing it", trying to create a scandal or controversy ("the rudiment secret THEY DON'T WANT YOU TO KNOW"), I count myself lucky to have been gifted a real scandal by the universe: everybody who became great does 3 big things right that mediocre drummers don't do, and nobody's talking about it.

Now, some other people are. Guilinana. Benny Greb. Anika. I think as the internet has started to play a larger role in drummers coming to prominence, the drum conversation has gotten "smarter".

A Benny Greb can observe what his mentors were telling him, figure out his own path to proficiency, then comment on the difference between the conventional wisdom and what he observed firsthand. I've called this "meta lessons" before.

As such, we're closer and closer to the efficient frontier when it comes to learning the drums. And since we're no longer trying to get from 45th percentile to 85th, but rather 85th to 95th, the space is once again ripe for a discussion of the humble rudiment.

And I do mean Humble, because this week's video has fewer views than any I've released since probably 2018. Did we bring about the world we fought for? One in which rudiments have reduced importance?

Well, it's time to swing the pendulum back the other way.

In this week's lesson, 4 rudiment "hacks", to utilize the full kit instead of the pad, view rudiments in a novel way to spark faster learning, and generally to make them more fun.

Please enjoy.

Double Your Drum Vocabulary With This One Trick? (Only Partially Clickbait)

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Hemiola Exercises

So, I'll confess the next few weeks' lessons are going to be more...rote drum lessons and less "infotainment", for the simple reason that I'm working harder than I've ever worked to produce the Solo Course that 35+ brave souls pre-ordered.

More on that below.

But ransacking the annals of my muscle memory (something that sounds dirtier than it actually is) has left precious few resources to brainstorm how to appeal to vast swaths of the internet, and required me to fall back on habit: teaching stuff I'm actually working on, and not worrying about whether it'll be niche or popular.

Apropos of which, this week's topic arose because I was trying to save myself some time and effort by going off-the-cuff - "we'll do it live!!!".

Which backfired hilariously. (Some of which is documented in this week's lesson.)

What it did leave me with, however, were the source materials to make a far more accessible video, about a concept I've been flogging since 2014, but into which I've never really "deep dived": The Humble Hemiola.

It's of-a-feather with the quarter note triplet, and sometimes it's exactly the same, but it's broader. It's also an attitude. A style. A "how", not just a "what".

So if you're ready to live that #hemilife, you'll dig this week's lesson.