3 Reasons Your Drum Feels Sucks (And What to Do)

Why is good feel on the drums so rare, even after we’ve basically built a religion around it?

You can’t read an article or watch an interview without hearing the importance of feel.

Steve Gadd

Steve Jordan

Bonham

Bernard

Jeff

Clyde

Ziggy

But - thought experiment: if you were putting up flyers for a drummer for your band, what percentage of the people who called you would have an amazing feel?

My quick back-of-the-napkin math says less than 10%. (I haven’t listened to auditions for drummers for my own bands, of course, but I’ve been one of the people auditioning, listening to others play, and I’ve listened to auditions for other things. Plus I’ve walked down the halls of New York practice spaces for the better part of 15 years.)

My conclusion? We don’t actually care about it as much as we claim to. When the lights are on, and the camera is recording, we talk a good game about feel, but behind closed doors? When it’s just us and the drumkit, and noone will ever know?

I think we think we’re already better at it than we really are, and I think we secretly think chops are more important.

But all it takes is a couple of “first takes” recording ourselves along with a tune to realize chops are meaningless if our beat placement is wack. And to hear the delta between the way we think we sound, and the way we reeeeeally sound.

And many-a-time, after having that revelation, people will wonder “how do I get better at this?”

Well, one way is to increase your sensitivity to where you’re placing your beats. One way, which I’ll discuss next week, is by playing simple beats and just “zooming in” on your beat placement with your attention. Kind of like meditating. Which is time consuming.

But there is another way. Isolate and exaggerate the weakness, so you can target it.

And it’s in this lesson that I’ll show you how I do that.

Hope you enjoy.

Boogadas - A Jazz Lick That Revolutionized Rock Drumming

First things first - grab your transcription here.

John Bonham didn't invent "his most famous lick".

He would have been honest if you'd asked him. The boogada, that tom sweep that became near-ubiquitous, from Steve Gadd, to Neil Peart, to Thomas Pridgen, to Eric Moore, was not a Bonham invention.

"But hang on," you're saying...

"I hear Bonzo play that before anybody else in rock. There were rock drummers before, then there was Bonham."

Fair enough. Operative word "rock".

Because Bonham was an avid jazz fan.

That "slow shuffle" in the chorus of Dazed and Confused? Legend has it, that's from Max Roach's The Drum Also Waltzes.

And the most famous lick in all of rock drumming?

From jazz drummers in general, Max Roach in particular.

In today's video, I'll trace the origins of the Boogada, show you how to play some of the most popular Bonham and Gadd interpretations, and demonstrate some modern "twists" that I've developed.

Hope you enjoy, and if you do, please share and leave a comment!

The One Kick Drum Technique to Solve (Most of) Your Problems

First things first - download your transcription here.

Today, a meditation on kick drum technique. I’ve been thinking a lot about a Nassim Taleb mental model called “teaching birds to fly”. I recognized what this was immediately, because it’s rampant in drums.

Loosely defined, it means “instruction led by the imperative to have something to talk about, not by the need to solve a real problem”. One imagines teaching a woodpecker the “stem twist technique”, or somebody developing an alternate way to flap wings that works just as well but is harder to learn.

Marketing is rife with teaching birds to fly. If you’ve got a course or software product to sell, it’s important that your prospect believes your solution is the only way he’ll solve his problem; otherwise he’ll ask the question “what do I need you for”?

Such is the ecosystem we have with kick-pedal playing, where people are developing all sorts of crazy and difficult techniques just to do basic things. (Metal drummers, with real problems to solve, appear to be the exception, and their technique has remarkable convergence around a small set of simple best practices.)

So when I surveyed my audience about their biggest issues playing the kick drum, the answers I got were things like “can’t balance on the throne”, “can’t find the right spring tension”, “need a way to carry my kick pedal with me to gigs”, and “can’t play both loud and soft without tension”.

If they’d said “I can’t play double-kick 32nds above a certain tempo and keep them clean”, I would’ve sent them to 66Samus. But 98% of the problems people described were (1) problems I used to have which (2) I solved with one variation to my technique.

As always, if it’s working for you, don’t change it (I’m not trying to teach birds to fly), but if you have any of the above issues, you might want to consider that they have a single source: your kick drum technique. And further, that a simple fix (though there will be a learning/adjustment curve) can do away with most of them.

In this lesson, the simple technique fix that will hopefully solve most of your basic kick drum problems.

Enjoy.

The 3 Most Underrated Vinnie Licks?

First things first: download the transcription here.

Let's end 2020 on a high, and uncontroversial note.

Let's study a drummer universally acknowledged to be one of the greatest of his generation.

I'm speaking, of course, about Vinnie. This month I was thinking about Vinnie after listening to Ron Bruner's solo record, because Ron gives an overdubbed verbal nod to some of his influences, and Vinnie is front-and-center.

I've also long felt Vinnie stood out from his peers as a drummer who continued to "push his prime back", by continuing to shed and get better decade-by-decade, instead of resting on his laurels. (It's inspirational to me, because I sure hope I'm a much better drummer at 70 than I am now, though I'll have to find ways to be more minimalist and efficient.)

Today's lesson is one which, like many that require multiple transcriptions, almost didn't get done in time. We pulled it off, though, and by "we", I mean Chris, who not only helped me transcribe one of the solos but pointed out an error I'd made in the counting, and Srdjan the video editor, who stuck with me gamely across multiple revisions, until we had a coherent video. (Then roasted me with the outtakes, as usual :P)

In this video I cover 3 Vinnie moments that are underrated, but which should immediately ring familiar to any "true fans".

They span multiple eras - 80s, 90s, and 2000s - and there's a good mix of jazz, fusion, and afro-cuban.

Curious yet?

See for yourself - the 3 most underrated Vinnie licks? And see if you agree.

See you in 2021,

N