The Joel Turcotte Lick That Nearly Broke Instagram

Anybody who’s been on drum Instagram in the last decade is probably familiar with Joel Turcotte, and if you’re not, you should be.

Not only is Joel a funny, irreverent, and entertaining personality, he brings this same approach to the drums.

Last week, Joel was in town on one of the last legs of a tour, so he swung by 80/20 HQ. So I handed him sticks, mic’d him up, sat him behind the drums, turned a camera on, and let things roll.

What followed was nearly 3 hours of drums and conversation. But today’s video is about just a tiny fraction of that material. When Joel was showing me a lick he’d been working on, I happened to pull out my phone and post it to Instagram.

I thought people would be excited to see Joel, but I didn’t realize just how excited they’d be. The video got a TON of comments and support, and many people (obviously) wanted to know how to play the lick.

Luckily, I asked Joel to slow it down, and demonstrate what we was doing.

In this video, Joel “guest teaches” you his lick, with me jumping in to transcribe things and explain further…

…then I “go rogue” with one of Joel’s concepts, and try to develop something of my own.

Hope you enjoy!

Playing in Time - The "Secret" of Great Groove Drummers Like Steve Jordan

First things first - if you want the complete Playing In Time video, free to you as a subscriber, check it out here.

What exactly “pocket” is has been the subject of vigorous debate in my comments lately, with many people taking the opinion that the great drummers are simply “born with it”, and others that the only way to develop a great feel is to…”feel it”.

While there’s doubtless truth in both takes, as usual I’m approaching things from the standpoint of “what’s the most practical way to improve your pocket in the direction of a Steve Jordan, a Steve Gadd, a Jeff Porcaro, a Bernard Purdie or a Brian Blade if you’re an ‘average’ drummer like me?”

And in my experience, it’s metronome displacement. If you’re advanced enough. (Otherwise, as others have said, it’s perfectly fine to place the click on the downbeats.) It’s here that the final controversy emerges: “won’t I be all up in my head instead of feeling the beat if I practice this way?”

Precisely the opposite.

Just like practicing field stripping a weapon 1,000 times means (I’m told) you can do it half asleep, in the back of a Jeep on a dirt road, in the dark, so practicing with the metronome on offbeats means when it’s time to gig, you won’t have to think about it. You’ll train your ears to hear time more like it sounds to bystanders and on recordings, and compensate for our human tendencies to mis-perceive time in the moment, as we’re playing.

Way more in the lesson, but expect to discover:

• How to work up to the offbeat exercise from the Drumeo lesson

• The two reasons metronome displacement is good for an advanced enough player

• The REAL difference betwen macro and micro time

Enjoy this one!

What It's Like to Record at Drumeo (And How I Did It)

First things first - if you haven’t seen the Original/Protptype drumeo video, check it out here.

While over the years a decent number of YouTubers have collaborated with Drumeo, I guess I'm lucky that so far noone has vlogged the experience.

So it was that it fell to me - reluctant/amateur Casey Neistat to document things. To be Your Man On The Inside.

And, as I say in the video, "vlogging ain't easy". It's not like ten years ago, when people would look shocked if you pulled out a camera and started talking to it in public Today, it mostly just elicits eye-rolls - "Oh, you're one of those guys."

"Outtake" moments include my lens cap falling off and rolling down the long aisle of an aircraft, for everyone's amusement, while taking off from Laguardia.

But I made it, and I managed to smuggle the footage out with me.

Expect to discover:

• What it actually looks like inside Drumeo HQ and what the studio looks like

• What it's like to work with them

• How I got the gig in the first place

• Why Montreal in March is no bueno

Hope you enjoy!

I Played Intentionally "Bad" Drums Over Bieber's Most Popular Songs

I don't actually dislike Bieber. The man has pipes. And I've done videos about his drummer, Devon Taylor.

But one day while I was forced to listen to Sorry for the umpteenth time at the gym, I decided it would be hilarious to do some troll covers of Bieber.

To make sure my covers wouldn't be like a tree falling in the woods, I'd need a place to post them. I quickly settled on the Bieber subreddit. Which also solved the problem of which songs I should cover.

I posted a quick message that I was a new fan and wondering which songs I should check out, and waited for some replies. Good! People were responding.

From among the many suggestions, I narrowed it down to one, and I knew already what I was going to do - play 5/8 over the whole thing.

I held my breath and posted.

A good result would be some people saying "I'm not sure what this is". A great result would he outright bile - "this is the worst thing I've ever seen."

But a fantastic result would be the type of "damning with faint praise" condescension I sometimes see in my comments - "Nate, I really want to help you out, and as a friend I have to tell you I know what you're going for, and it's way off the mark. I know that hurts to hear."

I have a growing file of such comments that I send to my friends for amusement.

Anyway, if you want to find out the result, the second cover I decided to do, and the response to that one, you'll have to watch the video.

(Not to mention you can hear for yourself the artistic choices I made.) 

Anyway, hope you enjoy!