Could You Sub for Mark Guiliana?

You know him, you love him.

When I first started making videos about Mark Guiliana, he was fast becoming the “drummer’s drummer”, known to practically all “insiders”.

Fast-forward 8 years, and he’s now “drum royalty”. On Bowie’s last album. Doing clinic tours with Weckl and Simon Phillips. And you can definitely use his last initial instead of spelling out his whole last name.

But what if you had to sub for Mark?

What if he took 3 months off his tour circuit to work on a conceptual art installation (something I mention in the video isn’t even that far-fetched), and needed somebody to hop in on his busy tour schedule, and the call came to YOU?

Today, as ever, I play your “proxy” jumping into that hypothetical challenge.

And unlike some of my other “could you do the gig” videos, we’re considering 3 different bands across Mark’s career.

1. Jazz bassist Avishai Cohen, with whom Mark played in the early and mid-2000s

2. Now vs Now, which…cmon, do I need to say more?

3. And Beat Music, Mark’s most prominent non-Bowie/post-Now-vs-Now project

As usual I’ll be learning 3 songs - one from each of the above groups…

…and facing some anticipated challenges, and some unanticipated ones.

Will I be up to the challenge? You’ll have to judge for yourself.

Could YOU sub for Mark?

Leave a comment below.

See you in the next one!

How to Deal with Negativity About Your Drumming

Friends, I want to introduce you to a concept I call The Gaslight Hangover, and tell me if that resonates immediately.

For my purposes, it refers to the mental load involved in separating “what’s you” vs “what’s them” when you get a negative comment. The hard part is that we want to be open minded, and maybe the commenter has a point. But at the same time, something rubs us the wrong way - we feel “wronged”.

Is that just our ego messing with us? Is that just defensiveness, or reluctance to accept reality? Because those things are real.

But you know who’s really good at sublimating their egos and being maximally open to criticism? Cult members.

Because open-mindedness can go too far. You can be so open-minded “your brains fall out” as the cliche goes.

So imagine you’re somewhere along the journey of learning the drums, and you’re “proto” seeing-all-the-territory. There are still big “unknown unknowns” for you.

To use the analogy I use in this week’s video, it’s like you’re partway up a mountain. You can see the summit - that’s like watching instagram videos of our drum heroes. But things like the exact route to the summit, what challenges lie between you and the summit, and even how long the distance…

…are opaque, or shrouded in fog.

You need to be open to feedback about which way to go, because you can’t get to the summit on your own - at least not as fast.

But you also need to be careful not to listen to too much negative feedback (“you’ll never make it”, “other climbers do it better”, etc), because if you let it get to you, you might give up and never reach the summit - which is a problem if you love climbing and really want to climb this mountain.

And it’s into this vulnerable state-of-mind that negative criticism about your drumming falls, causing you to ruminate about “what if they’re right”, which causes…the Gaslight Hangover.

In today’s video, I want to convey a few things.

First, it gets better, and you don’t have to be the world’s greatest drummer to come out of the fog and see the territory well enough that you can at least evaluate whether somebody’s criticism is likely to be true or not.

Second, I’ll give you some coping strategies (not “coping” in the 2023 tiktok sense, but real ways to deal) to use in the mean time.

Finally, I’ll do a reenactment that’s been on my bucket list since around 2015.

Hope you enjoy this one!

Hear from Jonah, a Coaching Intensive Student

The next round of the 80/20 Coaching Intensive opens the week of July 10.

Watch your inboxes if you’re interested!

How Good Do You Have to Be to Teach Drums?

Today's video attempts to answer a question I've been thinking about since a couple of provocative social media posts asked it:

These days there are a lot of so-called "drum teachers" on the internet. Are we SURE that's a good thing?

I responded at the time, in the comments. But now that months have passed and I've had a chance to reflect, I decided to make a video about it.

==

The most recent version of the debate started with two instagram posts - one, in my opinion, well-meaning, and the other, well, not.

The first asked innocently what people's opinion was of the fact that practically anybody could now hang a shingle and call themselves a "drum teacher". Spoiler alert - I was in a minority in the comments for taking the position that maybe this wasn't such a bad thing.

After conducting a quick poll, I decided not to respond to the second directly, because even though it directed venom at some of my friends and colleagues, my audience felt dignifying it with a direct response would have been a bigger error than leaving the negative comments unrebutted. (Sorry - I tried and failed to say that in simpler words.)

But despite the...shall we say..."unstatesmanlike" way the argument was presented, it's not a completely crazy critique. And here it is:

Should drummers have a certain minimum level of skill before they feel confident teaching.

So in the video, it's these two valid critiques I take on:

-Is the low bar to calling yourself a teacher on the internet a net good or bad?

-Should there be a minimum level of skill before one looks oneself in the mirror calling themself a "teacher"?

And as you'll see in the video, answering these questions is deceptively difficult.

• For starters, what do we even mean by "should"? Are we saying we want to create a governing body, or accreditation agency, to evaluate people before they become teachers? Or maybe just that "charlatans" face the power of ridicule in public.

• And say we did have an arbiter of who measured up and who didn't. How would we evaluate what "measure up" means? Does that mean you have to be a touring pro? Or on the cover of Modern Drummer? Or maybe you need a gear endorsement or two. (Did somebody just turn up the heat?)

• Finally, once we had our "test", where do we put the cutoff? Because something like "top 50 in the world" is arbitrary and relative. As I say in the video, if everybody could suddenly play like Justin Tyson or Ron Bruner, that wouldn't make that level any less impressive, but "top 50" would become "top 4.5 billion".

And yet, I think we probably should have standards about teachers, if I put myself in the shoes of a parent choosing a teacher my child, who really wants to be good at this.

So I propose what I consider a pretty "intuitive" standard...

...but, again, who's doing the deciding?😉

Hope you guys enjoy this one.