Early Access - Andy Prado on The Case for Chops, The "Why" Behind Drumming, and The Importance of Authenticity

Andy Prado is a drummer’s drummer.

Talk to practically anyone you’ve heard of about who their favorite drummers are, and Andy is likely to be in that sentence.

He’s one of a small list of drummers you could call “elite choppers” - a list that includes people like Ron Bruner, Mike Mitchell, and not too many others.

As such he’s in both an enviable, and an unenviable position. And you better believe we dig into the multi-edged sword of “chops”. (It’s way harder than you think to get them, you don’t have anything to “hide behind” like groove drummers, and when you reach the top of your profession everybody either wants to be you, hates you, or both.)

Andy touches a bit on the unhuman work ethic necessary to reach the level he’s reached. We also get into:

• Huey Lewis and The News - based or cringe

• Andy’s weekly routine and current projects

• The importance of being authentic

• Whether drummers’ outward personalities match their music

• How Andy is also an elite groove player

• and much more

I know you’ll enjoy this light-hearted convo with one of the LA OGs, the GOAT, as Forrest Rice calls him.

And if you haven’t caught my weekly video about a lick I adapted from another GOAT, Joel Turcotte, to escape from the bottom side of the kit, you can watch that below.

And here’s the free download to accompany that video.

Enjoy!

Early Access - YouTube Video of The Week - Don't Get Stuck on The Low Side of The Kit

Download the free transcription here.

I can’t promise this every week, but in my efforts to reward my email subscribers, and make being on my list inherently valuable - not just “Nate emails me the youtube video I could find on youtube anyway” - I’m going to attempt to add “sending you the youtube video a day early” to the other stuff you get just for being on the list:

• Early access to the podcast episodes (I’ve got Andy Prado coming Friday or Saturday)

• Exclusive access to list-only Q&As

• Occasional free lessons I don’t publish on youtube

In today’s video, I tackle a sticky little issue that doesn’t really have a name, but you kinda know it when you see it: getting stuck on the “bottom” of the kit.

Especially if you arrange your toms in a conventional “high to low” configuration, the lowest tom kind of has a “gravitational pull”. If you don’t want to crash the cymbal, it can feel awkward getting back to the other side of the kit to continue a fill.

That’s why, in today’s lesson, we’re going to explore two strategies:

The first inspired by my friend Joel Turcotte…

…and the second I probably ripped off from players like Dana Hawkins.

Even if you can’t do everything in this lesson on day 1, I think it’s an important conceptual framework.

Enjoy, and I’ll be back soon with the Andy Prado podcast.

Early Access - List Q&A #2, Plus Gavin Harrison and Keith Carlock

People sent me interesting questions! And I got a chance to weigh-in, during perhaps a slightly low-energy time of the afternoon.

In this solo pod, I discuss…

• An old qutation oft attributed to Mozart, and whether I think it applies to drums

• The myths and facts around developing speed

• “Niche” or “under-appreciated” superpowers of gigging drummers (like not dropping the wing nut while one-hand unscrewing it)

• Should we strive for versatility, and if-so, how?

Then, I cap things off with a ten-minute rant on nature/nurture, which still gets me fired up, even though I haven’t made a video on it in a year or three.

Hope you enjoy this slightly-jet-lagged, slightly-mic-thumpy solo pod!

And if you haven’t caught this week’s video about Gavin Harrison and Keith Carlock - separated at birth?…

…here it is.

And here’s the free download for that video.

Enjoy!

Can You Really Master Drums in One Week? (Plus, High-Effort, Low-View Videos)

Here’s the free download for this video - the show notes.

The year was 20…13? 20..14?

Nate was trying to figure out what to do with his life, but suspected there was another way to teach drums.

Then, I saw this video: Optimization Dude using the 80/20 rule to shortcut the drums.

I’d already made stabs in that direction with my fledgling channel.

But this video came out, and I was like “he stole my idea.”

Since then, it’s hard to say how much influence Tim Ferriss and his experiment to play drums in concert with Foreigner in one week had - was I conducting all sorts of “guinea pig” experiments to learn things in compressed amounts of time because of Tim, or was it just “in the air” among YouTubers?

As the years went on, though, that original video was less and less on my conscious mind, as the count of my videos ticked into the hundreds, and I’d run so many experiments and taught so many students I was forming my own relationship with teaching, learning, drums, and 8020.

By the time Tim re-released his original “learn drums fast” video 2 weeks ago, I’d been at it for around a decade.

Which prompted an idea I couldn’t resist: compare Tim’s approach in the original to where my thinking has settled after 10 years. And I discovered something surprising to probably only me: a lot of the ideas in Tim’s original video, while they might have worked for Tim in one extremely specific scenario…

…are probably either next-to-worthless for intermediate drummers who already practice every day, or things we already know.

To examine why, I backtrack and get into super-nerd territory. 8020, and Pareto, its inventor, aren’t just “get more from less”; they refer to a very specific statistical distribution, that’s not true of all things.

So I ask - is it true of drums?

And if it’s not, does that mean there’s no advantage to be gained from better teaching or practice?

Neither extreme passes the sniff test.

Instead of Tim, my recent thinking has settled closer to that of another thinker who influenced me heavily - Anders Ericsson: he of the 10,000-hour rule.

But in the video, I examine what “real life” accelerated-progress looks like.

Know you’ll enjoy.

And in case you missed it, I want to share the video I’m most proud of from 2024, the video I worked hardest on, and also the one that got definitively the fewest views.

Feel guilty enough to watch?

It’s the vlog of my clinic tour this past November.

Enjoy, and see you soon!