Exclusive Access - Full Length Jazz Swing Lesson

Here’s the free download to accompany this lesson.

While there may be no global conspiracy to keep aspiring jazz drummers in the dark, I find that certain things are…”under-emphasized”, perhaps because they came naturally to great players.

If you’re looking to learn jazz swing beats, you’ll find an abundance of material from the best drummers and teachers in the world, several-and-counting of whom have been on the podcast.

As I feel they do an adequate job communicating the tradition, and going through basic concepts like “walking the dog”, we’ll cover those only briefly at the top of the lesson.

What’s more interesting to me is stuff that was hard for me as a novice, and which - while teachers did tell me about, I needed a decade of grinding away on gigs and jam sessions to understand its centrality to jazz swing.

What I’m speaking about are…

(1) the precarious balance of kit voicing, subdivision, time, relaxation, and original ideas

(2) how to improvise “semi-broken” time, which all modern drummers do, but few seem to talk about

Naturally, we’ll have to tackle those in order.

So we’ll go through some of the traditional “walk the dog” instruction, but with an emphasis on maintaining that balance. (It doesn’t count as surfing if you can only balance on the board on the beach.)

Then, in the “list exclusive” second half, we’ll get into an algorithm my students helped me develop for improvising the meandering-but-anchored ride cymbal beats we associate with Max Roach, Connie Kay, Joe Morello, Mel Lewis, and more.

It was a lot of fun making this lesson, and I hope you get some utility from it.

Enjoy!

Early Access - Benny Greb on Being an Entertainer, Neitzsche, Vinnie, and More

I had a suspicion Benny Greb would be an interesting and thought-provoking conversation partner, and I wasn’t wrong.

I was interested to compare notes with the master-clinician on a number of things that have been top-of-mind, like nature/nurture, the paradox of the subjectivity of - but requirement for skill in - art, gap-click, and overrated drum advice.

Benny surprised me at turns, and confirmed my suspicions at others.

One of his most-interesting insights, in my opinion, was that he wants to be an entertainer/craftsperson, not just an “artist”.

We also managed to touch on Pablo Picaso, Neitzsche, Vinnie’s Attack of The 20lb Pizza (it’s 20 pounds, I know - I misspoke and under-weighted the pizza during the interview), and why Benny maybe disagrees with me on independence as a concept.

Know you’ll enjoy this one!

Early Access - 5 Reasons You’re Still an Intermediate Drummer

Here’s the free download to accompany this lesson.

Tolstoy’s Anna Karinena begins with the line “Happy families are all alike; every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.”

I feel that applies to drummers, only in reverse.

Every developed drummer is unique in their own way, and there are infinite ways to be good.

But practically every drummer on their way to being good passes through the same bottleneck.

This has been front-and-center in my mind this month as I’ve been watching a lot of footage from drummers doing one of my interactive courses. So many drummers work very hard to build up a bunch of “potential energy”, then end up getting blocked behind the same few things.

The good news is, once they break through, they often grow prodigiously for a few months, and it’s not because “shortcuts exist”', but rather because resolving these bottlenecks releases them to reap the benefits of all the work they’ve put in, but which they weren’t able to access.

And as I say in the video, there is zero shade for anybody who currently feels “stuck”. Everybody who ever became good was once at this same stage, and it’s not your fault - the quick wins and low hanging fruit to get to this stage stop working as quickly, and it can feel like progress just stalls.

That’s why I decided to make a video about the 5 most common blockers I see for drummers at this stage, and what to do about them.

While I can’t promise this will produce an immediate breakthrough, beginning to focus on these details can spell the beginning of a course change.

Finally, a program note - the “show notes” will be available later in the day, and I’ll post them here when they are.

Enjoy!

Early Access - TaRon Lockett on Humility, Erykah Badu, and Hard-Won Lessons

TaRon Lockett, who was Prince’ last drummer, who cut his teeth with Erykah Badu, and who was a key member of a scene that spawned Robert “Sput” Searight, Cleon Edwards and Mike Mitchell among others…

…showed up to our interview in character as his own life coach.

And from that point I knew this wasn’t going to be an “average” podcast episode.

It’s perfectly in-keeping with TaRon’s entire approach to music and creativity, though. There’s the dedication to “the bit”, evidenced by TaRon’s philosophy to dedicate himself 100% to assuming the character necessary to perform at his best for any gig he’s agreed to.

There’s the fearlessness that helped TaRon “not look back” when he left a college degree program to pursue music full-time after getting some high-profile gigs.

There’s the respect for age-old wisdom and the hard-won lessons of playing in church and learning by “respectful hard knocks”, and the dead seriousness of one’s dedication to their art.

Then there’s the duality itself, between irreverence, rebelliousness, and independence on one hand, and respect for the tradition and the aforementioned willingness to conform to perform his best on the gig.

In any case, if you’re patient, there are lessons, both humorous and serious to be gleaned both from TaRon-as-his-life-coach, and Taron-as-himself.

I hope you enjoy this fascinating the surprising conversation with one of the most underrated drummers around.

(And if you want to check out TaRon more, I recommend his instagram, starting with this clip.)