Early Access - YouTube Video AND Podcast - Gordy Knudtson and Practice "Science"

From practice-science to the literal hand-whisperer, I couldn’t be more excited about this Wednesday’s list-exclusive pairing.

When Gordy Knudtson was gigging in the late 70s, he was using almost exclusively traditional grip, and suffered an injury he says caused doctors to doubt he’d be able to continue playing.

Desperate to “work around” his tension, Gordy switched to matched and did one of the great deep-dives on hand technique. You could say he “John Dahaner’ed” drumstick mechanics, but it’s more accurate to say John “Gordy’d” jiujitsu.

One of the points I bring up with Gordy is that just as before and after Danaher, plenty of practitioners embodied solid mechanics, if you watch the hands of any of myriad great drummers, from Joe Morello to Philly Joe, to Tony Williams, to maybe Tony’s most famous fan, Vinnie Colaiuta, to modern technicians like Dana Hawkins, it’s clear there’s no shortage of drummers putting mechanical principles into practice.

But it’s probably also true that Gordy has extended the understanding of what’s actually happening when these greats play more than anyone at least since Murray Spivack, and, just like Danaher, made it more efficient for beginners to learn.

As you’ll see, Gordy also gives me something of a “free lesson”, showing how I could extend on my technique. Video of my thoughts and experiments on this in the pipeline for sure. There’s been much chat around this on calls with my coaching students.

From Gordy, we go to some first-principles practice science, and tackle the question “can better practice shorten the journey” (it’s pretty obvious where I’ll come down) through the lens of a specific challenge I’ve been tackling for the past month. When one watches my friend (I think I can call him that since he made the hang at 8020 hq;) Zack Grooves play, it’s nothing short of dazzling. But, as I discuss, it’s more the how of how he’s stringing together combos and playing them with creativity, power, spontaneity, and precision, than any one magic combo that makes Zack Zack.

Hence, I wagered I should spend a month in what I call “The Rage Cave” (see my earlier video about the paradox of unhealthy obsession and self-acceptance) just workshopping my existing vocab to survive the “heat of re-entry”. I’m only about 10 days into the experiment but I think it’s going well.

(It’s also full-circle, because as I apply pressure to my playing, Gordy’s concepts have helped keep me clean and relaxed.)

From that jumping off point, we try to speak axiomatically about how we know good practice works, and to pull out some first principles.

Know you’ll enjoy this Wednesday wine-and-pod pairing!

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!