Is Your Drumming Bulls#!t?

First things first - grab your transcription here.

I fear there’s no offramp from aggravating some members of my audience for whom expletives are a deal-breaker. The best I can promise is not to use them superfluously.

With that said, is your drumming bullshit?

Is mine?

A couple of things inspired me to make this video. First was the interesting fact that some drumming of undeniable technical merit can elicit yawns and eye-rolls, whereas other drumming of manifestly lower technical prowess can inspire.

All of which got me thinking about musical…”validity”, for lack of a better word. And the central paradox that art is subjective, and yet we practice to move toward something.

What is that “something”, and is it possible to be better or worse at it?

In other words, in a world where art is subjective and arbitrary, is it nonetheless possible to be full of shit?

Ultimately, I conclude, yes. Though not necessarily for the reason we’d think. For practically every musical performance someone somewhere thinks is transcendent, somebody else somewhere else finds it intolerably boring.

But is there a difference between “in the eye of the beholder”, and “just bullshit”.

i.e. is there a bigger gap between Aretha Franklin and a “bad” American Idol contestant than between a pop star some love and others hate, and an analogous country music star.

If this seems trivial or philosophical, it’s not.

Because if it’s not possible to be bullshit, then every one of us who’s practicing on the daily should immediately stop this affront to our free time and family time, and just “be authentically us” every time we play, even if that means committing some of the “cardinal sins of bullshit”, like not knowing what we’re missing, having a gap between our authentic selves and the performance, and trying to impress.

But if we can situate bullshit on a continuum of artistic validity, there’s something to practice for. And it’s almost circular. Maybe through our practice we instantiate that continuum.

In any case, I leave you to be the judge.

Enjoy!

3 Subdivisions You're Probably Not Using on Drums

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Ever notice what crazy percentage of the most popular songs across the last 3 decades are either “straight 8th”, or “hip hop/new jack” shuffles?

I’ll actually give you a moment to try to think of any that aren’t. It’s a short list. Fool in The Rain. (Guess that’s older than 30 years.) Rosanna. Everybody Wants to Rule The World. Latch.

(I’m talking about English Language music. There are doubtless other traditions where other subdivisions loom larger.)

Think about what that’s created in terms of our shared rhythmic vocabulary, especially for drummers who haven’t studied jazz: a lot of duple vocabulary.

8ths. 16ths. Some triplets. Some sextuplets.

But as a rule we don’t get much exposure to slow shuffles or “12/8” style grooves in English Language music. Which means that when we do encounter sextuplets, it’s in the conventional “divided by 2” configuration. (I get into this in the video, but picture playing 8th notes with the kick under sextuplets. You’re hitting the kick drum every 3.)

But there’s a whole other dimension of vocabulary we’re missing, and that’s without even getting into 5/7/9 subdivision like friends of the channel Joel Turcotte and Alex Cohen traffic in. And expanding your vocab horizons can make your playing more interesting even if you’re never playing any songs with these subdivisions. (Paradoxical, I know, but picture expanding your vocabulary “range of motion”.)

In this video, I’ll outline 3 “less common” subdivisions:

Conventional Sextuplets - ok, we see these more. But if you haven’t practiced them much, they’re an easy way to give your fills and grooves an extra dimension, even if the song is in straight duple meter.

Doubled Triplets - technically the same rate as sextuplets, it’s my contention that these are different for how we group them - in groups of 2 rather than 3. (Picture soloing at double the rate of Everybody Wants to Rule the World.) But you don’t have to play anything crazy or busy to get the benefits of practicing them. Watch friend-of-the-thumbnail Matt Garstka with Animals As Leaders or Josh DeLa Victoria, and the ideas he draws from thinking in doubled triplets make his conventional sextuplets more interesting.

Tripled Triplets - this will be more familiar to jazz folks, but this is what you’d play if you were soloing in triplets over a fast jazz waltz. And if you slow down a Purdie shuffle, it’s a jazz waltz with a backbeat.

Just because we only get one popular-song-a-decade that’s in these subdivisions doesn’t mean you can’t immediately reap the benefit of familiarity with them in your day-to-day playing.

If you dare - mwahahahaha ;)

Hope you enjoy this one!

Why Does Everybody Hate Modern Drumming?

FIRST THINGS FIRST - download your free transcription.

Rarely have I struggled with a thumbnail the way I struggled this week.

It’s like this: there are images immediately evocative of exactly the type of drumming I’m referring to…

…and if I used them everybody would think I was criticizing those players. Or at least teeing them up for criticism.

So maybe it’s a generic image of a kit immediately evocative of this style of playing, only without a human attached. Surprisingly hard to find. Stock photos aren’t specific enough, any image of a specific device like a stack risks being seen as an attack on that particular maker, and any photo of a whole kit loses the specificity.

Fine. Fred Armisen. Maybe the only image of a human playing a kit that looks “modern” that won’t get me piñata’d for picking on a specific human. (Because he’s satirizing it.) But do gen-z folks even know Fred?

Boo.

Anyway, modern drumming you guys! Why does everybody seemingly hate it? At least if you look at my comments. This spring I’ve made 2 videos on modern playing - one asking why modern drummers sound so different, and another detailing this linear style playing, which I call “clave flow”, that’s suddenly dominating modern drumming.

And the comments were withering. “Not music.” “[synonym for self-pleasure]”. “What happened to letting the music breathe.” And so on.

“I guess everybody just hates modern drumming,” I told myself. But something didn’t fit.

If nobody liked it, who were all these people “liking” it on the socials? Or buying tickets?

And maybe it was like “congress”, where people claim to hate the generic concept, but not their favorite specific players. Nate Smith. Larnell. Etc.

Then there was this video of “groover-hero” Ash Soan…well…chopping out. Sure, it sounded “retro”, but that was just because of tuning and some creative muting. If I played the same thing on a “modern-tuned” kit, it sounds like, well, modern chopping.

So this simple picture became a wee bit complicated.

Anyway, today we’ll talk about it.

Do people really hate modern drumming? Do some people like it? Do the same people who say they hate it like it when it’s Adam Deitch or Karriem Riggins? Do the ones who say they’d hate it even then secretly like it, but only when noone’s watching? Would even those who don’t like it if we pulled a little ruse and convinced them that Matt Garstka was actually Ginger Baker?

And so on.

If you want to take the nerdy, deconstructive ride, I invite you to buckle up.

The Under-Appreciated Thing Killing Your Single Strokes

FIRST THINGS FIRST - download your free transcription.

There’s a solution hidden in plain sight for improving our single strokes. For anyone who’s played the ride cymbal with their strong hand, at least.

If you watch a good jazz player play the ride cymbal, it’s a study in efficiency - the stick “dancing” between hand pressure and rebound, with only minimal control required. It seems to “take off” when the forces equalize.

So why don’t we just do that with our weak hand?

So began several months of trying to “transmit”, from my strong hand to my weak one, all the “intelligence” of the way it played the ride cymbal. And in the process, I discovered two things:

First, the “hidden killer” from the title - something I’m calling “stick stall”…

…but second, and just-as-important, the unique utility of cymbals as surfaces to practice avoiding that stall, for their unique rebound characteristics.

A practice pad or tight drum will return the stick in every case.

A pillow or neoprene pad will hinder its return just as reliably, requiring some “make it happen” mechanics.

But a cymbal will rebound beautifully sometimes, and occasionally just “stall”. What’s going on there?

It turns out there’s kind of a third hidden force at play, beyond speed and power. Efficiency. How much of the rebound are you utilizing, vs how much is bleeding off because you’re “over-controlling” the stick and getting “out of phase”.

Hence stick stall - the hidden thing killing your singles. You can have speed and power, but are you sure you’re not bleeding off efficiency by getting out of phase?

Try the exercises in the lesson on a cymbal or hi hats, and you’ll see.

Anyway, hope you enjoy watching this one as much as I enjoyed making it!