The "Sneaky" Way to 2x Your Speed on Drums

First things first - grab your free transcription here.

Whooooa Nelly I’m tempting the clickbait accusations with this one.

Sometimes I’ll come up with a learning technique with my students that works so well I’m in the unenviable position that everything I say to describe it sounds like utter horse$#!#.

So, caveats out front:

The method I’m about to describe assumes you’ve done a lot of prerequisite work. That means learned to play cleanly and in time, and developed your idea flow. I’ve often said that the key to playing fast solos is playing slow solos. The reason what I’m about to describe works is that you’ve already learned to play slow solos. If you take a sloppy solo and add speed, it’s just going to sound sloppy fast.

With that out of the way, how long should it take to play faster, once you can already play slowly?

The answer could be a couple of years, if you just inch the metronome up. (And I recommend you do that either way.)

But, it turns out, there’s another, faster - sneakier - way.

In this complex soup of drum improvisation, speed is one ingredient. Another is number of licks you maintain in active memory. And you can play with both.

In fact, one of the most famous “choppers” of his generation is talking about it, in public, in plain English. If you know where to look.

I promise I’ll explain more in the video.

Hope you enjoy!

I Changed One Thing And My Weak Hand Got Faster

First things first - grab your free transcription here.

I’m actually pretty excited to present today’s video. It represents the culmination of at least a few months’ experimentation, not-to-mention working around an injury. It took a bit of time until I felt I had things comfortable enough to show to the public in a video.

But here goes - I made one change in my left hand that, I believe, brought it much more in line with what I’ve been doing naturally with my right. It’s probably fine to have slightly different techniques between the two hands up to a point - i.e. if you’re not trying to chop, but unfortunately I was, and that exposed a limitation.

I realized I’ve been doing something very “against the conventional wisdom” with my right hand for at least the last year: moving almost totally away from the “pinch and fold” fulcrum everybody shows to beginners, and approaching something much more dynamic, with the hand kind of dyamically resisting the rebound force from the drum or cymbal, with a bunch of input from the middle finger.

“Against conventional wisdom”, unless you listen to teachers like Gordy Knudtson or Murray Spivack, or watch the hands of - to name just a few - Thomas Pridgen, Giancarlo Pellerito, JP Bouvet, or Chad Wackerman. Two key details differ from “basic technique”: first, the stick is linear with the forearm, instead of “out in the fingers”. Next, you’re utilizing that entire range-of-motion with the fingers.

Great! So now all that was necessary was applying it to the left hand. Which, as you’ll see, is a work in progress. Anyway, I hope this will be helpful for anybody trying to break the “speed limit” with their weak hand.

Hope you enjoy!

Chris Coleman - It Was Never About Competition

For practically every podcast guest, there’s a question I’m “winding up” to ask.

For Chris Coleman, it was “what’s the space for competition in music?”

Just like everybody else, I’d tuned into Chris’ viral clinic clip, discussing the origin of - shall we say - “church improvisation”, and found his description of the “pop-up”, late-night shed sessions in the church, captivating. But how does Chris reconcile this friendly competition with…well, the “subjectivity of art”?

In Chris’ opinion, the “competition” was always a misnomer.

Added for “click bait”, after people started publicizing the sheds. And as the 2001 winner of the Drum-Off, Chris doesn’t begrudge people monetizing the shed-life. After all, as he puts it, many these drummers were killer players who, were it not for Youtube, would have struggled to find mainstream audiences. But the imperative to get clicks, views, and money changes things.

Which is all only to say that, by Chris’ recollection, it was never about competition. And if somebody brought that vibe into the room, it was clear they were an outsider.

In this brief-but-action-packed interview, Chris and I also chat about how he balances tours and life, and his methodology for teaching up-and-coming players.

Know you’ll enjoy this one!

Playing Eric Moore's "Signature" Lick On Drum Heads He Sent Me

First things first - grab your free transcription here.

I will admit this week’s video is a bit “gimmicky”, in a way I don’t usually make videos.

It was hard to resist this opportunity, though.

Seemingly out of the blue, Eric Moore messaged me asking if I wanted new drum heads. I guess he, or the folks at Aquarian, had suffered through enough instagram footage of the heads on the shared kit in my practice space, and decided to take pity.

It’s true that, now that I have a nifty overpriced-curtain-rod upon which to mount an overhead camera without relying on iota on duct tape or a staple gun, the heads on these drums have been “front and center” in more videos. And, as I describe in the video, a fair bit of “decision paralysis” had set in, preventing me from taking any action to replace them.

So it transpired that on one afternoon in early October, I noticed a large, flat cardboard box in the mail room of my apartment building.

Rushing it to the studio and tearing open the box, I saw Aquarian and Eric had sent me not one, but three sets of heads. (It probably helped that I only use a four-piece in my studio.)

So I thought - “gear review” - let’s play these new heads for the people.

Then I thought - do I transcribe an Eric lick even though it’s going to be a lot of work? Unfortunately, yes. (And youtube allows you to 0.75x the speed, so it wasn’t that hard.)

And that, friends, is how I ended up playing one of Eric’s “signature” licks on the very heads he plays in the video.

This has everything? Don’t care about heads but want to learn the lick? Watch the video! Don’t care about the lick but just want to see how much better new heads can make Nate’s kit sound? Watch the video!

Hope you enjoy!