Yogev Gabay - Be Brave Enough to Play What You Love

Today’s guest first came to my attention for his sizzling covers of Tigran Hamasyan songs in the 20-teens. Ever the master of precision, Yogev Gabay made a name for himself as one of the “go-tos” for music in the borderlands between prog and jazz that drummers like Arthur Hnatek made famous.

Asked what he’d tell his teenage self about career expectations, Yogev muses that he needed to be brave enough to “disappoint” his younger self (because the studio work he’d pictured ceased to exist as a career path), but adds that playing gigs for money can be a sort of prison, and that he’s glad he made the choice to pursue the music he dreamed of playing, consequences-be-damned. (I suspect Young Yogev would be impressed.)

I was also very curious to learn Yogev’s approach to learning to improvise, and how it tracks with my own experience. And we did a decent deep-dive on that topic.

But we also talked hand technique, metronome practice, and memorizing angular odd-meter rhythms so well you forget them.

I feel we illuminated some new ground extrapolating from the process of learning to improvise over an odd-meter prog-jazz vamp to how it feels to learn to improvise writ large, i.e. learning “benchmarks” for when something is “medium rare” vs “well done”. (In drums, you want well-done ;)

Above all, Yogev’s enthusiasm for learning is inspiring and disarming. I suspect many of us will practice more this week after listening to this interview.

Hope you enjoy!

The Hardest Thing About Playing Drums With A Band

First things first - grab your free show notes.

Today’s video was simmering on the back burner for quite a while.

It concerns my attempt to answer possibly the most frequent question I get from students about playing with a band: “what happens if I’m in a tug-or-war over the tempo?”

BTW, hopefully the video thumbnail captures this adequately. Thanks, Midjourney, and goodbye, 3 hours this morning.

But we’ve all probably been there.

You practice your time and tempo in the shed with a metronome, and you’re pretty confident you’re solid. Then you get in a rehearsal or gig situation with a…maybe slightly novice…musician or two in your band, and it feels like the tempo is going to come apart at the seams.

Maybe you’ve got one member who is pulling on the tempo in a certain direction. Or maybe you’ve got multiple factions, all threatening the “global order”.

These situations can be frustrating precisely because there’s no easy answer: on the surface, it seems like you’re caught between two bad options - go with the offending member, and let the tempo get out of control, or resist militantly, often causing the band to pull apart, and incurring the bad vibes that enesue.

That’s why I call this the “hardest thing about playing with a band”.

But what if I told you there’s a “third way”.

Just like jiujitsu, and annoyingly, it’s all in the subtleties. In this video, I’ll attempt to frame some of the more “201” strategies for keeping a song on the rails even when factions are trying to pull it off - all without pissing anybody off. Hopefully.

Hope you enjoy.

Is This The HARDEST Thing to Master on Drums?

First things first - here’s your free transcription.

When we think about what the “hardest” thing to play on drums is, we probably have some of the same ideas.

Certainly some of the impressive double-kick/blast beat/gravity drop technical prog rock of the type Navene Koperweis or Estepario Siberiano do seems pretty hard.

Ditto anything with shifting, angular polyrhythms of the type we see Arthur Hnatek or either Matt (Halpern or Garstka) playing. Not to mention adding lightening double-kick to that, as Chris Turner is wont to do.

But I’m going to propose something else entirely as a contender for hardest thing to do on the drums: improvising with doubled triplets.

Whereas some of the other disciplines are hard primarily for their speed, doubled-triplet improv is difficult even if it’s slow.

Whereas some of the other things are hard because you’re learning composed polyrhythms that cross the barline in weird ways, doubled-triplets - if you want to play them at a high level - are hard because you have to improvise things that cross the barline in weird ways.

So, what are doubled triplets? Imagine a slow half-time shuffle, and imagine improvising over it, at twice the rate of the triplet. They’re the same rate as sextuplets, but they “lie differently”.

And what makes them so hard?

My theory is that it’s because they only emerge in a certain band of tempos, and they’re tempos we don’t see very much in popular music. And that it’s all down to reps. We get tons of reps with 16ths, sextuplets, and 32nds, but many fewer with doubled triplets.

But I’d argue we should be making time for this solo structure, because it sounds really cool. (In the video I’ll show you several examples.)

Which leaves us with how do we do it. And you know me - I’ve got you.

The answers to get you started, as usual, are in the video.

Hope you enjoy.

Brandon Olander - Technique Notes With The Drum Corps GOAT

If you're like me, you probably remember those drum corps videos from 2017 and 2018, when a certain media network started sharing a ton of them on YouTube.

One of the most captivating to watch were the blue devils. I actually used excerpts from some of their lot drum line performances to illustrate what I meant by "playing clean": if you treat your drum kit like 4 players playing together, your "personal drum troupe" should sound, well, Together, rather than all over the place. And it was the devils' footage I used.

The center snare player for that group, during several of its best years, was Brandon Olander, who, I'm excited to say, is today's podcast guest.

Brandon and I had been meaning to have a conversation for a while, and decided "why not record it". I was excited to pick the arch corpsman's brain on a number of things.

Topics we touch on in this interview include:

-The differences between marching snare and drum kit technique

-Brandon's philosophy and approach to teaching

-What it's like to be an apex marching percussionist learning drum kit

If you've ever wondered why the hands of corps folks and drum kit players look so different, or whether the crazy rhythmic vocabulary of drum corps gives you a "leg up" learning to improvise, I know you'll dig this interview.