JP Bouvet Schools Me on Improvisation

First things first - download your free show notes.

So I had JP Bouvet in the flesh at 8020 HQ this past week. And what a treat it was.

I’d deliberately avoided looking to specifically into the guy I consider maybe the foremost drum teacher…out there…

…because I had a bunch of my own stuff to shoot, and I didn’t want to worry I was being influenced. (i.e. if we had a parallel thought I didn’t want to wonder if I “stole” it.)

But given that it’s the end of the year and most of those things are in the can, I reached out to JP with an idea: come over to the studio, and let’s mic us up and just “hash out” where our ideas overlap.

The result was a nearly 90-minute interview, complete with playing, talking, and switching places at the drums, which I’ll release as a podcast next Monday.

But for the lesson of the week, I wanted to give you just a taste.

In this 15-minute clip, JP and I discuss his concept of “building blocks”, which overlaps somewhat with my idea of “the switching exercise”. As you’ll hear, our ideas had different origins, but we ended up in similar places. (He also guessed correctly with only about 10 minutes of thinking something that took me years of working stuff out with students to learn. See if you can see what I’m talking about.)

Hope you enjoy.

Is This The ONLY Drum Warmup You Need?

First things first - download your free study guide here.

This week’s video is the culmination of about six weeks of experimentation.

The impetus was the recent change I’ve made to my left hand technique. Upon locating a “feeling” for when it’s working well, I was then faced with a challenge: short-term memory being a cruel mistress.

Practice something until you feel quasi-mastery, put it aside until tomorrow, then when you pick it up again you’re “starting from zero”. Not to worry - long term memory will eventually take over, and you’ll be able to do it at 3am in the rain after being roused from a deep slumber. But that takes time, and it takes specific reps.

Which means I needed a way to find my way back to the “feeling of it working”. And arbitrary warmups out of a book weren’t going to cut it. Nope. I needed a new kind of warmup. One in which I let feeling be my guide.

So I set about experimenting to build one. I improvised until I had the feeling I was chasing “captured”, then remembered what I had done.

And what I did is what I’m now showing to you, in this video. The transcriptions will help, but they’re only the tip of the iceberg. I recommend you watch the whole video for the underlying concepts.

And see if you agree. In my humble opinion, for the right player, in the right circumstances, this blows away what I was doing for “warmups” previously.

Hope you enjoy.

Camellia "Cami" Kies - Your "Limitations" Are Fake

I’ve never before struggled so much to come up with an episode title.

But today’s guest, Camellia Kies, aka Cami Loops if you follow the socials, has a quality that’s immediately obvious upon speaking to her and hearing her story, that’s simultaneously really hard to put into a short-catchy slogan.

Here’s what I mean - she was the child of a military family, who herself played drums and percussion in the military, after feeling frustrated that doors were somewhat “closed” to her playing drums in her church. Through a combination of innate tenacity and discipline she learned through the military and the military music schools, she built a practice regimen that’s an impressive combination of “hard”, “smart”, and “patient”, whereupon she aimed right at the most daunting seeming challenges - whether that was learning jazz more-or-less from scratch when she already had a touring gig in just weeks, or mastering left foot independence ala Antonio Sanchez or Horacio Hernandez - broke that down into exquisite detail, took it piece-by-piece, mastered it, then used the meta-lessons to surmount the subsequent challenge in less time.

But that doesn’t fit in a YouTube title. So I had to resort so something that sounds like a slogan you’d see on the wall outside HR.

Cami first caught my attention with her youtube tutorials at the pad or snare drum. She explains that after leaving the service, while living in Texas, she didn’t have regular access to a kit. But it was these ebullient mini-lessons that fueled her eventual stardom on social media - doubtless because she’s a fun and energetic presenter, but also possibly because they were so different from anything else out there.

In addition to her social media, Cami is active in creating music from her many influences, from afrobeat, to jazz and latin jazz, to (recently) gospel.

In this interview we chat a lot about the nitty-gritty of practice, and this “extra gear” she seems to have to conquer challenges, but also about her life arc and influences.

Know you’ll enjoy this one!

Can You Be A Late Bloomer On Drums?

First things first - download your free study guide here.

This week’s video began with a shower thought. A slightly external-validation-focussed one, if we’re being honest. More on that later.

The thought was - “if I could transmute my current ability into my 18-year-old self, how would things have been different?”

In today’s world, probably not much. I’d have been one of an army of instagrammers, many-of-them with more skills than I had.

But in this world in which, for better or worse, ability to play is just one part of your “package” - which also includes high-minded things like your personal musical voice and low-minded things like your personality on camera, we can afford to take a break from practical or career considerations and ask the question purely as a thought experiment.

If you’re a decade-or-two on from your undergrad college years or high school graduation, and have worked steadily on your drumming since then, try asking yourself the same thing: “If my 18-year old self could have played like I play now, what would have been different?”

And it’s in the answer to that question that I think we find interesting things.

Things like “why is it less valuable to be a good player in your ‘40s or ‘50s than at age 18?”

And even a moment’s thought leads to the inevitable “it’s not”, which then leads to the “then why do I compare myself to 18 year olds with ‘crazy’ abilities for their age?”

And it’s possible I’m doing a LOT of projection.

But that was the jumping off point for this video that explores late-bloomers. I’m pretty proud of this one, which includes excerpts from Anika, and pieces of brand new interviews with Steve Lyman and Yogev Gabay.

Are late bloomers a thing? Obviously. But knowing that intellectually and believing it are two different things. Hopefully this video goes some distance to help you believe it.

Hope you enjoy.