The Drum Setup Change That's Suddenly Everywhere

First things first - download your free transcription here.

Notice one drummer doing something, and you’re like “hmmm, that’s novel.”

Notice two doing it, and you’re like “that looks familiar.”

Notice 3, and you’re like, “needle scratch. That’s a thing.”

So it was with the drum setup change that’s the subject of this lesson. I’d see the odd drummer doing it on Instagram, and think “those kids, always experimentin’”.

I’d notice Anika Niles doing it in a Rush soundcheck, and think “hmmm maybe I should try this.”

Then, like the snare cowbell, or the bass drum bongos, it started to take over.

I’m speaking of course of switching the position of the “high” and “middle” toms in a “5-piece”, which is to say any arrangement in which you’ve got at least 2 toms more-or-less over the bass drum, as opposed to the “4 piece”, in which you’ve got only one, usually in the left-hand position, and the others are floor toms.

Was this a viral meme? If so, who started it?

My research indicated no single point-or-origin. Anika, yes. But also Macro Minnemann, Kenny Aronoff, Jimmy Chambelin…all the way back to Bernard Purdie.

Hmmm, well maybe everybody’s doing it because it serves some musical or ergonomic purpose. Digging deeper, I found out that a lot of drummers like the “4-piece skeleton”, with a medium-high tom on the left-hand side, and a space for the ride cymbal to the right.

By putting the high tom on the right, you leave more space for the ride, and also “preserve” the layout of the 4-piece, allowing you to play this kit as if it were a 4-piece, but with an extra tom in case you want it.

As we’ll cover, the 4-piece is the original incarnation of the tunable drum kit, which Slingerland and Gene Krupa popularized. And many of the jazz and subsequent rock greats created a lot of the canonical vocabulary on the 4-piece. Such that, if you’ve played any jazz, let alone simply played the layout a lot, it “feels great”.

Switching to a “high/middle/low” 5-piece can feel awkward, since your melody now changes. Sure, you can still “play it as a 4-piece”, but the high tom sounds higher. And you have to reach to play the middle-tom with the left hand.

Finally, I discovered a third great reason to switch the toms: modularity. If you quickly want to revert your kit back to a 4-piece for space or the preferences of other drummers, the “inverted” tom layout allows that - just pull the high tom off the stand, and you’ve got your original 4-piece.

At any rate, we explore this “weird” setup, complete with some tom flow vocabulary, and why it’s fast becoming my preferred way to set up the drums.

P.S. did you know you can sign up to be the first to hear when we open up new slots for Impossible to Fail, my flagship 1:1 coaching program? Just click here to sign up for the waitlist.

This Exercise Will Change Your Drumming Forever, But You Might Hate It

First things first - download your free transcription here.

There’s that old saying: “knowing the path and walking the path are 2 different things.”

I’m fond of another: “I said simple. Not easy.”

Sometimes the solution to our blockers is in plain sight. We just don’t want to do it.

Today, I’m going to make the case to you that, if you can get over the initial trepidation and bore, yes, you actually do want to do it.

For starters, because agnostic to your level, it’s one of the most powerful exercises to help your playing across-the-board.

But also because, once you get going with this, it’s actually quite meditative.

I’m talking about slow practice. Like, absurdly slow. So slow it feels like an eternity between notes. So slow that when you use a metronome, you have to keep remembering not to rush.

So - why do we do this?

I’ve often said great drummers do 3 things differently from mediocre ones. Taking speed, flashiness, etc totally out of the equation. These are things that the most minimal groove players and Eloy Casagrande have in common.

1. Control of timing - note placement.

2. Control of sound - stick height differentiation, “zones” on drums, “vertical spacing”, etc.

3. Control of ideas - always within the protective “improv bubble” where it feels like they can’t play a wrong idea.

And I’ve complained that, in my travels, the average drummer mostly doesn’t grasp how insanely better than most of us great drummers are at the first 2. (Well, all 3, but this exercise deals primarily with the first 2.)

Timing and sound control are like the “secret gravity” of great drummers. The hidden matrix giving your ideas snap and danceability.

And there’s simply no better way to ingrain these than absurdly-slow practice.

You could make a spreadsheet of all the places your notes are early or late on the grid, and practice them one-by-one, and try to remember “on the 3rd 16th, I’m always 2 milliseconds ahead, so I have to compensate”…

…or you could simply put yourself in a context where you can tell intuitively the difference between on-the-grid and not, and (much easier) just let your subconscious bootstrap all the subtle shifts to get you grooving.

At any rate, this video explores the “why”, “what” and “how” of The Cult of Slow Practice. And I hope you’ll join me out on this branch.

P.S. did you know you can sign up to be the first to hear when we open up new slots for Impossible to Fail, my flagship 1:1 coaching program? Just click here to sign up for the waitlist.

How One Song Became The Standard to Measure Modern Drumming

First things first - download your free transcription here.

I’ll keep this brief, so you can get to watching the video.

If you’re a channel fan, you probably know and love him: Brian Blade.

But more than even one drummer, the song he made famous, Jazz Crimes, has had an outsized influence on the drum ecosystem. And, due to happy and not-so-happy coincidences, it’s kind of become the bar by which modern drumming is judged.

In this video, we dispense with all the “judgment”, and other internet noise, and focus instead on what the song can tell us about our drumming, and how to learn from it.

I take the 3 primary challenges in turn:

• The opening groove

• The drum solo

• The deceptively-difficult beginning to the organ solo

Each shows us in stark relief whether our timing, subdivision, sound-control, and idea-control are squared-away. As such, I call it a “mirror song”.

And now, friends, I’ll let you get to the video.

Hope you enjoy!

Can Practice REALLY Improve Your Drumming Speed?

First things first - download your free time-linked "improve your speed” practice routine here.

You can’t open social media without seeing a drummer showcasing their otherworldly single-stroke speed, and showing you exercises to “get there”.

Not to mention astounding shows of explosive speed from drummers like Tony Royster, Mike Mitchell, Ron Bruner, and Riccardo Merlini.

“If I just work hard enough, I’ll be able to play singles like those folks,” we think.

But what if that were wrong? What if these freakishly-fast folks were simply…born with it.

Today, I welcome drum mechanics expert and friend of the channel Brandon Green back to answer that age-old question. Several months ago he shared a provocative video comparing his - trained over 25 years - single stroke speed to his wife’s. (She’d never played drums.) And Brandon’s wife wins “going away”.

We then delve into the musculo-skeletal reasons some humans may have an advantage from birth.

But if you're on my list you probably already know the punch line: "who cares?"

It's actually several layers of who cares.

First, for the average drummer still working on functional technique, a hypothetical genetic speed limit on the very top end of their speed is like a 60mph speed limit on a freeway when our car is out of gas. Our first concern is going from zero to anything, just as most drummers' is "how can I go pretty fast cleanly and efficiently."

And we'll show you how to do that: Brandon with some strength exercises, I with some technique ones you can practice even away from the kit, and without making any noise.

But the even deeper layer of "who cares" is "how much would I use Riccardo Merlini singles in musical applications even if I could do them."

And I believe there are so many ways to be great as a drummer that, beyond the functional speed most-anyone can develop, you're unlikely to encounter the generic speed limit in the real world.

Hope you enjoy!

And if you want to grab a 14-day trial to Brandon Green’s Drum Forever Fitness Program, and support me in the process, you can do that here.