How Much Should You Muffle Your Toms?

First things first - download your free transcription here.

I need to spend less time on Reddit. Put, this past week, it “pulled me back in”.

Over the stupidest stuff, too.

A poster had shared a video of their tom tuning, and asked for feedback. Without looking at any of the other comments, I wrote something complimentary. Then, contrary to the advice I’d give to anyone, I looked at the other comments. And this poster was getting dragged by everybody, for the simple act of muffling.

Slapping a couple of moon gels on, to get a deader sound. Like Steve Gadd. Purdie before him. Ringo. But nope, guess the Reddit community will no longer abide anything other than fully-open, “let a thousand overtone angels sing”.

What I should have done was close my phone and go for a walk. What I did instead was fire up the laptop and begin penning the screed that turned into this video.

In which we’ll examine the true history of muffling, which players were famous for it (hint, not just modern ones), their likely reasons, and the gear that made it possible.

Then, we’ll cover tom tuning and a few “hot licks” I like to warm up.

Finally, we’ll run our own experiment: from “wide open” to “dead as hell”. And you can be the judge.

Hope you enjoy!

P.S. did you know you can get 30 days free at JP Bouvet Method (until May 3) with the code FLOW, and support 8020 in the process. Get you some!

Berj Fazlian - Berklee as Hogwarts, 32nd Notes, and Life As a Young Drummer

I’m going to stop hiding the fact that I fancy myself a bit of a “next hot thing” whisperer for the drums.

Can barely dress myself, can’t cook worth a lick, but amongst my friends I have a decent track record of saying “have you peeped this drummer” a few years prior to their becoming a household name. So it was with Ari Hoenig among my classmates in music school, Nate Wood a few years later, and pre-Butcher-Brown Corey Fonville.

So it was with December’s podcast guest, Diego Ramirez, who I believe in a few years will be on the tips of young drummers’ tongues, and so it is with today’s. Someone you might know if you’ve seen any of my videos on what I call “clave flow”.

At the age of 18, he’s already become synonymous with a style that’s sweeping drumming, more than practically anyone else. And if there is a such thing as “prodigies”, he’s that in every sense of the word, having played for only 10 years. (And his description of putting in 8-hours-a-day of practice both tracks with past guests like Chris Turner, and should give you an idea of the work required to make that kind of meteoric rise.)

I’m speaking of Berj Fazlian. Son of an orchestra conductor, Berklee student, and, already, a sensation.

In person, Berj is amiable and warm. And can’t hide his enthusiasm for the drums. It’s no wonder that, like Turner, drums never felt like “work” to him.

In this meandering conversation, we speak about Berklee-as-Hogwarts and navigating the world as a young drummer, with strong undertones of finding a voice in the wilderness and trusting your own tastes, even as a “prodigy”.

Hope you enjoy!

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.

Why Pro Drummers Don't Mess Up - Live Clinic

A few months ago I published a video on "flight envelope protection" for drummers.

The analogy had come to me while watching this or that documentary on aviation. (An interest of mine.) 

For context, this is one of the most frequent questions I get both in the comments on the channel and when I'm interviewing students. "How are pros able to be so free and never fear messing up, whereas if I deviate one inch from my pre-planned beat or fill, there's the possibility of a train wreck."

The answer, I realized, was "flight envelope protection". Many modern airplanes, with caveats, process all pilot input through a computer that mediates those requests before maneuvering the airplane. What this means in practice is they will not let you crash them.

"Pull back on the stick" at low speed without increasing the power in a conventional plane, and bad things. Do that in most modern "fly by wire" aircraft, and the computer will automatically command an eye-watering increase in thrust, and limit the "upward pitch" to keep you safely in the envelope.

And that's almost exactly what it feels like to pros when they play.

They can do almost anything, and there's a protective cocoon around their playing that will not let them train-wreck. (With shades of gray, of course.)

So - how do we build that in our playing?

It starts by understanding "inside out" improvisation. Rather than try to play with zero guardrails, then "debug" the mistakes, we start in a carefully circumscribed lane, and make it wider over time.

This applies to groove, improvisation...everything.

In my live clinic, I spoke about steps and methods I use with my students to build up this "envelope".

Hope you enjoy! Below is the complete intro solo.

The "Foundational" Drum Rhythm That's Everywhere Again

First things first - download your free transcription here.

The jig is kind of up on “modern drum whatever that’s suddenly everywhere.”

As it was with the “tom reversal”, so it is with this week’s phenomenon: you can find clips of Art Blakey doing it back in the ‘60s. Which is to say it’s not exclusively modern.

But that doesn’t mean it isn’t seeing a big resurgence.

Bring it in, you guys. Super quick “stoner thought” - for all the chaos it’s wrought, for all the “homogeneity” it’s encouraged among musicians, social media has poured 100 years of drum innovations into a large hadron collider, allowing the pace of innovation to skyrocket.

That might be why, when one speaks of today’s innovation, you can say Art Blakey “did it”, and Bill Stewart “did it”, and Virgil Donati, Dave Dicenso, and Keith Carlock “did it”, but Marcus Gilmore and the modern generation of drummers “did it and did it and did it”.

(The “did it” thing was ironically originally a joke about Marcus’ grandfather, Roy Haynes, and triplets.)

The lick, of course, is dotted 8ths in the left foot. Something that, once you notice, you can’t “unhear”, and which has a funkiness that’s difficult to fully explain, and my final stoner theory of the day is that that’s because ultimate it comes from West African drumming, and that we as humans find intersecting rhythms inherently funky.

If you feel like joining me today on a journey that includes all those drummers we mentioned, with honorable mentioned Tony Allen and Danny Carey, and not incidentally a pretty intensive lesson on how to get started using these rhythms in your drumming, I invite you to watch.

Hope you enjoy!

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.