The Chops "System" You Didn't Know Your Favorite Drummers Were Using

First things first - grab your transcription here.

Linear chops are all the rage, and for good reason. With just a few source elements, you can make just about any tasty lick you want. I challenge anyone to find a clip of someone executing fills with a few variations of the “classic” combos (Rllk, RLK, etc.) that don’t go hard, as long as they’re executing them with finesse and creativity.

But linear vocabulary is not the ONLY game in town.

Yes, all licks have a “length”, and it’s all ultimately about arrangement, subdivision, and orchestration…

…but that “orchestration” bit leaves a lot of latitude for interpretation.

“Orchestration” means you can play quarters with the kick underneath your phrases. You can play dotted 8ths with the left foot. You can make a “flam” with some of the accents.

And that, plus some creative use of subdivision, is the beginning of the answer to “why do JD Beck and Diego Ramirez sound so different?”

Today I want to present one particular way to innovate with texture and orchestration. It’s something that will sound “familiar” if you’ve heard drummers like JD Beck and Dana Hawkins, but the truth is it has its roots earlier - like the early 2000s.

And if we really trace the roots, the origin point is even earlier than that.

There’s a way of playing - a textural approach - that includes playing a cymbal, a hat, or indeed another tom, along with bass drum notes in otherwise “linear” fills.

When you listen to the “Dallas Guys”, like JD Beck, Sput, Cleon Edwards, and TaRon Lockett do it, it sounds like polyphony between toms and bass drum. Dana Hawkins’ version (probably closest to the system I’m teaching here) sounds like a “separate layer” of cymbal and hat on top of the “tom layer”.

And, if you go back to the [redacted] videos of the early 2000s and 2010s, you hear drummers like Darion Javon and Devon “Sticks” Taylor doing something you might call “fortification” - i.e. “fortifying” certain kick notes with dry hats, to create a sound that “cuts” beautifully, while being dry.

All of these folks are inspiration for what I’m calling “the doubles system”. I’m probably creating a course on it soon, and I’ve been messing with it and giving it to my coaching students for the better part of a year.

And now, I give you Part One.

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Why Copying Pro Drummers is (Maybe) Making You Worse

First things first - grab your transcription here. (It’s small ;)

Cheeky title, I know.

“2015 Youtube called and wants its title back.”

Level all those critiques at me. I can take it. And I think my thesis holds up. Because it’s what happened to me.

We (mostly) all love to watch great drummers. It’s what maybe got us into drumming in the first place. Watching a true great move around the kit is a reminder of what’s possible. It keeps us inspired and moving forward.

But it can also be deceptive.

Because greats, by definition, do a lot of things well. But what if I told you there’s a specific subset of things they do that’s more likely to get you better faster, and another that, if you do it in the wrong order, can actually interfere.

I’m referring, of course, to timing, touch, and doing everything you do well - something I’m starting to call “fluency” on one side…

…and the whole “blazing hands/a million and one licks” on the other.

Do the fluency thing first, and “perfect” a small pocket of personal vocabulary you can do really well, but still feel free improvising with, and it’s almost like a cheat code.

Chase speed and variety before learning any individual thing really well, and you’ll still be on shaky ground.

Great - so it’s a 50/50 shot which lessons people take from pros, and around 50% take the wrong lesson? Cool.

Except it’s not like that.

It’s more like 90%. It’s more like we’re hardwired to waaaay over-index on the speed and variety, and completely ignore the “doing everything well” thing.

And it turns out there’s even a name for the psychological effect that explains this tendency. “Salience Bias”. Confronted with a mixture of inputs and outputs, we’re wired to attribute causality to the most flashy thing.

Ergo, “Matt Garstka great because Matt Play Many Things Fast.”

Which is why copying great drummers verbatim, for the wrong drummer, at the wrong time, can be worse than neutral. It can actually be counterproductive.

So - what should we do instead?

In the video, I propose a few alternatives, from finding a small subset of greats in whose playing the refinement of a few things is more obvious. (I show the actual video that finally incepted this into me.)

Plus, I show some exercises to get you there.

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.

Whiplash Lied to You About Jazz Drumming

First things first - download your free transcription here.

We thought we were done with Whiplash.

Interesting movie. Not trying to be "real". The questions people ask us about it gradually fewer with the passing of the years.

A useful touchpoint for cultural references. "Not quite my tempo" has become the "Greed is Good" or "You can't handle the truth" for anyone with a toe in the music world.

But that's not all. Art shapes life.

Ten years ago, Adam Neely contrasted the music of Whiplash with what "real jazz students" of the time would likely be listening to. With the gradual seepage of the movie into the zeitgeist, "real life" jazz has become closer to the Whiplash.

Internet stars built entire careers in the wake of the movie.

I'm not saying any of this is good or bad. It's the way popular art works. But it does mean we can talk about Whiplash again. We should talk about it. If it's going to be the general public's avatar for what jazz drummers do, we get to set the record straight, in much the same way medical professionals would want to if Grey's Anatomy were the only portrayal of them, or pilots if Snakes on a Plane or Airplane were the only popular portrayals of them.

All of which leads us to the question: is the movie's central character, Andrew Niemann, standard-bearer in the popular consciousness for "jazz drummer", actually any good? He who broke up with his girlfriend, bled, performed with a concussion, committed assault and battery onstage, all in pursuit of being "one of the greats"...

...if we compare him to real life jazz drummers - the "real life" version of a jazz drummer at one of the world's leading music schools - how does he hold up?

Well, it's a more interesting question than it might appear.

For starters, which "Andrew" are we talking about? If it's the Andrew on the backing tracks for the big band recordings the bands pantomime along to, then who we're hearing is actually real life pro Bernie Dressel. Google him. He plays in a bit of a "classic" style, but he's legit.

Likewise, if we critique the drumming of the "body double" whose hands we see in many of the solos, Kyle Crane. Look him up on Youtube. Kyle Crane is legit.

Even actor Miles Teller himself, veteran of garage bands but with nothing like the experience his character would have had upon enrolling at the fictitious Shaffer Conservatory, deserves kudos for "crash coursing" traditional grip, jazz beats, and even some of the songs.

That's Miles playing Whipash in the "chair" scene, once Fletcher stops the band and counts off he specific "rushing or dragging" section.

Of course teller doesn't have anything like the touch and acumen his real life equivalents would, but my issue is less with any of the actual drumming in the film than with what the film portrays as important.

What it chooses to emphasize.

Practice till your hands bleed.

Double time swing.

Solos.

Sure - the last 2 are real parts of jazz drumming, though we wouldn't call it "double time" (just "up"). But just as important is what the film leaves out. How about regular swing? Kind of important, right? Touch. Subdivision. (In the "rushing or dragging" scene, what's more important than the tempo is the "nervous" pulse Teller plays, though it's realistic to a character under as much stress as he was.)

Not to mention body movement and mechanics.

So today, we'll get into it. For fun. But, lest anybody think "this old movie again?" No. Doctors got The Pitt. Soldiers and police get their more realistic portrays. If Hollywood isn't going to give us any attempt at realism, we get to earn clicks by calling them out.

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.

If You Can’t Do This, You’re Not Really Drumming? (Featuring JP Bouvet)

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Improvising on drums contains a “great filter” - a chasm with a narrow passage across.

On the surface, it seems simple, inevitable that if we simply practice enough rudiments and listen to enough drums, we’ll be able to cross it. And given enough time, that’s probably true. But we underestimate the challenge.

Crossing this chasm requires doing 2 things at once: combining “asymmetric” phrases - phrases that cross the bar, or at least “syncopate”, and keeping the “big beat” in our heads. If you think this is easy, try clapping 4 quarter notes, with beat “1” a normal clap, and beats 2-4 with the back of the lead hand, and singing combinations of 2 and 4 16ths - choose any syllable you want to represent each, but I might humbly recommend “2” and “4”. Now, you have to syncopate, which is to say make phrases including odd numbers of “2s”.

And you also have to land confidently on “1” after 4 bars of 4/4. If you can do this, the rest of drumming is just adding technique.

Obviously a lot of steps, but you’ve cleared the “hardest filter” to improvisation. If you can’t, you’ll struggle to improvise interesting phrases. You’ll be able to play “pre-composed” licks and loops, and you might be able to improvise “non-syncopated” rhythms that never violate the quarter note downbeat.

But fear not, because I’ll tell you 2 reassuring things. The first is that practically everybody struggles with this. It requires practice. Just like riding a bike, it’s a complex skill. Even musicians who seem to have been able to do it from birth likely learned it early in life from exposure to music. If this is hard for you, that doesn’t mean there’s something “wrong” with you. It’s hard for everybody at first.

The second is you can learn to do it. And you don’t need to spend years tackling rudiments, though in certain arrangements they obviously help. No. We think we have a faster way. An easier way.

A more fun way. “We”, by the way, is I, with friend of the channel JP Bouvet. And credit-where-credit-is-due, when we set out to tackle this problem in parallel, it was he who developed the easier, more intuitive method.

And that’s why I’ve adopted his method as a step in my teaching. He calls it the 2s and 4s. Any phrase that “syncopates” (which is to say “includes upbeats”) at the 8th note level can be deconstructed into groups of 2 and 4. And you can build any syncopated phrase at the 8th note level with them.

That’s why the key to learning to improvise on drums might boil down to understanding deeply how 2s and 4s interact, and memorizing - “getting in your ear” - their sound. In this video, JP and I attempt to give you a crash course into the system: to show you how to “test” your ability to syncopate, then show you the basics for adopting this system.

P.S. I’m doing a small promo for JP Bouvet Method this week, where the above-mentioned course lives. If you dig this youtube video, you’ll probably want to go way more in-depth, with tons of written examples. You can grab a 7-day trial to JP Bouvet Method and support me in the process using my affiliate link here, and until midnight when Thursday, Jul 23 turns into Friday the 25th, you can save…

-50%/month x 6 months with the code SaveMonthlyJul26

-$100 off your first year with the code SaveAnnualJul26

Just enter the codes at checkout.