The REAL Reason You Can't Flow Around The Drums (Updated)

First things first - download your free transcription here.

Two years ago I made a video called The Real Reason You Can’t Flow Around The Drums. In that video I discussed a specific sticking that allowed me to access the rack tom with my left hand, and “restored balance” to my playing.

At the time, it had genuinely been a “zero to one” for me, opening up all kinds of new avenues for my improvisation.

Since then, I’ve had two additional years to coach students, and realized something big: I was playing at the wrong level of abstraction. Which is to say I was concerned with decorating my new apartment in a hypothetical extremely polluted city rather than moving first. Sure - when we’re ready for them, hip stickings can help our improvisation a ton. But if we’re not, they’ll cover over a more fundamental issue.

That’s why I decided this video needed an update. “The actual, REAL reason you can’t flow around the drums.”

And that reason? We’re learning things out of order.

Worrying about stickings, and orchestration before we address something much more fundamental. Phrase structure.

Put more artfully, we’ve learned a ton of elegant ways to continue to phrase in groups of 4 16ths.

Because that’s what happens when you don’t put phrase structure first. Or, more fundamentally, realize that phrase structure is a more powerful lever than sticking or orchestration.

You can strip everything else away, and just use groups of “2” and “4” 16ths on the share, with accents to highlight the phrase shifts, and if you know how to arrange them musically, without losing the “4/4” in your head, you’re already cooking.

Or, you can learn Rllk, RLKK, RLRK, Frlk, and a million other ways to land on “1” and “3”, and it won’t sound like flow.

The Container Primacy - I’m terrible with names - also means we’ve solved the second most fundamental level of abstraction: subdivision changes.

It used to be that you’d learn a bunch of licks in 16ths, and a bunch in sextuplets or triplets, then practice 2 bars of each. But it felt like switching languages in mid-sentence. With the…ahem…CP…system, you can now substitute triple subdivision, i.e. a “3” or a “6”, one-to-one with a “2” or a “4”.

So that’s how we got it wrong, and that’s why we’re wasting time pecking around the edges instead of drilling into our phrase structure and subdivision substitution, and that [inhales] is why we can’t flow around the drums.

But hopefully this lesson will help get you closer.

P.S. If you like the theory and material in this video and would like me to take you through it one-on-one, I’m doing a quiet 2-seat enrollment in my coaching program. (SHHHHHH.) More info and the link to apply here.

The Drum Technique Lesson That Would Have Saved Me Years

First things first - grab your study guide here.

This past month I had one of those “synesthesia” moments you see depicted in movies by the music crescendoing with a wash of disjoined voices and a suspended cymbal roll until everything stops abruptly and there’s just a bright light.

It wasn’t exactly as depicted.

But the realization was around hand technique. And the fact that drum hand technique is not one thing, but two things.

I would see it from both directions:

Player has a speed limit because they can’t activate their fingers, so they “wrist” and “force” everything above a certain tempo.

Player complains of “pinkie out”, and has “mushy” singles or doubles at slower tempos.

We all kind of intuitively know that there are two distinct drum techniques. As a kid, in drum lessons, once I learned you could bounce double-strokes, the teacher would ask me to practice them “slow-fast-slow”, and we could see there was a point they went from “articulated” to “bouncing”.

But I’ve yet to hear anybody really talk about this except in passing. Which is especially interesting, considering that this might be the. single. most. fundamental. property. in. drum. technique.

As in, day one of lessons: “Jimmy, I’m gonna cut through a lot of potential confusion. You need 2 techniques. One for slow, and one for fast. The fast one is harder. Then you’re gonna have to transition seamlessly between them. This is the way.”

Then Jimmy would say some secular equivalent of “amen”.

So - what am I talking about?

I call it “walking” and “running”.

When we move, walking means we keep one foot on the ground all the time, whereas when we run, we’re airborne for brief periods between one foot touching the ground. And similarly-to-drums, if we try to walk too fast, or run too slowly, it’s awkward. We need two techniques for personal locomotion, and we need to transition seamlessly and intuitively, as we break into a jog to catch a bus, or slow to a walk once we’ve missed it.

For drums, “walking” means the stick returning to the heel of the hand after every stroke. That simple.

“Running” means it does not. The strokes are fast enough that it’s more efficient to have the stick “floating” between the energy of the rebound and the fingers returning it. Or loud enough that the stick height is creating the same effect.

This introduces two issues: how do we practice the individual techniques, and how do we transition between them.

The video covers them both.

Hope you enjoy.

P.S. did you know we’re doing a pilot enrollment for my new fledgling membership? It’s called the 8020 Academy, there’s a “new member” deal until Friday, and you can check it out here.

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.

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 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.