Why Guns N’ Roses’ “Paradise City” Sounds Wrong

First things first - get your free transcription here.

This one is straightforward fun.

Years ago, I’d be in my college gym, and inevitably the playlist included Guns N Roses’ Paradise City.

Even at the time, the was one bar I found jarring.

I’d be in my daily practice, with a metronome, trying to get my timing down to a minute degree…

…then I’d come into the “real world” for a gym break, and hear…something I couldn’t place.

On the transition between verse and chorus, GNR’s Steven Adler plays a series of “machine gun” 16ths on the snare, then 2 thunderous 8ths as the pickup into the next bar,

But I couldn’t shake the feeling that those 8ths were…a little ahead. “Whatever,” I thought, and went back to studying odd-meter jazz, or Dave Hollinden percussion ensemble music.

Last week, hearing Paradise City - where else - at the gym, it finally hit me: “this is in 15/16”.

Not that it was intentional. But that the “warp” of that bar was so extreme that it was functionally missing a 16th.

Excited, I ran to the studio to see if it worked out. Sure enough, if you loop just that “pre-chorus” bar, you can play seamless Matt Garstka/Tigran Hamasyan 15/16 over the top, and it actually sounds pretty cool.

Now, do I think this is really what GNR had in mind?
Of course not.

The reality has more to do with the band’s relationship with drummer Steven Adler, and with Adler himself.

And in this video, we get into all of it.

Hope you enjoy!

Stop Memorizing Drum Grooves - Do This Instead

First things first - get your study guide here, and your (somewhat ironic, given the theme) transcription here.

I often struggle with two seemingly-conflicting facts:

Fact 1 - great drummers have been dancing ably over the drums, incorporating whatever’s necessary to pull off what they want to do, for nearly a century.

Fact 2 - systems for teaching what they do have lagged woefully behind.

That contradiction sometimes gives me the “cold water”/”pinch myself” feeling when I start thinking things like “finally, a grand unified theory of groove”.

The “cold water” voice goes “so hang on. Everyone from Papa Jo to Bonham to Stewart to Nate Smith just did what they did by accident? Or maybe somebody else thought of this.”

And people did/have.

Probably the closest thing to the system I’ll present today is Gary Chester’s New Breed, though Garibaldi’s Future Sounds plays with some of the concepts we could nest under the category I’m calling “texture”. Benny Greb and Jojo Mayer have likewise contributed some great stuff to the study of groove.

And I want to do a longer lesson about this soon - “how much drum instruction is really New” - but for today’s purposes, let’s just add a big caveat that if others have thought of this before me, or in parallel, that’s fine, and it’s to be expected.

With all that out of the way, however, I tended to feel both online and lessons like we teach groove like a series of individual factoids to learn. “Here’s a shuffle.” “Here’s a bossa.” When there are obviously more generalizable concepts at work just beneath the surface, and if we just learned those we’d be able to own the generator rather than the output.

(Or, to put another way, we don’t teach adults language by asking them to memorize thousands of individual sentences. We have structures like grammar and verb cases which, if you learn them, give you access to thousands of individual output instances.)

Ok, but why do we care, besides “Nate went in the garage and made a thing.”

Because when we approach groove like a transcription exercise, we’re “trapped” in the loop. If we stay in it, we feel restricted. And if we try to “break out”, the groove gets sloppy, or the timing suffers.

Very simple example: how many of us learned 50 Ways to Leave Your Lover? How many of us could improvise, using theme-and-variation of that groove, inventing new loops every few bars, as Steve Gadd could no-doubt do in his sleep?

Or watch Keith Carlock play. Even with Steely Dan or Paul Simon, he’s rarely repeating the exact 2-bar loop. But in more “loose” settings like with Wayne Krantz, he’s flowing improvisationally the whole time, never losing the groove.

Don’t you want to be able to do that?

Great.

The solution starts with how we absorb groove. It’s not “rock”, “half-time rock”, “Purdie shuffle”.

It’s special cases of some broad concepts. And they’re not even that hard to figure out. I’ve chosen 4 - Grid, Snare Placement, Texture, and What Can Move - but that’s just one potential taxonomy.

What’s more important is internalizing some taxonomy, and using that to fuel your practice.

“Grid: straight 8th/Snare Placement: “3”/Texture: 8ths on hat/What Can Move: kick drum” delivers us quickly to what I call a “beat improv” exercise with a half time rock beat.

And you could use this like a “spin the wheel”/slot machine to make sure you’re hitting all the important, commonly-occurring categories, and that’s already way more helpful than “just memorizing”, but the even deeper application is internalizing or memorizing some version of this system to help you generate exercises.

For instance, the “texture” category allows things like “broken straight 16th” grooves, and by allowing “kick” to move independently, you might discover either that most of the ideas you come up with are boring, or that the coordination challenge of learning every possible permutation way exceeds how many idiomatic ways to phrase you need, so you make the kick placement “inter-dependent” with the lead hand.

These are just some of the directions this approach can send you, but notice that we’re now speaking in high-leverage terms, RAM-ing generators that can produce hundreds of individual loops, and baking in that variability to practice rather than memorizing individual grooves.

This is just the beginning of my exploration of this space, but I think you’ll find this initial foray useful.

How Anika Nilles Filled Rush's "Impossible" Drum Chair

I haven’t “gone to school” on the classic repertoire of a band in so deep a way since I used to do the “could I do the gig” challenges.

But in today’s video, there’s zero of me playing.

And I did not school myself on the most beloved songs of the Rush catalogue in order to record them myself, but rather to understand, as much as possible, the stakes facing Anika Nilles when she agreed to take over Neil Peart’s fabled Rush drum chair.

I say it’s one of the most difficult-to-fill drum roles in the world not because Rush’s catalogue is necessarily the most technically-demanding - Dream Theater, Meshuggah, and Frank Zappa probably have a stronger claim - nor only because its former drummer was universally-beloved among fans, nor even because those same fans know every note of his intricate and “composed” (as opposed to improvised differently every time) drum parts, but rather because it’s the rare combination of all 3.

When Mike Mangini stewarded Mike Portnoy’s drum chair in Dream Theater, he took his own original approach to the band’s demanding repertoire. The same can be said of Zappa’s drummers.

Phil Collins has one drum fill everybody waits for. The Police have a few.

And beloved bands like Snarky Puppy, Pearl Jam, The Mars Volta, and Nine Inch Nails have all had several great drummers, each adding their own unique spin.

Over the past 41 years and 18 albums, Rush has had one. The Professor. Who didn’t just drum; he has lyric credits for 94% of Rush’s non-instrumental songs.

Rush fans know hundreds of his fills, across the band’s expansive catalogue, by heart.

And the music, while not Dream Theater or Zappa, is also not Maroon Five, no offense to them. This is not “boom chick verse chorus”. One listen to Xanadu or La Villa Strangiato, and you understand the scope of the task.

So when you get the call to audition for Rush, you swallow hard. You check your schedule. You say to yourself “I’ve got a pretty good thing going. Do I really want to go into a cave for six months SEAL-training every nook and cranny of Neil Peart’s legacy?”

And Anika, beloved by drum fans since way back for her own many projects, not-to-mention being Jeff Beck’s last drummer, understood the full weight of the decision and, without hesitation, said “yes”.

Indeed, you can tell she’s having fun.

Different audiences will hopefully get different things from this video.

I imagine my list is a mix of Anika fans who know of Neil but haven’t gone too deep with Rush, Rush diehards who know of Anika but mainly because she replaced Neil, and OG fans of them both.

In the video, I attempt to illustrate why the gig is so difficult in spite of not being Zappa, introduce its new drummer, and examine what about her made her uniquely-qualified to take on the role, not only as a drummer but as a human.

I hope I did an decent job.

The REAL Reason Your Kick Drum Feels Sluggish

First things first - download your free transcription here.

I’ve had a number of new coaching students for whom fixing the kick drum was a priority in recent months.

For one, I recorded a mini-youtube-lesson off the cuff, which ended up being almost 8 minutes, and which we titled The Kick Drum Crash Course. This video got passed around so much in our coaching discord, I decided it was time to update my Youtube kick pedal houvre.

At issue: students often complain of a “sluggish” feeling. But everyone thinks the solution is improving their speed. It’s a reasonable assumption, considering that 98% of the kick drum material online or otherwise promises more speed, usually with multiples of BPM in the thumbail.

And while it’s true that you can’t go faster without solving some of the underlying technical, it’s also true that pure speed, which is to say reducing the space between consecutive strokes as much as possible (and maybe doing as many of them in a row as possible) is only part of the issue.

My humble thesis is there’s another part entirely to feeling dextrous on the kick drum, which is only tenuously related to speed, but which many drummers and most instructionals ignore: placement precision.

If speed has to do with how few mili-seconds are between your doubles, precision, (or “agility” I’ve heard it called) has to do with how many mili-seconds off the grid any individual stroke is.

If you don’t think they’re different or important, just listen to Clown Core’s Computers, which I demonstrate in the lesson. Isolate the kick drum part, and there’s nothing terribly “fast” - no two of the strokes are closer than an 8th note. But put them back in context in the beat, and if any one is more than a few mili-seconds off, the beat loses its “snap” entirely.

So what’s this mysterious bass drum skill that can fail you, even if, once in the rhythm, you can play reasonably fast doubles, or even triples?

It’s some part technical - so we want to eliminate technique as a bottleneck - but after that, primarily “calibration”. Because of course time elapses between when you think “I’d like a bass drum note”, and the signal traveling to your ankle muscles, your muscles making the movements, overcoming the inertia of the machinery of the kick pedal, then finally the beater “winding up” and traveling to the head. But our nervous system can compensate and anticipate that delay. Provided it’s well-calibrated. So we’ll hit you with some exercises to do that.

Finally, you’ll have to overcome something I call “the dead zone”, a tempo range where doubles naturally feel sluggish, because you’re in between “individual stroke” tempo and “elided stroke” tempo.

We’ll show you exercises for all of it.

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.