The Obvious Flaw in How We Play The Drums - Grab Your Free Transcription

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Pretend you were an alien, and intercepted a radio signal from Earth. Something called “The Beatles”. You’d probably understand melody and harmony, assuming your species perceived sound - those are just “pleasing” special cases of the physics of vibration. You might even understand the rhythm of the song, and the drums. After all, that’s just using regular intervals in time (a “beat”). These Earthlings apparently find that pleasing.

But it’s likely you’d have questions about the man seated behind some objects at the back, striking them with some kind of rods: “why is it crossing its arms one-over another?”

Because you’d likely understand engineering, and possibly robotics, and you’d know you’d never-in-a-million-years design something like that.

“Hmm. Maybe it’s an earlier model,” you’d muse.

And scene.

But seriously - why do we cross over when we play the drums?

If you’re a bit of an aficionado of drum history, you might have a story in your head. It’s maybe the same story I had, and it goes something like this:

“Traps” came indoors, adapting military and “second line” percussion for stages. The invention of the bass drum pedal occupied the lead foot. With the snare in front of the player, that left only the left foot free, and the invention of the “low boy” occupied that before it occurred to anyone we might be playing it with the hand. In the late 1920s, somebody invented extending the low boy stand to put the cymbals in reach of the player, but nobody noticed or cared, because everybody was playing jazz over on the ride cymbal. It wasn’t until we got to rock and, roughly, Ringo, that drummers realized they were “painted in” - forced to “cross over” if they didn’t want to relearn the drums.

That’s a nice story. But, as I discovered, there’s a big fly in its ointment. And when you see some 1930s big band footage, you’ll probably realize what it is.

But the real story is both more interesting and more illustrative of how we can “evolve into corners”. And I actually have a crackpot conspiracy theory about how we got here, that I don’t think anybody’s really talked about much. (At least I couldn’t find it in several hours of googling.)

And to learn all of that, I invite you to watch the video.

Hope you enjoy!

If You Can Play This Beat, You're a Good Drummer

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I happened on the beat in today’s video more-or-less at random. But once I struggled to play it, I realized “this has everything.”

Sure, there’s the surface layer or it looking relatively easy.

Then, just below that, the “premutated” “1-E-and”s.

The most challenging bit for me was syncing the kick drum with that hand part.

But it’a actually turtles all the way down. There’s something for every level of drummer.

Beginners may find it challenging just to keep the snare part consistent volume and touch when adding 8th notes in the lead hand.

Intermediates might be challenged by adding a basic foot part without “flamming”.

Still more advanced folks might be challenged by playing the lead hand groups of 3 notes, and the underlying technique.

Still more advanced will find that ok, but possibly need time to master the “changing polarity” of the hand part.

And your GOAT, final boss drummers will struggle…who are we kidding. They’d probably nail it.

But for US mere mortals, improvising with the kick drum with the “permutated” hand part will give us plenty o’challenge.

Back to the “it looks easy” thing. One thing I used to do but have mostly stopped doing is arguing with YouTube commenters about where there’s more-than-meets-the-eye about good drummers. (i.e. that time is more than a completely personal/subjective/arbitrary concept.) (And not in the way it is for Ringo or Bonham.)

When I interviewed Ed Soph 2 years ago, he said he doesn’t waste time arguing. He simply presents people with a challenge they won’t be able to master with their current approach. “Drummer 1 and drummer 2.”

So in that spirit, I give you today’s beat, with the proviso that at every level, it’s only a matter of spending the time to get better, so nobody should take finding particular parts of this challenge an indictment of their potential.

Phew - onto the lesson?

See you soon!

The Drum Fill Test Every Intermediate Drummer Should Pass

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Today’s video is aspirational. No one should feel bad about their level of improvisation on the drums, any more than I might feel bad about my lack of aptitude at deep sea diving or the Greek language. It’s almost entirely a function of how much time you put in.

So I want to give you four principles to aim for as you work to improve your fills on the drums. In the hopes of narrowing your focus from the infinite potential things you could be working on. By focussing on these 4, my guess is you’ll improve faster.

When playing fills, or indeed any improvisation on the drums, we’re trying to be a few things at once. And you can probably guess the things:

Not boring, in control, maintaining our sense of the barline where appropriate.

And here’s the kicker - it’s not like there’s some metaphysical Simon Cowell who’s going to tell you if your fills are good or wack. Ultimately, you’re still the judge.

But these 4 criteria will help you pinpoint your direction of travel more minutely. Hopefully.

Plus, for each “test question”, I also propose exercises to help you improve that part of your fills.

I hope this will make you feel better about your drumming, and give you some tools to get a little growth during the last few weeks of the summer.

Hope you enjoy!

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

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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

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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.

The REAL Reason Your Kick Drum Feels Sluggish

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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.

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

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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

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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

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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

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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 - Transcription

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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.

Flow Grooves - The Drum Beat That's Suddenly Everywhere - Transcription

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One year ago I made a video on the family of grooves we were starting to see…well…everywhere.

They weren’t like other grooves - not “boom chick” like rock, not “straight 16th” like James Gadson/Stubblefield funk, nor even like shuffles per se.

Their closest living relative were probably the linear funk grooves of players like David Garibaldi, but of course “the kids” were putting a gen-z topspin on them.

Players like Jharis Yokley, Zack G, and recent podcast guest Berj Fazlian were chief among the drummers taking this way of playing to the next level.

At the time, I didn’t know what to call them. So I invented a name: “clave flow”. Which is also the title of the course I created around them in JP Bouvet Method. (Link and coupon codes below.)

Since then, they’ve become more recognized, and have a mainstream name: flow grooves.

So - what are they, exactly?

Strictly speaking, it’s any practically-continuous improvisation around a backbeat - not necessarily “3” or “2 and 4”. It’s usually done with chatter between closed hats and snare ghost notes - though often with extra implements like cowbells on the snare - and usually places the backbeat on the snare, though sometimes it’s on the stack. It’s mostly linear, though not without exception.

But it’s always easier to demonstrate than to explain. Click on the video, and you’ll immediately see examples of Berj and Zack playing them.

And students love these. It’s way out of proportion with what I would have predicted. But my guess is that learning the system to play these grooves gives people a feeling of freedom they haven’t felt before while grooving.

Ok - but how do we learn them?

You can get transcriptions practically everywhere, but I tend toward the “teach a person to fish” approach. Hence, I’m going to show you a simple system to get you started.

And it’s way simpler than when I first considered these grooves a year ago. We’ve had a year of refinement working on it with students, and working through the course material for JP.

In fact, I bet if you take the basic lessons (“rule of 16”, “rule of 8”) into the shed, you should be able to play basic versions of these grooves in just a day.

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.

stop overthinking speed on drums - Transcription

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Hand technique can be a frustrating Kafkaesque morass.

To a beginner or intermediate, the constellation of instruction makes it seem like there are dozens of unrelated orthodoxies that never come in contact, not to mention a literal waterfall of “quick tips”.

I’m gathering steam for a “grand unified theory” of hand technique video - because it’s ridiculous that, with the same laws of physics, we can get such disparate approaches from the various camps - but in the meantime I wanted to chip away at a simpler problem: how to “know if it’s right”.

In my opinion, that’s what makes teaching and learning hand technique so difficult: most of it happens inside the hand, where it’s hard for the student to observe the teacher or vice versa, and that’s on top of the lack of telepathy or mind-melding, so we have to use words and demonstrations to coax the student in “warmer” direction until they finally feel the “rightness”, then they can continue to seek that. But how do they know if what they’re feeling is “right”?

Enter today’s 2 exercises.

They’re almost impossible to do if the technique isn’t “in the right direction”, and if you can do them, it’s a good indication that you’re “warm”.

Ironically, even though there’s a messy universe of hand technique orthodoxies out there, most students I see who need technique help suffer from the same issues, and they’re basic “laws of physics” stuff:

Using too-large muscle groups to do the job smaller ones could do.

“Stealing” the energy of the stick through inefficiency, and having to “add it back”, usually (see number 1) with larger-than-appropriate muscle groups.

And this is the beginning of the grand-unified-theory.

Whether via French grip or German, drum corps or Murray Spivack, practically all good drummers have 2 things in common:

An efficient division of labor amongst muscle groups.

An ability to harness a lot of the “physics” without adding unnecessary new energy to the system.

Phew.

Enter today’s 2 exercises:

The 2-finger rimshot, and Speed Golf Rob.

Both are simple to explain and understand, even if they take some time to do. But both will point you in the right direction.

For more detail, check out the video.

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