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.

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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.

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.

How Much Should You Muffle Your Toms?

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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!

The "Foundational" Drum Rhythm That's Everywhere Again

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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.

If You want to be a great drummer, you need to conquer this

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Many drummers suffer from the “if a tree falls in the woods” conundrum.

Sound great by ourselves, then turn a camera on, or take the stage, and…we can’t find it.

Beyond the fact that this is normal, and not a sign you’re a “bad drummer” - indeed, “good in private” is a necessary first step before “good in public”…

…it’s also something we can use in the practice room.

There’s something I jokingly call the “3am test” with my students. Sometimes people will ask “when do I know when I’ve truly mastered this exercise?”

The answer: “when you can play it at 3am, fresh out of bed, in the rain.”

The experience of finding our performance lacking in public or on camera can be a tool we take back to the practice room, to inform the level our playing needs to reach. Which is why it’s so important, in my opinion, that drummers seek opportunities to perform in public, or on camera.

Onstage, not only are “people watching”, but acoustics are weird, setups feel different, and umpteen little factors all add up to take us out of our element.

Our favorite “pros”, obviously, don’t suffer the same falloff of their performance as we do. Beyond “making our best so great that 80% of it is still good”, there are things we can do to make sure the public performances are 80%, instead of 50 or 60. Then 90. Then 101.

Sure, there’s no substitute for raw experience. But “experience” doesn’t mean on tour with your favorite band. It can mean coffee shop performances, or jam sessions. It can even mean recording yourself and posting it on Instagram. Or, for the more industrious with fewer local ordinances, busking in a local park or square.

Finally, I share some experience from my past in which I’ve had that “in public falloff” of my playing, and how I moved on from it.

Hope you enjoy!

Should Drummers Boycott AI?

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The “bad future” is here.

AI tools can now write songs for you, replace band members in a DAW, quantize your drum parts without any fidelity loss, and transcribe songs for you.

(That last one…needs a few tweaks.)

And the internets are awash with critics, decrying the new generation of music tech.

But what if you’re a drummer who just wants to make some songs to play along with?

Does that make you the equivalent of somebody buying factory-farmed meat instead of free-range? Or, worse, burning coal in their back yard?

In this video, I attempt to separate the “society-wide” arguments from the personal ones. We take a hopefully-sober look at the tools that are actually available to drummers, through the lens of a bunch of feedback I received from Instagram, Reddit, and members of my private Discord.

Then we ask “would even the most shrill critics of AI music tech decry this use case.”

And, short answer: maybe.

You’ll find people impugning any use of AI because of “ick factor”. You’ll find plenty on the polar opposite side, opening shilling it. And between the two polls, some arguments we ought to consider, like “de-skilling”.

Are drummers who use AI at risk of stunting their brains?

Well, color me skeptical.

To me, the much more clear and present danger has almost zero to do with private use, and much more to do with the large companies that stand to adopt - and are already adopting - AI in cases where they could have, and would have, afforded human creators.

And, in my opinion, it’s these cases we should be most concerned about.

Can we split our brains in 2? Go easier on individual drummers who just want a fun song to accompany them, and harder on big companies replacing human producers, drummers, and composers?

We’ll get into it.

The Drum Setup Change That's Suddenly Everywhere

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Notice one drummer doing something, and you’re like “hmmm, that’s novel.”

Notice two doing it, and you’re like “that looks familiar.”

Notice 3, and you’re like, “needle scratch. That’s a thing.”

So it was with the drum setup change that’s the subject of this lesson. I’d see the odd drummer doing it on Instagram, and think “those kids, always experimentin’”.

I’d notice Anika Niles doing it in a Rush soundcheck, and think “hmmm maybe I should try this.”

Then, like the snare cowbell, or the bass drum bongos, it started to take over.

I’m speaking of course of switching the position of the “high” and “middle” toms in a “5-piece”, which is to say any arrangement in which you’ve got at least 2 toms more-or-less over the bass drum, as opposed to the “4 piece”, in which you’ve got only one, usually in the left-hand position, and the others are floor toms.

Was this a viral meme? If so, who started it?

My research indicated no single point-or-origin. Anika, yes. But also Macro Minnemann, Kenny Aronoff, Jimmy Chambelin…all the way back to Bernard Purdie.

Hmmm, well maybe everybody’s doing it because it serves some musical or ergonomic purpose. Digging deeper, I found out that a lot of drummers like the “4-piece skeleton”, with a medium-high tom on the left-hand side, and a space for the ride cymbal to the right.

By putting the high tom on the right, you leave more space for the ride, and also “preserve” the layout of the 4-piece, allowing you to play this kit as if it were a 4-piece, but with an extra tom in case you want it.

As we’ll cover, the 4-piece is the original incarnation of the tunable drum kit, which Slingerland and Gene Krupa popularized. And many of the jazz and subsequent rock greats created a lot of the canonical vocabulary on the 4-piece. Such that, if you’ve played any jazz, let alone simply played the layout a lot, it “feels great”.

Switching to a “high/middle/low” 5-piece can feel awkward, since your melody now changes. Sure, you can still “play it as a 4-piece”, but the high tom sounds higher. And you have to reach to play the middle-tom with the left hand.

Finally, I discovered a third great reason to switch the toms: modularity. If you quickly want to revert your kit back to a 4-piece for space or the preferences of other drummers, the “inverted” tom layout allows that - just pull the high tom off the stand, and you’ve got your original 4-piece.

At any rate, we explore this “weird” setup, complete with some tom flow vocabulary, and why it’s fast becoming my preferred way to set up the drums.

This Will Revolutionize Your Drumming, But You Might Hate It

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There’s that old saying: “knowing the path and walking the path are 2 different things.”

I’m fond of another: “I said simple. Not easy.”

Sometimes the solution to our blockers is in plain sight. We just don’t want to do it.

Today, I’m going to make the case to you that, if you can get over the initial trepidation and bore, yes, you actually do want to do it.

For starters, because agnostic to your level, it’s one of the most powerful exercises to help your playing across-the-board.

But also because, once you get going with this, it’s actually quite meditative.

I’m talking about slow practice. Like, absurdly slow. So slow it feels like an eternity between notes. So slow that when you use a metronome, you have to keep remembering not to rush.

So - why do we do this?

I’ve often said great drummers do 3 things differently from mediocre ones. Taking speed, flashiness, etc totally out of the equation. These are things that the most minimal groove players and Eloy Casagrande have in common.

1. Control of timing - note placement.

2. Control of sound - stick height differentiation, “zones” on drums, “vertical spacing”, etc.

3. Control of ideas - always within the protective “improv bubble” where it feels like they can’t play a wrong idea.

And I’ve complained that, in my travels, the average drummer mostly doesn’t grasp how insanely better than most of us great drummers are at the first 2. (Well, all 3, but this exercise deals primarily with the first 2.)

Timing and sound control are like the “secret gravity” of great drummers. The hidden matrix giving your ideas snap and danceability.

And there’s simply no better way to ingrain these than absurdly-slow practice.

You could make a spreadsheet of all the places your notes are early or late on the grid, and practice them one-by-one, and try to remember “on the 3rd 16th, I’m always 2 milliseconds ahead, so I have to compensate”…

…or you could simply put yourself in a context where you can tell intuitively the difference between on-the-grid and not, and (much easier) just let your subconscious bootstrap all the subtle shifts to get you grooving.

At any rate, this video explores the “why”, “what” and “how” of The Cult of Slow Practice. And I hope you’ll join me out on this branch.

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.

How One Song Became The Standard to Measure Modern Drumming

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I’ll keep this brief, so you can get to watching the video.

If you’re a channel fan, you probably know and love him: Brian Blade.

But more than even one drummer, the song he made famous, Jazz Crimes, has had an outsized influence on the drum ecosystem. And, due to happy and not-so-happy coincidences, it’s kind of become the bar by which modern drumming is judged.

In this video, we dispense with all the “judgment”, and other internet noise, and focus instead on what the song can tell us about our drumming, and how to learn from it.

I take the 3 primary challenges in turn:

• The opening groove

• The drum solo

• The deceptively-difficult beginning to the organ solo

Each shows us in stark relief whether our timing, subdivision, sound-control, and idea-control are squared-away. As such, I call it a “mirror song”.

And now, friends, I’ll let you get to the video.

Hope you enjoy!

Can Practice REALLY Make Your Drumming Faster?

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You can’t open social media without seeing a drummer showcasing their otherworldly single-stroke speed, and showing you exercises to “get there”.

Not to mention astounding shows of explosive speed from drummers like Tony Royster, Mike Mitchell, Ron Bruner, and Riccardo Merlini.

“If I just work hard enough, I’ll be able to play singles like those folks,” we think.

But what if that were wrong? What if these freakishly-fast folks were simply…born with it.

Today, I welcome drum mechanics expert and friend of the channel Brandon Green back to answer that age-old question. Several months ago he shared a provocative video comparing his - trained over 25 years - single stroke speed to his wife’s. (She’d never played drums.) And Brandon’s wife wins “going away”.

We then delve into the musculo-skeletal reasons some humans may have an advantage from birth.

But if you're on my list you probably already know the punch line: "who cares?"

It's actually several layers of who cares.

First, for the average drummer still working on functional technique, a hypothetical genetic speed limit on the very top end of their speed is like a 60mph speed limit on a freeway when our car is out of gas. Our first concern is going from zero to anything, just as most drummers' is "how can I go pretty fast cleanly and efficiently."

And we'll show you how to do that: Brandon with some strength exercises, I with some technique ones you can practice even away from the kit, and without making any noise.

But the even deeper layer of "who cares" is "how much would I use Riccardo Merlini singles in musical applications even if I could do them."

And I believe there are so many ways to be great as a drummer that, beyond the functional speed most-anyone can develop, you're unlikely to encounter the generic speed limit in the real world.

Hope you enjoy!

And if you want to grab a 14-day trial to Brandon Green’s Drum Forever Fitness Program, and support me in the process, you can do that here.

10 Tricks Pros Use for Better Drum Grooves - Do You?

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Recently, every time I think of another lesson idea that has primarily to do with what the general public would call “fills”, I pause and think “could I also do something around groove.”

While I generally don’t like the wall-of-separation between the two - fills can have backbeats and grooves can and should include improvisation - I’m cognizant that they’re different…”directions”. They fit different parts of a song.

To that end, and as the output of reviewing quite a few student videos in the past few weeks, I thought you might enjoy a lesson on ways to spice up your drum grooves - without adding more notes.

Obviously, there are gen-z beats. The internet has solved how to fill every possible 32nd in a backbeat funk groove. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

But sometimes you want to do more with less. And to their credit, some of the very same “pros” who play those flowy/gen-z beats can also “chill” during a song, but still find ways to make grooves interesting.

From injecting “hi hat stabs” in unexpected-but-musical places, to questioning the orthodoxy of “big subdivision”, to taking a page from New Orleans, today’s 10 “tricks” are tools you can fit to the situation. Not all will be appropriate for all songs, or all parts of songs, or all tempos.

But having them in your back pocket will give you a feeling of paining with a fuller palette.

And not one of them requires more technique or faster singles (I guess those are kind of the same thing) than you currently possess.

Hope you enjoy!

The One Thing That Separates Drum Pros From Everyone Else

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To the degree anything is a “magnum opus”, that’s today’s video. My “grand unified theory” on improvisation, which is to say “all drumming”.

This has been in the works over 15 years of me “retrofitting” my own playing, and 4 years of coaching students.

A culmination of all the “what’s water” moments (David Foster Wallace anecdote about two fish, one of whom remarks “the water’s lovely today” and the other who replies “what’s water?”), which is to say discovery of things I was taking for-granted that aren’t a given for those just learning to drum.

The sum of my micro-insights from “both sides of the divide” (knowing what it feels like when I feel good playing, knowing what I worked on to get there, and also seeing things through the eyes of students based on their questions, descriptions, and progress) cash out to two big things:

First, mature drummers (“pros” for the algorithm) have a kind of “bubble” around their playing, that insulates them from “mistakes” the way we typically think of them. (“Glitching”, big unintended sounds, feeling “behind your hands”, etc.)

The best analogy I could think of was the “flight envelope protection” modern fly-by-wire airplanes have. (Very short version - they won’t let you crash them.)

Second, you and I can learn to do it too.

There are many things that make great drummers great, and having a unique artistic voice is among them. But we don’t need to be artistic geniuses to teach ourselves to have that protective capsule around our playing, so we can “lean on things”, and our ideas feel insulated from “mistakes”.

**Quick disclaimer - many great drummers will say, in interviews, things like “I make mistakes all the time”, or “you should embrace mistakes”. That’s a bit misleading, imho, since any of these drummers could play a 90-minute set without once “glitching” or doing anything we’d detect as a mistake.

So, how do we do it?

By inverting the conventional understanding of improvisation. In my experience, improvisation is often seen (passive voice) as a place where you lower the guardrails, “embrace the muse”, and hope for the best.

In my opinion, that’s only useful later on. But at the beginning, I like to think “inside out”. Literally build that protective idea-capsule bit-by-bit, and rarely-if-ever play something outside of it.

This has the obvious advantage that we can practice improvising with ideas - rather than repping the same verbatim stuff over and over - while controlling the scope, so we’re always sure we’ve had a lot of reps on anything that might come up.

Finally, I reprise parts of a couple of recent lessons with examples of this type of exercises. Examples you can apply today.

Hope you enjoy!

Sound More "Pro" on Drums With One Simple Step

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Today’s video is over something deceptively-simple, but which, once you make it work for you, is a huge unlock.

Over the years I’ve talked a fair bit “hemiola”, or making 4-beat phrases into 6-beat phrases, and repeating them to make a more interesting, syncopated shape. It’s a handy way to get more mileage out of an idea.

But what if we went “back to zero” and pretended 3 and 6 beat phrases hadn’t been discovered.

Imagine if, suddenly, by decree, every drummer in the universe had to play “symmetrical” phrases. (Phrases based on 4 or 8 beats that resolve inevitably and predictably to the downbeat.) Gartstka, Larnell, Nate, Keith - everybody could do all their fancy stuff, but they could only play symmetrical phrases.

This would be a drab universe.

For drummers familiar with asymmetric phrasing, it would be an exercise in frustration listening to our heroes “boxed in”, and none of their fast chops able to save them.

“Freeeee Carloooock,” we’d yell at the YouTube. “Let the big dog EAT!”

And for those unfamiliar with the underlying theory, our drum heroes would just lose about half their “magic”. Inexplicably, they’d just sound more boring and predictable.

Turn this around, and, by adding one simple tool, we’d restore color to the “black and white” world of boring drums.

An if this tool is powerful enough to make-or-break a Benny Greb solo or beat, imagine what it could do for you.

This is the first in a series of videos exploring elements other than fast chops that create greatness in drumming: asymmetric phrases.

But I’m not even talking about 5s or 7s.

The simple, humble 6s and 3s have been around since Haydn in European music, and probably longer in other traditions. But we started to see them in American music in ragtime and New Orleans marches.

The create a flavor or repetitive syncopation that’s more interesting and danceable, but likely won’t get anyone fired from a gig.

And today, using simple examples, we’ll explore some ways to add them to your drumming immediately.

Hope you enjoy!

The Surprising Reason "Nate Smith Beats" Are So Hard

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We see a lesson on Nate Smith style funk beats (truly James Gadson, Clyde Stubblefield, Mike Clark, Lenny White, etc. beats), and we assume “one-handed 16ths”.

And if you’re like anything like I was, you find this style of “continuous 16th funk” challenging.

But I submit to you that it’s not because of the hand technique.

If I gifted you Isac Jamba’s right hand, would you suddenly sound like Nate? No, right? So why?

To illustrate the real reason, I went digging in my analogy bag, and pulled out a doozie: the bowling alley.

In a bowling alley, of course, you have a long strip of hardwood, and gutters on either side. If you roll the ball straight down the center, you’ll miss the gutters. But you’ll also miss the opportunity to shape your shots, or catch challenging spares. The more you explore, the more you risk gutter balls.

When I watch some drummers try to emulate the beats of Nate/Corey Fonville/Yussef Dayes, their playing sounds like a bowling alley. They’ve got a narrow lane where their stuff sounds pretty “pro”, but as soon as they deviate from it, they lose control. A kick drum is early or late. They flam hands or feet. Something feels “off”.

The thing that makes Nate-style beats challenging is they’re improvisational. If you listen to Mike Clark with Herbie, practically every bar is different. So you can’t “play like Nate” simply playing “boom chick”. You need to be able to improvise within the groove.

But that’s where the trouble starts.

Because improvisation is chaos. Infinity possibilities. And you can only do a few of the confidently. Jump into that abyss, and you’re not going to get enough reps with any one thing to “widen your lane”, unless you do it for years. There are simply too many possibilities to get the “spaced repetition” necessary to improve.

But stick to “written down” exercises, and you fail to simulate real life. Then you get that familiar “stuff I practice isn’t coming out in my playing” conundrum.

The solution? Algorithms.

A system that gives you discreet things to practice, but which mirrors the “possibility-tree” of real-life playing. And to which you can add more and more conditions until, for all intents and purposes, it becomes indistinguishable from real life.

This is building a lexicon from the “inside out”.

Phew, is anybody still reading? Anyway, today we tackle algorithms through the prism of Nate Smith beats.

Hope you enjoy!

Hope you enjoy!

6 Underrated Drummers Who Should Be Household Names in 2026

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This is a video I’ve been wanting to make for a while, but couldn’t find a good way to tell the story.

The subject of “underrated” players is familiar to any music aficionado: “no, but you really have to hear so-and-so, sooo underrated” is practically a cliche at music school dorm-room parties.

But in my searches, I haven’t been able to find much on it for modern drummers. And that’s a shame.

Larnell Lewis tells the story of his rise to drum-stardom as one of a chance meeting. Michael League happened to catch his performance in a Toronto club and like it, then Larnell sat in with Snarky Puppy a few times, and it just so happened that, the following month, League had the We Like it Here session booked, and needed a drummer to fill-in at the last minute. The rest is obviously history.

Carter Beauford was a “drummer’s drummer” in a fusion band before Dave Matthews plucked him from obscurity. Nate Smith was well-known in circles who also knew Chris Potter and Dave Holland, but nothing like the international brand ambassador he is today.

Which invites the obvious question, “what about everybody with tons of talent musical genius who DON’T get a lucky break?”

Or haven’t yet.

The six drummers I’m going to chronicle today are not “obscure”. They’re working players, with gigs. Some have substantial social media followings.

But, when you ask a New School student, in line for Nublu, or when I interview new students for my coaching program, there are the drummers who tend to come up - “legacy” folks like Nate, Thomas Pridgen, Nate Wood, JD Beck, Larnell, etc, “up-and-comers” like Jharis Yokley, Noah Fuerbringer, Roni Kaspi - and those conversations hardly ever include any of these six.

But, if there were any justice in the universe, they should.

To check my picks for 6 most underrated drummers of 2026, just watch the video.

Hope you enjoy!

The Real Reason You Can't Flow Around The Toms Like The Pros

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The idea for this week’s video dawned on me when my (practice) roommate was out of town, and (as you do) I added an extra tom to the house kit to make a 5-piece.

I don’t think my hands are spectacular, but I like to think they’re pretty decent. And I’ve got a lot of experience flowing around the kit when it’s a 4-piece.

But all of a sudden, with that extra drum, it was like my hands regressed 5 years. I was getting tense, missing drums, hitting rims…

What gives?

This was my first clue that something more than simple hand speed is in effect when we see great “flow” drummers like Vinnie Colauita and Dennis Chambers - or modern greats like Gergo Borlai and Xavier Ware - fly around the toms as if the laws of physics didn’t exist.

If it’s only hand speed, try the experiment in the video - play a simple sticking pattern (as I outline) on the snare, and see what the speed limit is. Then, try to orchestrate it around the toms, with the same clarity, without missing or mis-hitting. If that’s hard, you might benefit from today’s lesson.

Proprioception. The awareness of where your body is in space. It’s what allows you to close your eyes and still touch your nose with your index fingers.

But I would argue there’s “drum proprioception” too. Memorizing deeply where all your drums are in space.

We may think we know - obviously we have eyes - but if we can’t play around the toms as fast as we can play on the snare, and/or if our speed and precision decreases when we add an extra drum, it’s not just hand speed.

No worries - the simple exercises in today’s video will get you started.

Hope you enjoy!

4 Modern Drum "Tricks" Most Drummers Miss

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Did you know that there are unique musical ideas modern drummers are “cooking up”, which could help add variety and flavor to your ideas today…

…that most drummers probably don’t know about?

I’m not talking about faster chops.

Nor am I talking about “Dilla everything”, or stacks, though both have their place.

I’m talking about some really unique approaches to the drums that aren’t hard to do - they’re just stuff you wouldn’t necessarily think of if you weren’t looking.

And they can be very musical - when used wisely.

For this video, we’ll draw from drummers from Xavier Ware (of thumbnail fame) to Adam Deitch, to Cleon Edwards and Dana Hawkins.

We’ll talk about what makes these 4 approaches unique - i.e. why it isn’t just the same old thing you’ve already seen - we’ll show you some basic examples, then we’ll show them in context and demonstrate some of the musical things you can do with them.

If you’ve seen some of the “non-chop”/”non-dilla” flavors of modern playing and wondered how to get some of that, or reached a “plateau” with your existing ideas, and need an injection of inspo, maybe one of these approaches is for you.

Hope you enjoy!

I Was Wrong About E Drums

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If you know me you know - I have historically not been a fan of E-drums.

And historically, E-drums haven’t been very good.

Sorry.

“Twacky” rubber, or mesh heads with unrealistic tactile responses.

“Gated” sounds that omit all the '“analog” gradations and “messiness” of acoustics.

And their general…unsightly…appearance.

And over the years, various E-drum companies have offered to send me drums to review, but I’ve always refused.

But this year, it just so happened that when one such manufacturer DMd me, I was in a bit of a “YOLO” state of mind. I needed a gear review for the content calendar anyway, so I said “yes” - on one big condition: there was zero guarantee of a positive review, and I wouldn’t propagandize for them. If they sent the drums, they would get a candid review - upsides, downsides, and all.

The company - Roland - agreed.

What followed was a comedy of errors: the sheer enormity of the shipment, which barely fit in my mail room, and required an environmentalist’s nightmare worth of boxes. My comic ineptitude with making sure I had all the cables, connecting them properly, then connecting everything to my digital audio workstation, so I could bring you the sound.

I really wanted to hate them. But I failed.

The truth is…E-drums have changed. These aren’t your great uncle’s E-drums. The response is way better, both tactilely and in terms of mimicking the sound response of “real” drums. The appearance is way more similar to a mid-tier acoustic “wrap” kit than their predecessors. This is a kit that actually looks good in the den or rumpus room. And the one item Roland requested I feature - the recorded sound - is really good, especially if you don’t have pro mics and a lot of experience mixing and mastering your acoustics.

Still, they’re not perfect, and they’re not for everybody.

For my complete review, including misadventures, pros, cons, and a cheeky flow warmup (the transcription), peep the video!

This Is Killing Your Progress on Drums

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This week sees a return to an old hobby horse. Practically what put 8020 “on the map”.

Years ago, while developing one of my courses, I took a survey. I was interested in the mistmatch between drummers’ stated goals, and their practice routines. I had expected something like poor time-management, and/or a few adjustments at the margins. What I found, of course, was a complete-and-total mismatch.

Complaint: “I don’t know why what I practice isn’t coming out in my playing!”

Goal: Play clean, musical fills and beats, be able to get around the kit.

Practice routine: the literal same exercises out of drum books that they’d been doing for decades. Hand warmups, abstract “independence exercises”.

Addendum: Plus a decent dollop of “literal transcription of whatever I saw on Instagram this week”.

Since then, course materials have evolved somewhat. I and others are producing materials that more resemble real-world playing.

Many of these “contemporary” materials even emphasize the “missing piece”, which we’ll get to. It’s just that many players are explicitly skipping that part.

So - what’s missing?

Let’s look at language learning. Say you memorize a bunch of literal sentences. Then you go to a bar and try to hang out with native speakers.

No one would be surprised what they practiced “wasn’t coming out in their conversation” if they hadn’t practiced making their own sentences and free-associating with the vocab they’d learned.

Heck - let’s even take this to a different instrument. Let’s say you practiced a bunch of scales, and even some simple Charlie Parker transcriptions on the horn. Then it came time to solo on a different tune. Nobody would be mystified that they couldn’t solo over Dolphin Dance if all they’d practiced was CP’s solo on one chorus of Confirmation.

But somehow we don’t notice the “missing piece” on drums: practicing improvisation.

And not just unstructured improvisation; improvisation with relevant vocabulary, with guard-rails and increasing degrees of freedom. Improvisation that begins with kernels of exactly what you eventually want to play, then steps you closer to…well - fully improvising…with that stuff.

So why?

I have a couple of pet theories.

One is that drums are less “solo-based”, in that, especially if you don’t play jazz, you can go an entire lifetime just playing the repetitive loops we call “beats”.

Another is that “written out” stuff is easier to teach - a teach has only to improvise in front of a camera or microphone, then hand the recording off to somebody to transcribe, then that goes in the book.

And the third is probably that we like written out stuff more too. It’s less cognitively demanding. More like reading a book and less like writing one.

But around once every few years I have to draw a line in the sand and say “this is what’s killing drummers’ progress”. The culture of courses has evolved from abstract hand exercises to relevant vocabulary, and even improvisation practice with the ideas.

I’m trying, in a small way, to evolve the norms around actually doing that part.

Hope you enjoy!