Is The Internet Ruining Drumming?

First things first - grab your transcription here.

And, until Friday at midnight, get your membership to JP Bouvet Method here, using the code SaveAnnual to get $100 off an annual subscription, or SaveMonthly to get 50% off your monthly sub for the first 6 months.

The above paragraph is not unrelated to today’s subject, because I consider him one of the good things that’s resulted for drummers due to the internet.

This is a subject everybody has an opinion on, which I don’t think anybody’s addressed head-on. We touch it through proxies, like “modern drumming”, and “how to make a living as a musician these days”. But it’s engendered such strong opinions, I thought it deserved a video all its own.

Part of the reason is I want people to own “the internet has made the world worse for drummers” if that’s what they really believe.

20 years ago - heck, 15 years ago - we had a world in which if you wanted to watch a great drummer play, you needed to rent a DVD of them, or go see them live. In which if you wanted a lesson with a great teacher, you needed to travel to them, or go to music school. In which if you wanted a career in music, you needed to impress a gatekeeper, or several gatekeepers.

In was a world in which sponsors, drum magazines, music schools, agents, and record labels held most of the power, and could name their price.

But did all the work required give us something in return?

Did we appreciate those performances more if we needed to pay for a CD or a live concert in order to hear them? Did we appreciate the lessons more if we needed to pay an individual? Did the small number of “anointed ones” in the orbit of the gatekeepers enjoy better careers than most musicians have today?

Now, of course, we have a world with everything at our fingertips. Any video of any drummer, any lesson on any subject, and also access to an audience for anybody willing to put in the hours “getting good” - or at least getting entertaining - and has that made things better?

Has it made the world more “fast food”? Where instead of whole performances we appreciate only isolated solos, and it that warping the musical instincts of young drummers? Are the algorithms that show us more and more cool solos once we watch one contributing to a flattening of musical variety?

Are the ubiquitous impressive physical feats, like one-handed single strokes and impossible blast beats making everybody feel worse about their own playing?

And has the move from record-based payment to sponsored posts and patreons pulled the rug out from under the working “journeyman” players, forcing them to either “eat tide pods for views” or get a job for Uber Eats?

It’s far from a simple “up or down” picture. And in today’s video, I’ll do my best to give both sides a fair hearing. They you can decide!

Hope you enjoy!

Brandon Green Returns - Should Drummers Work Out?

Well it’s beach season. And if you’re anything like me, that means reducing the chocolate croissant diet to only the essentials, a few extra sessions in the tanning bed, and ample coconut oil.

For those who didn’t catch the irony, fitness for drummers is nonetheless a subject close to my heart. For drummers who age into their 70s and beyond with most of their peak ability, can you think of any who was out of shape? Conversely, what about players we can think of who - hate to say it - have “lost a step” compared to their peak?

You can outrun poor physical fitness into your 50s if you’re lucky, but eventually it’s going to catch up. And for those of us with lanky physiques, or other things we were born with that make sitting on a throne for hours-a-day a challenge, thats’s all-the-more true.

Which is why it was such a pleasure to have my friend Brandon Green of Drum Mechanics, fresh off a Drumeo shoot, back in the (virtual) 8020 studios.

Brandon - he won’t mince words - has a new fitness program specifically for drummers. (Which I’ll link below the published video on Monday.) And it was the perfect occasion to speak about the “whys” and “hows” of fitness for drummers.

Whereas during Brandon’s first appearance on the pod, we spoke more about things like posture and kit ergonomics, his second centered around what we do away from the kit. As I get older, it’s a subject I think about a lot. And as a “drum coach” I’ve got a bit of a vantage point to the issues drummers of all ages start to face when we “ratchet up” the time we’re spending behind the kit. I’ve referred a handful of students to Brandon because of injuries, so it’s no laughing matter.

Issues we touch in this conversation include…

• How specific training for drums differs from “bog standard”/general workouts.

• What happens when we age as players, and what do we need to be more mindful of.

• The importance of drumming fitness for women, and his specific advice.

• TRT, and related things, for men. (We do not shy away.)

Hope you enjoy the knowledge bombs as much as I did.

Why Good Drum Feel is So Hard

First things first - grab your transcription here.

A few years ago I made a video called “stop trying so hard to groove” (linked in the card in today’s video), in which I made the case that the advice “just feel it” has limits, since sometimes our perceptions in the moment aren’t accurate.

For a very quick example, many of us are susceptible to “temporal optical illusions”, a fancy way of saying that offbeats will feel slower than they are, and consecutive half notes will often feel faster. Only by “training” our perceptions can we reach a state where “just feeling it” produces reliable results.

But today we’re diving deeper into “feel” writ-large.

Because it’s not just metronomic accuracy. Nor is having the perfect hypothetical ability to perceive feel without any idea where to go. And in the video we examine a deceptively complex question: why is “feel” so hard?

I begin with an anecdote about when I was first learning drums - I had one of the books everybody studies, and when I played exercises from beginning to end without “messing up”, I got to move on. So the first definition of good feel is something like “the difference between playing a Steve Gadd transcription as a beginner with all the notes ‘right’ and what it sounds like when Steve does it.”

It’s here that you get into taste, and “just feeling it”. (Sorry, commenters against whom I went kinda hard.)

If you don’t know what it feels like to dance, you don’t even know what you’re chasing.

Of course, the next stage is to be able to play on the drums what’s in your head, then to make the audience feel what you’re feeling, and it’s here that all that metronome stuff is important.

But there’s a level above even that!

Because there are recordings in which you’re happy with how you sounded listening back to the playback after 5 minutes, but which you’d find “wanting” after 20 more years. There are those subtleties that take years to hear - like local accents.

That complete deep-dive is in today’s video.

Hope you enjoy!

Most Drummers Never Learn This Groove Concept

First things first - grab your transcription here.

How to make the case to the “just give me the groove” crowd that metric modulation is worth your trouble. Increasingly, I’m avoiding the temptation to assume everything is inherently interesting.

Why did the feeling of meter shifting beneath my feet first captivate me ages ago when I watched drummers like Ari Hoenig and Dan Weiss? Or listened to Standard Time Volume 1 with Wynton Marsallis and Jeff “Tain” Watts. And how can I encapsulate that feeling for an audience?

For starters, it’s a feeling that there are higher dimensions within time. I know that sounds woo, but for me the sensation was akin to possibilities I hadn’t realized existed unfolding. I then became fascinated with being able to hear this stuff.

Now, of course there are “higher order” metric modulations from the likes of Tigran Hamasyan and Vijey Iyer.

But even the boilerplate 3 to 4, 4 to 6, etc are fun.

And easier than you might think to learn!

And I’m not saying you’ll pull these out on a bar gig. But they’ll expand your sense of possibilities within rhythm. (And probably make your time better.)

Hope you enjoy!