Coordination CHALLENGE - Can You Play This Beat? (I'll Help You)

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Coordination Challenge Workbook

I like to create coordination exercises for impatient people.

I’ve long championed the somewhat controversial idea that exercises are useful in direct relation to their utility in real life.

Hence - abstract coordination exercises with zero resemblance to any real-world situations…you might as well be practicing stunt driving to improve your rock climbing.

Except…

Except.

When multimodal thinking is the point. For example, when I decided it would be cool to practice a 9-beat pattern with my feet, and play the Allan Dawson Rudimental Ritual over that (still in 4). That taught my brain a lot of unorthodox ways of hearing rhythm and orchestration, and I believe it’s a big reason why Nasheet Waits’ playing made sense to me when I encountered it later.

So it’s in that spirit that I offer this week’s lesson.

Does it bear a strong resemblance to anything you’re likely to play on a cruise ship, or in a wedding band. No.

Will it spark your brain to think creatively, and open up new forms of muscle memory which might themselves inspire more novel ways of negotiating everyday challenges?

Emphatically yes.

I got the idea from watching Steve Lyman’s Instagram videos, and imagining, as a thought exercise, what his nightmares must look like. There would be flams, there would be related rates, and there would be ride cymbal.

Next I decided to throw in a decidedly-8020 approach to coordinated independence: a beat you can’t “fake” unless your limbs are truly occurring together when they’re supposed to be.

Enjoy this one!

The Top 10 Ways to Get Fired From a Gig

Ever notice that "good clean fun" hardly ever means good or clean?

I've heard it used to refer to keg stands, sloppy rudiments, and murder.

So maybe I should retitle this "whatever happened to slightly bad-taste humor". I've been jonesing to make a lesson on how to get fired ever since some music friends and I invented the game "where's one, motherf###er" in 2009.

And by "some music friends and I", I mean "I, to the annoyance of my musician friends".

Being able to throw people off the beat while keeping it in my head used to be my definition of Good Clean Fun. And it's not like it's totally without precedent. See: Keith Jarrett trio, Chick Corea trio, Walter Smith Live in Paris, The Entire Gilad Hekselman canon, any time Justin Brown and Joe Infinity Sanders play together.

Oh, and Nate Wood and Tigran.

And the handy part about a good clean game of "where's one" is it segues perfectly into this week's topic: getting fired from gigs.

Getting fired is a bit of an abstraction for me since, A: I haven't depended on a "call back" since 2010. (A year after I invented the game. Daaaamn - conspiracy theory...)

Oh, and...B: even before then, you didn't really get "fired" from gigs in my circles, you just "didn't get called for the next thing".

But I can say safely that any "tears" I was going to cry as a result of getting fired, I'd probably cried out by 2009, and now it's all upside.

Which means I can safely teach you two of the beat displacement games that are fun if you too want to play stoicism games with your current portfolio of gigs...

...and relay to you the portfolio of "getting fired" stories from my good subscribers on YouTube, where people have been fired for reasons I'd never even heard of, including one guy who's lucky he's not a registered s#x @ffender by now. (Do the funky letters really stop email filters? I'm skeptical - seems like a "wives' tale". Meh I'll try it.)

And, just in time, I'll relate a couple of real-life "hard lessons" I had to learn the...um...."hard way".

I give you, This Week's Lesson: The Top 10 Ways to Get Fired From a Gig.

Ten surprising things about playing the drums in New York

So over the years I’ve kept getting the same questions:

“Why don’t you change your snare head?”

“Why don’t you repaint your wall/clean your door?”

“Why don’t you slap new heads on ‘your’ kit?”

“Why don’t you use a wing nut on your cymbal stand?”

It’s worse than that. Not only haven’t I changed the heads on the shared drum kit that featured in so many of my videos...

...I take a perverse pleasure in playing it exactly as I found it. Like found-object art.

And I’m not alone.

If you haven’t encountered them in the wild, New York drummers come across as an odd bunch, with idiosyncratic behaviors. Until you live here for a couple of years, then you’ll understand.

In suburbia, where I grew up, space is abundant, parking is convenient and cheap, people live in single family homes with distance between, cars are cheap to fuel and insure, and there’s always more time than you need.

In such an environment, a “utopian” drum culture evolves.

People play elaborate kits with permanent mic set-ups. Everybody plays their own kit, which is exquisitely maintained, with well-tuned new heads.

And almost every suburban drum YouTuber has a dedicated room in their home, which they’ve painted, decorated, and essentially turned into a professionally lit television studio.

The forces that force New Yorkers to evolve differently come from a few directions.

As living space is scarce and expensive, and neighbors just a wall away in the same building, home studios are rarer. Most everybody rents shared practice studios, a habit we started developing in music school.

Cymbal stands are missing wing nuts because they’re not necessary enough for anybody to put in an effort that outweighs the ease with which they can cavalierly be stolen or misplaced.

Nobody changes the heads because they don’t want to be the one guy stuck buying heads everybody else is going to use and abuse.

Both in practice studios and on gigs, drummers develop an appreciation for anything that allows them to carry less, spend less time setting up and tearing down, and leave less personal equipment on the kit for others to steal, abuse, or complain about. (In just the last 2 days of setting up and tearing down at my new studio I decided changing the cymbals and hats on the house kit “wasn’t worth it”, and started playing the house ones.)

Whereas in the suburbs having a modern-drummer-cover-ready kit for a gig is a flex, in the city playing somebody else’s ancient four-piece that hasn’t had a head change since the Ford administration and making it sound great is often more respected.

Welcome to the weird and wonderful world of New York drumming, in this week’s video.

The REAL Difference Between Good Drummers and Mediocre Ones

At times, when I flatter myself, I think I’m a heterodox thinker.

In reality, I’m a small-time YouTuber with no gigs.

But let’s just pretend anything I say is important. Many of my favorite heterodox thinkers have a “signature issue”. For Nassim Taleb, it’s probably “trust risk models less and skin-in-the-game more.” For Daniel Schmachtenberger it’s positive-sum dynamics and “Game B.” For Elon Musk it’s “actually we can go to Mars and have electric cars.” For Rob Wolff, it was “hang on - what if the food pyramid is actually making us unhealthier.”

And for me, to the degree I have a tiny platform where people care about anything I say, it’s “hierarchies in ability are real, and beginners aren’t able to perceive all the ways in which good drummers are better than they are.”

It’s in that spirit that I “continue to make the same video,” to a degree.

Last August I made a video called Five Subtle Ways Pros Can Tell if a Drummer’s “Legit”.

In it, I argued for…well…five…lessons I’d learned over the years about what really separates good drummers from mediocre ones.

Sure - there are obvious things. Anybody can tell Vinnie Colauita is better than I am.

But everybody already knows that stuff. I was trying to advance the conversation.

The five things I argued for were kit control - the ability to adapt to any kit instead of rushing or dragging because the kick pedal feels different, learning tunes quickly, “lock-up” - the ability to play together with a band, the ability to catch figures without losing the groove, and the ability to “keep the 1”, even in complex music.

I guess I wasn’t fully prepared for the scope of the “push back”.

“Who are you to say who’s good and who isn’t?”

Even “there’s no good or bad”.

So I feel like I keep making a tighter loop with this argument.

The next time out of the gate, I had beginner drum covers: novice bands covering famous recordings of great drummers. By setting the two side-by-side and controlling for “chops”, could you tease out some of the differences?

I thought so.

But there were still naysayers.

“It’s the recording quality. If the novices had access to the same mics and mix, they’d sound as good as the ‘pros’.”

Next weapon: bootlegs of pros. By watching great drummers with their bands from things like iPhone recordings, I reasoned, we could control for recording quality.

Think that stopped them?

“Of course the ‘novice’ drummer doesn’t sound as good. He’s playing with beginners. If he were in a better band, he’d sound better.”

That’s why: great-drummers-sitting-in.

Will that end the argument, or will I have to continue making iterated versions of this video?

I’m not naive. But, as I say in the video, there are worse things to be than the “secret ways to get good” guy.

Anyway, hope you enjoy.