Drum Like Steve Gadd

Gadd - zooks!

It’s an afternoon with the Gadd - fly.

You know what they say: thank…

Puns aside, the Gaddfather has been front-of-mind since the beginning of the year, when I started looking into the Boogada.

One doesn’t simply disregard the Aja solo in considering that tradition. So I’d had it - and the Manhattan School of Music Clinic where Gadd explains the vocabulary - seared into my brain.

And, what-do-you-know, I started hearing “Gadd-esque” things in my head while walking down the street. Doing the dishes.

I’d chafe to get back to the studio so I could see if what I was hearing would really work on the drums. So, I decided to make you, the good people of the internet, a video on it.

Far from force-feeding myself some Gadd licks I could regurgitate, this is a video I couldn’t not make, given how much Gadd vocabulary is bubbling up emergently in my playing.

Anyway, hope you enjoy!

Oh - and grab your transcription here.

I Said Good Day 😜

Can I Beat Drumeo's Timing Challenge?

It’s an urban myth that I have any beef with Drumeo. In 2015 or so, I published a video in which I parodied Jared Falk’s one-handed-roll video, and several years later a video that was a play on a Drumeo title - “Hard Beats That Sound Easy” instead of “Easy Beats That Sound Hard”.

It’s true, my rabble-rousing instincts are probably slightly higher on the mixing board that completely optimal not to ruffle any feathers, but from me to Drumeo, it’s always been love. From featuring many of my friends and quite frankly launching a few careers, to epic videos like Thomas Pridgen’s, to recent stuff like Larnell playing Enter Sandman (I need to hear him with real Metalica now)…I’ve always been a steady consumer of what Drumeo is doing.

All of which is probably to “protest too much” to an objection I may not even face: “why are you doing another video about Drumeo?!?”

Well, have you seen the timing challenge video they just put out? Play creatively with the metronome in weird places without losing the click?

How am I not supposed to respond to that? Obviously, I’m a moth-to-a-flame. It’s the 80/20 bat signal. As I say in the video, they could’ve just sent me an email.

Why?

I’ve been talking about weird metronome placements on this channel for the better part of a decade. And of course it all began with my own sh##ty timekeeping, which was hindering my career at around the time they invented the YouTube.

So, whether I’m actually any good, after all these years, at weird metronome placements, remains to be seen. But I’ve sure been talking a good game about it.

So in this video, I put my moey where my mouth has been. Can the self-proclaimed “inventor of weird metronome stuff” (and of course I jest because plenty of drummers before me have talked about this stuff) handle the Drumeo challenge?

You’ll have to watch the video and judge for yourself.

3 Reasons Your Drum Feels Sucks (And What to Do)

Why is good feel on the drums so rare, even after we’ve basically built a religion around it?

You can’t read an article or watch an interview without hearing the importance of feel.

Steve Gadd

Steve Jordan

Bonham

Bernard

Jeff

Clyde

Ziggy

But - thought experiment: if you were putting up flyers for a drummer for your band, what percentage of the people who called you would have an amazing feel?

My quick back-of-the-napkin math says less than 10%. (I haven’t listened to auditions for drummers for my own bands, of course, but I’ve been one of the people auditioning, listening to others play, and I’ve listened to auditions for other things. Plus I’ve walked down the halls of New York practice spaces for the better part of 15 years.)

My conclusion? We don’t actually care about it as much as we claim to. When the lights are on, and the camera is recording, we talk a good game about feel, but behind closed doors? When it’s just us and the drumkit, and noone will ever know?

I think we think we’re already better at it than we really are, and I think we secretly think chops are more important.

But all it takes is a couple of “first takes” recording ourselves along with a tune to realize chops are meaningless if our beat placement is wack. And to hear the delta between the way we think we sound, and the way we reeeeeally sound.

And many-a-time, after having that revelation, people will wonder “how do I get better at this?”

Well, one way is to increase your sensitivity to where you’re placing your beats. One way, which I’ll discuss next week, is by playing simple beats and just “zooming in” on your beat placement with your attention. Kind of like meditating. Which is time consuming.

But there is another way. Isolate and exaggerate the weakness, so you can target it.

And it’s in this lesson that I’ll show you how I do that.

Hope you enjoy.

Boogadas - A Jazz Lick That Revolutionized Rock Drumming

First things first - grab your transcription here.

John Bonham didn't invent "his most famous lick".

He would have been honest if you'd asked him. The boogada, that tom sweep that became near-ubiquitous, from Steve Gadd, to Neil Peart, to Thomas Pridgen, to Eric Moore, was not a Bonham invention.

"But hang on," you're saying...

"I hear Bonzo play that before anybody else in rock. There were rock drummers before, then there was Bonham."

Fair enough. Operative word "rock".

Because Bonham was an avid jazz fan.

That "slow shuffle" in the chorus of Dazed and Confused? Legend has it, that's from Max Roach's The Drum Also Waltzes.

And the most famous lick in all of rock drumming?

From jazz drummers in general, Max Roach in particular.

In today's video, I'll trace the origins of the Boogada, show you how to play some of the most popular Bonham and Gadd interpretations, and demonstrate some modern "twists" that I've developed.

Hope you enjoy, and if you do, please share and leave a comment!