That Time I Learned I Sucked at The Drums

Ahoy!

I'm back with another free lesson, and this week it's a little philosophy/self-talk.

Have you heard the term "growth mindset"?

It sounds really good on a button or a bumper sticker. "I'm not going to let my ego get involved. I'm not going to get attached to how good I am. I'm only interested in learning."

Nice. If you're a complete beginner, or a wisened veteran, you can maybe pull that off.

If you're anywhere in "the dip" - which is to say anything other than a total beginner or world-beater, good luck with that.

With drums, I'm currently in a spot where I'm surprised by how bad I am less frequently these days. Maybe that's one definition of success. A reasonably clear picture of how you sound to others.

In jiujitsu, however...damn.

As you'll see in [the video], my friend Hardcore is able to crush me like a bug. And he's half my size. You just see me flopping around like a suffocating fish.

And here's the surprising thing: I felt pretty good in that roll.

Today's video is about the rude awakenings we get when we think we're at a certain level, then we see some tape that...knocks us back down to earth.

And that moment came for me with drums in a big way circa 2010/2011.

As I explain in the video, I'd already been playing gigs, I'd long since graduated from music school, but I didn't know why I wasn't getting called more often blah blah. Until I heard a couple of recordings that really drove it home.

When you record yourself with a band, it's easier to "hide". Other musicians will compensate for you, and if the overall product isn't stellar, it's pretty easy to blame on the ensemble/room acoustics/etc. This explains how somebody can gig for a decade, and listen to gig tapes, and not know there's anything wrong.

But try to play a drum cover, and all of a sudden you hear every single 16th that's not lining up with the band, or the original drummer, who, of course, are not adjusting to you.

Such was my experience. And, as I explain in the video, I ran myself a bath and sat in it the whole afternoon. It felt horrible.

But the only out is through. I eventually grappled with my pain, embraced the "suck", and used it to try to improve.

This video is about how you can do the same.

Hope you enjoy!

What would pros think of your jazz playing?

Ever wonder what faculty members at Berklee, or MSM, or Juilliard, or NYU, would be listening for if you played jazz drums for them?

Ever wonder, if you sat in at Smalls after one of your jazz heroes, what he or she would be listening to to judge your jazz playing?

Well, of course, it’s impossible to know exactly.

Everybody’s different and values things differently. Plus, if there’s a way to read minds if hasn’t made its way to me yet.

But we can make educated guesses.

I can judge based on what past teachers have told me, and based on the things I learned to value more highly in the process of becoming a better drummer. And I think we can get pretty close.

Many of these things are, by definition, subtle. If we knew what they were we’d probably be better.

But over the years of listening to jazz drummers who have the bare minimum package to swing and those still proto…that point (and there’s nothing wrong with that)…

…one develops an intuition. One overhears others sitting on an audition panel quip “if I could just hear one person xyz before the end of the day, my faith in humanity won’t be utterly destroyed.”

(Audition panels are a grind.)

If you’re an aspiring jazz drummer, wouldn’t you like to know what “xyz” is?

In this video, I’ll tell you.

Five subtle sings pros listen to to determine whether or not a jazz drummer is legit.

Watch it here.

See you soon,

N

3 Fills for Purdie Shuffles

Grab your transcription here!

Greetings!

Today I bring you three easy sounding fills for purdie shuffles, “that sound hard”.

The whole “easy thing that sounds hard” thing isn’t usually my jam, but in this case “hard” really means “interesting”.

The usual fills we pull out in triplet or sextuplet situations are boring for a couple of reasons: predictable phrasing, and predictable orchestration. I like to begin a lot of my fills on the snare and hats, and practice orchestrating them creatively, so that’s the genesis of these 3.

The first 2 are just specific patterns you can play on various parts of the kit, or on various parts of the beat…

…but the third is more like “glue” - just a simple pattern to allow combinations of the previous two. I know once you mess with these a little, you’ll start having fun and making some new shapes.

Hope you enjoy!

The Best Jazz Tunes for Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced Drummers

This week’s lesson is a highly-requested one.

Quite often, people ask me “what jazz tunes should I learn?” And there are thousands to choose from, from musical classics of Cole Porter and Johnny Mercer, to big band suites from Duke Ellington, to Charlie Parker reworks of famous songs, to the originals of everybody from Dizzy to Monk. (Not to mention the “modern classics” I did a whole video about.)

The obvious answer is “whichever tunes inspire you to play, and fire you up to learn fastest”. Which is still an answer I’d give, but I’d hedge a little with this: “also, probably learn the tunes people are most likely to call at jam sessions.”

It’s not about prestige, or bragging points, though if you can make it through these tunes you’ll certainly get a little of that. On a basic level, if you want to play jazz with other humans, in a jazz scene, much less at music school, it helps to know the canon everybody’s going to be drawing from in addition to everything else you think is cool/that inspires you.

Once I had the nine tunes I’ll discuss in this video under my belt, it became fun to start suggesting other tunes I’d heard on various records: Boo Boo’s Birthday, Time After Time, Blue in Green, Cheek to Cheek, etc.

So it’s in that spirit that I’m going to recommend these nine tunes: what I’d classify as the 3 most commonly-called in my experience in New York’s public and private jam sessions, at each of the 3 levels - beginner, intermediate, and advanced.

A quick word about what makes a jazz tune “hard”: none of these is exactly “movie hard”, the way the Caravan arrangement in Whiplash appears to be (or something like Gary Smulyan’s Lickety Split is in real life) - i.e. with tons of unpredictable figures and changing meters. The “hardness” of a jazz standard comes from the fact that you have to play the form reliably, and keep the exact number of sections/bars/harmonies in your head while the soloist is playing over them, often taking liberties with phrasing, etc.

In a word - can you keep the form in Stablemates when Aaron Goldberg intentionally plays a harmonic change 2 bars early, just for fun?

(That’s why I also chafe at the trope that drummers don’t know harmony. Ask me to whistle an unaccompanied solo over any of these sometime. Or at the very least hum a bass line. And I’m not unique. Any jazz drummer worth his/her salt knows these forms deeply.)

So the “beginner” catalogue is tunes that are pretty easy for a beginner to play over, with a soloist, without losing the beat or the form.

And as they get more “advanced”, they require a more and more experienced drummer not to get lost.

I had a ton of fun making this one, and I hope you enjoy.