Could You Do The Gig: Erykah Badu

We’ve all got our “bucket list” of amazing artists we’d drop everything and give notice at our jobs to play with if they called. The Police, Soundgarden, Tigran, etc.

And this isn’t as far-fetched situation as you might think, especially for elite drummers like J.P. Bouvet, who cataloged his subbing with Periphery in his vlog, nor session/tour go-tos like Josh Freese, Steve Jordan, or Dave Elitch.

But it is a little far-fetched for us.

But that doesn’t mean we can’t indulge in the fantasy. We’ve just finished dinner. We’re settling down to watch an episode of Game of Thrones (a timely reference again ;), and suddenly the phone rings, and it’s…

Well, this week, for the inaugural installment of “Could You Do The Gig”, it’s Erykah.

And that’s no coincidence, because Erykah, particularly VH1 Soul/Chris Dave-era Erykah, is probably my number-one dream gig. Which doesn’t mean it would be easy.

Erykah is also a good first artist to feature on the 80/20 channel, because the thing that make her music difficult are the “pro skills” - the less than obvious stuff I detailed in my “5 ways pros can tell if a drummer’s legit” video. Stuff like learning songs quickly, locking up with the rest of the rhythm section, following non-verbal cues (and verbal ones), not tensing up onstage, etc.

Plus the whole “parking space” thing, for which I want to give credit to my friend Ian Allison’s friend Steve Goold. (I’m planning to do a whole video on the parking space soon and hopefully Steve will let me interview him.)

But yea - the parking space. On slow songs like Other Side of The Game and Tyrone, that parking space is hella-wide, and Erykah’s drummers - in particular Charles “Poogie” Bell on the live versions - parked that backbeat right in the center on every beat. That’s tough.

For this installment, I chose 3 iconic Erykah songs - two from the Live album with Poogie, one from the VH1 Soul show with Chris Dave.

How did I do? Think I could do the gig? And how would you do? Could you do the gig?

Check out the video to find out.

Enjoy!

The Joel Turcotte Lick That Nearly Broke Instagram

Anybody who’s been on drum Instagram in the last decade is probably familiar with Joel Turcotte, and if you’re not, you should be.

Not only is Joel a funny, irreverent, and entertaining personality, he brings this same approach to the drums.

Last week, Joel was in town on one of the last legs of a tour, so he swung by 80/20 HQ. So I handed him sticks, mic’d him up, sat him behind the drums, turned a camera on, and let things roll.

What followed was nearly 3 hours of drums and conversation. But today’s video is about just a tiny fraction of that material. When Joel was showing me a lick he’d been working on, I happened to pull out my phone and post it to Instagram.

I thought people would be excited to see Joel, but I didn’t realize just how excited they’d be. The video got a TON of comments and support, and many people (obviously) wanted to know how to play the lick.

Luckily, I asked Joel to slow it down, and demonstrate what we was doing.

In this video, Joel “guest teaches” you his lick, with me jumping in to transcribe things and explain further…

…then I “go rogue” with one of Joel’s concepts, and try to develop something of my own.

Hope you enjoy!

Playing in Time - The "Secret" of Great Groove Drummers Like Steve Jordan

First things first - if you want the complete Playing In Time video, free to you as a subscriber, check it out here.

What exactly “pocket” is has been the subject of vigorous debate in my comments lately, with many people taking the opinion that the great drummers are simply “born with it”, and others that the only way to develop a great feel is to…”feel it”.

While there’s doubtless truth in both takes, as usual I’m approaching things from the standpoint of “what’s the most practical way to improve your pocket in the direction of a Steve Jordan, a Steve Gadd, a Jeff Porcaro, a Bernard Purdie or a Brian Blade if you’re an ‘average’ drummer like me?”

And in my experience, it’s metronome displacement. If you’re advanced enough. (Otherwise, as others have said, it’s perfectly fine to place the click on the downbeats.) It’s here that the final controversy emerges: “won’t I be all up in my head instead of feeling the beat if I practice this way?”

Precisely the opposite.

Just like practicing field stripping a weapon 1,000 times means (I’m told) you can do it half asleep, in the back of a Jeep on a dirt road, in the dark, so practicing with the metronome on offbeats means when it’s time to gig, you won’t have to think about it. You’ll train your ears to hear time more like it sounds to bystanders and on recordings, and compensate for our human tendencies to mis-perceive time in the moment, as we’re playing.

Way more in the lesson, but expect to discover:

• How to work up to the offbeat exercise from the Drumeo lesson

• The two reasons metronome displacement is good for an advanced enough player

• The REAL difference betwen macro and micro time

Enjoy this one!

What It's Like to Record at Drumeo (And How I Did It)

First things first - if you haven’t seen the Original/Protptype drumeo video, check it out here.

While over the years a decent number of YouTubers have collaborated with Drumeo, I guess I'm lucky that so far noone has vlogged the experience.

So it was that it fell to me - reluctant/amateur Casey Neistat to document things. To be Your Man On The Inside.

And, as I say in the video, "vlogging ain't easy". It's not like ten years ago, when people would look shocked if you pulled out a camera and started talking to it in public Today, it mostly just elicits eye-rolls - "Oh, you're one of those guys."

"Outtake" moments include my lens cap falling off and rolling down the long aisle of an aircraft, for everyone's amusement, while taking off from Laguardia.

But I made it, and I managed to smuggle the footage out with me.

Expect to discover:

• What it actually looks like inside Drumeo HQ and what the studio looks like

• What it's like to work with them

• How I got the gig in the first place

• Why Montreal in March is no bueno

Hope you enjoy!