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!

Bruce Becker on Buddy Rich, Hand Physics, and What Makes Great Teachers

Posture and gesture. Direct drive vs high gears. Bone density.

If those sound familiar but slightly bizarro, how about these: microtime. Minimum effective beat. Stick stall.

If you’re picking up that they’re all metaphors to help bridge the fundamental gap in teaching drums - that a student can never directly feel what I feel and vice versa - you’re in the ballpark. The latter set, or course, are some of mine. The former are those of this week’s podcast guest, one Mr. Bruce Becker.

Renowned for teaching the likes of David Garibaldi among others, and for carrying the torch or Freddy Gruber, Becker is among the most respected sages of drum hand technique still with us. When I learned I’d have the opportunity to speak to Bruce, I of course wanted to ask him things like…

• what separates great teachers from great players

• what was it like for him the first time he saw a concept he’d innovated change the playing of a student

• when did drum hand technique reach maturity, and what’s changed since then

• how would you evaluate a new approach - i.e. what’s the “would it work in the ring” for hand technique

But I also wanted to see how he’d evaluate my stuff, so he graciously agreed to review a recent video of mine. (I explained how much Gordy Knudtson had evolved my approach last year.)

It was there that the shop talk and metaphors started. I was delighted that we had some overlap - the concept of “traction” as a metaphor for when your hand and fingers are “in phase” with the energy generated by the bounce of the stick, for instance.

I loved his concept of “direct drive” vs “gears” for the difference between “low and slow” strokes, which are mostly initiated with the wrist and begin and end with the butt of the stick in contact with the heel of the hand, and any regime in which the stick is in “perpetual motion” between the elasticity of the fingers and the energy of the bounce. (My slightly inferior analogy was “on the ground” vs “in flight”.)

To use a jiujitsu analogy, it was like flow-rolling with a master.

You’ll also see in the title that Bruce has a quite a soft-spot for Buddy Rich - as much as admitting he believes Rich to be beginning of the “diminishing returns” era of hand technique, i.e. the last of the Big Innovators - and some pointed thoughts about what separates great teachers from mediocre ones.

If you’ve ever been interested in thy physics of hands, I know you’ll enjoy this episode!