The Tony Williams Take That You Might Not Like

First things first - grab your transcription here.

And, until Thursday the 24th at midnight, get your membership to JP Bouvet Method here, using the code SaveAnnualJul25 to get $100 off an annual subscription, or SaveMonthlyJul25 to get 50% off your monthly sub for the first 6 months.

We revere Tony Williams. Drum royalty. One of the true greats of jazz drums, nay drums writ large. Real ones know. Everybody from Vinnie Colauita to Mike Mitchell credits Tony for quantum-leaping the genre. His performance are masterclasses in raw emotion balanced with control.

And that’s exactly why this controversial hot take from a clinic in 1985 might rub you the wrong way. Because it’s about the control side of “emotion balanced with control”.

First off, I love all my commenters. And you know what comes with a “but”, and the “but” is that there’s a sizable contingent I like to call the “just feelers”. Who are probably directionally right if they’re giving advice to overly-cerebral drummers. “This is supposed to feel good. It’s supposed to happen in your guts; not your brain.”

But that last clause needs another word. “Not just your brain.”

Because at least Tony Williams thought control was important. That raw emotion was mostly interesting in relationship to control. That he didn’t want to be “reeeeally hoping something worked”. He wanted to know for sure. And that’s not going to sit well with everybody.

Because it’s one thing if I say “practice, you guys. Control is important.”

You can dismiss me as “too up in his head”/”too cerebral”. But Tony?

But for anyone tempted to dismiss the “just feelers” entirely, they have at least half the equation too.

This stuff is usually much easier to see when we take it out of the realm of music. Do we hope pilots and astronauts have a good “seat of the pants”/”stick and rudder” sense of what to do, and good aviating instincts? Of course!

Do we think those develop without years of study and training?

How about doctors?

My favorite type of hot take is one that’s not really that controversial once you look into, but which still gets people up in arms. It’s like an underpriced stock. Anyway, my hot take on this hot Wednesday afternoon is that you need both the cerebral - the control - and the rawness - the emotion.

And “stick around” for when I reveal why that’s like golf.

At any rate, hope you enjoy!

Is The Internet Ruining Drumming?

First things first - grab your transcription here.

And, until Friday at midnight, get your membership to JP Bouvet Method here, using the code SaveAnnual to get $100 off an annual subscription, or SaveMonthly to get 50% off your monthly sub for the first 6 months.

The above paragraph is not unrelated to today’s subject, because I consider him one of the good things that’s resulted for drummers due to the internet.

This is a subject everybody has an opinion on, which I don’t think anybody’s addressed head-on. We touch it through proxies, like “modern drumming”, and “how to make a living as a musician these days”. But it’s engendered such strong opinions, I thought it deserved a video all its own.

Part of the reason is I want people to own “the internet has made the world worse for drummers” if that’s what they really believe.

20 years ago - heck, 15 years ago - we had a world in which if you wanted to watch a great drummer play, you needed to rent a DVD of them, or go see them live. In which if you wanted a lesson with a great teacher, you needed to travel to them, or go to music school. In which if you wanted a career in music, you needed to impress a gatekeeper, or several gatekeepers.

In was a world in which sponsors, drum magazines, music schools, agents, and record labels held most of the power, and could name their price.

But did all the work required give us something in return?

Did we appreciate those performances more if we needed to pay for a CD or a live concert in order to hear them? Did we appreciate the lessons more if we needed to pay an individual? Did the small number of “anointed ones” in the orbit of the gatekeepers enjoy better careers than most musicians have today?

Now, of course, we have a world with everything at our fingertips. Any video of any drummer, any lesson on any subject, and also access to an audience for anybody willing to put in the hours “getting good” - or at least getting entertaining - and has that made things better?

Has it made the world more “fast food”? Where instead of whole performances we appreciate only isolated solos, and it that warping the musical instincts of young drummers? Are the algorithms that show us more and more cool solos once we watch one contributing to a flattening of musical variety?

Are the ubiquitous impressive physical feats, like one-handed single strokes and impossible blast beats making everybody feel worse about their own playing?

And has the move from record-based payment to sponsored posts and patreons pulled the rug out from under the working “journeyman” players, forcing them to either “eat tide pods for views” or get a job for Uber Eats?

It’s far from a simple “up or down” picture. And in today’s video, I’ll do my best to give both sides a fair hearing. They you can decide!

Hope you enjoy!

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!