I Wish Someone Had Told Me This About Double Stoke Rolls

First things first - grab your free transcription here.

It’s often the case that when we seek to understand an abstract concept, we see lots of differing opinions among “experts”. Plenty of great drummers have good double stroke rolls, so why is it that opinions vary so widely on how to teach/learn them?

That could extend to videos in which the presenter has some unorthodox learning method. Like me in the thumbnail for this week’s video. “What are the odds that all the great drummers throughout history, from Papa Jo to Tony Williams to modern greats all did this thing, and this one random guy is going to come up with something new or novel in the approach. I guess they were all wrong?”

Such is the question in my head whenever I seek to deconstruct a physical movement.

To start with, those great drummers weren’t wrong. If you can do it, there’s not much more to say. The issue comes with communication.

Imagine there’s a feeling of double strokes being right. We don’t have telepathy or Neurolink, so I can’t connect a cable from my brain to your brain to incept you with the feeling. So I have to do the next best thing: use words, and visuals.

Double strokes, and hand technique in general is especially difficult, because the movements are small, and they’re often hidden from view, inside the hand. (As opposed to, say, a golf swing.) So visuals only get you so far.

In my opinion, much of drum instruction tackles this problem by getting the student “in the territory” of correctness, then assuming if they just add reps, they’ll eventually get it.

In that paradigm, this video is just an attempt to geolocate that neighborhood more precisely. i.e. with this method, you’ll need hopefully less time to get the feeling for yourself.

We do that by focussing on the hardest part of the double stroke - what’s actually happening in the bounced double - and slowing it down, to almost infinity. In that region, the drop-catch mechanics that tons of great drummers do without thinking, but which Gordy Knudtson pointed out most effectively, are our key.

If we can increase the time between the first and the second double to infinity, we solve the most pernicious problems of double strokes: the evenness between strokes without forcing it, and the “dead zone” between articulating and bouncing.

Come with me on the journey;)

Hope you enjoy!

Pros Use This For More Exciting Drum Fills - Do You?

First things first - grab your free transcription here.

We spill a lot of ink and occupy gigabytes of SD cards talking about “secrets of pro drummers”, like subtle stickings that you wouldn’t see are the same unless you slowed them down, or weird “below-the-surface” muscle memory stuff you won’t understand until you feel it.

Today’s video is not about that. Today’s video is about something everybody sees great drummers do every day, then promptly forgets about when we go back to our own drumming.

I’m talking about bog-standard, stupid-simple, boilerplate, block-and-tackle subdivision changes.

Like, “use a sextuplet for once Seamus! It won’t kill ya!”

Then Seamus screams “nevaaaaaaaah!” Across his pint, then steps out into the rain and shuffles away alone, to a sad violin soundtrack. And scene. I’d like to apologize for any negative Irish stereotypes in this vignette.

But I bet if you added up the variety of subdivisions our favorite drummers use in their improvisation and compared it to the average drummer, they’re doing it way more. And I’m not saying “spam” it. Just, it’s like we all have an obvious musical tool, and they use it, and we always forget.

Why?

Well beyond simple “this is how I’ve always done it” inertia, I can think of 3 reasons. 3 reasons we’ll try to “de-claw” in this video:

• They seem faster, which is “scury”.

• They have a base of 3 or 6 instead of 2/4/8, so we worry our existing ideas won’t work.

• We worry we’ll get lost with the counting.

Beyond this, there’s also one “secret” reason people don’t think about, but which I think is actually the biggest issue. But you have to watch the video to hear about it. Woooooo.

But in all seriousness, let’s normalize the musical use of subdivision. We wouldn’t talk in monotone, at the same speed always. So why not make our playing more fluid, so we can make better music?

Hope you enjoy!

Is The Metronome Hurting Your Drumming?

First things first - grab your free transcription here.

Is the metronome hurting your time?

Like many things, I think there’s an “adult” and a “pre-school” version of this discussion.

I don’t spend much time entertaining the suggestion, for instance, that a metronome “kills your natural, human feel”. The reality, in my opinion, is that our inherited time perception instincts are badly calibrated to produce danceability, filled with distortions as they are.

We rush offbeats, hemiolas, double time, and most syncopation, while we drag downbeats or sparse rhythms.

What’s more, the “natural” rhythms many cite as examples of our “innate human timekeeping” - take folkloric drumming, for example - result less from anything innate and more from decades of training, beginning in early childhood.

The “natural”/”innate” timekeeping we’re born with mostly results in boring, weighty, unreliable, at-times-frantic playing. Not very danceable.

So we use the metronome to train our perceptions so our groove listening back to our own recordings matches our perceptions in the moment/as we play. (And play along with recordings to capture that “loose”/”human” feel I argue is the result of years of training and refinement.)

But there’s an “adult” version of the argument. Can the metronome be a crutch?

Absolutely.

At first, simply because we use it on quarters for too long, and only learn to “follow”, but not to “lead”. (Plus it becomes easier to ignore.) That’s the reason for unorthodox placements like 16th offbeats and beat “4”.

But eventually, because we can become used to having it accompany us in any capacity.

So - advanced players only, use with a grain of salt. But yes - sometimes it is important to turn the metronome off and rekindle your trust of your own timekeeping. It’s something I’ve been doing increasingly lately.

For the whole in-depth argument, you’ll want to watch the video.

Hope you enjoy!

If You Don't Know This Rhythm You Won't Understand Modern Drumming

First things first - grab your free transcription here.

Watch enough music and you start to notice patterns.

And the pattern that inspired today’s video was hard to ignore.

There’s this…rhythm…that underpins so much of modern drumming, and modern music. It satisfies my two major conditions to be considered “a thing”:

• 30 years ago and further back, you hardly heard it

• It’s near-ubiquitous today

Just a few examples:

What About Me, by Snarky Puppy

The Grid, by Tigran

A bunch of the prog rock catalogue, including Periphery

And I’m sure once you know what I’m talking about, that you’ll think of tons more.

It’s this syncopated, serpentine rhythm that’s hard to pin down. It feels like it should be “hemiola”, or cycling groups of 3 over the barline, but it’s not.

The answer?

5.

Not quintuplets, necessarily. Just groups of 5 notes against a quarter note.

If you’re in 5/4, than your rhythm will cycle neatly. If you’re in other meters, we need some simple math.

But that’s what you’re hearing.

Two of my favorite examples are What About Me - the chorus and subsequent drum solo section - and a VF Jams ear-worm with Devon Taylor. (Both featured in the video.)

But there’s also Tigran’s The Grid, and Dracul Gras by Periphery.

In this video, we’ll delve into 3 facets:

• Why is this suddenly everywhere (my hypothesis is musicians get bored with stuff)

• How do we play it in the simplest terms

• How do we use it practically over normal meters (and what are those song examples doing)

Once you get this pattern in your ear, modern music and modern drumming will make a lot more sense, and you might even hear some of these ideas in your own playing!

Hope you enjoy!