This Will Revolutionize Your Drumming, But You Might Hate It

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There’s that old saying: “knowing the path and walking the path are 2 different things.”

I’m fond of another: “I said simple. Not easy.”

Sometimes the solution to our blockers is in plain sight. We just don’t want to do it.

Today, I’m going to make the case to you that, if you can get over the initial trepidation and bore, yes, you actually do want to do it.

For starters, because agnostic to your level, it’s one of the most powerful exercises to help your playing across-the-board.

But also because, once you get going with this, it’s actually quite meditative.

I’m talking about slow practice. Like, absurdly slow. So slow it feels like an eternity between notes. So slow that when you use a metronome, you have to keep remembering not to rush.

So - why do we do this?

I’ve often said great drummers do 3 things differently from mediocre ones. Taking speed, flashiness, etc totally out of the equation. These are things that the most minimal groove players and Eloy Casagrande have in common.

1. Control of timing - note placement.

2. Control of sound - stick height differentiation, “zones” on drums, “vertical spacing”, etc.

3. Control of ideas - always within the protective “improv bubble” where it feels like they can’t play a wrong idea.

And I’ve complained that, in my travels, the average drummer mostly doesn’t grasp how insanely better than most of us great drummers are at the first 2. (Well, all 3, but this exercise deals primarily with the first 2.)

Timing and sound control are like the “secret gravity” of great drummers. The hidden matrix giving your ideas snap and danceability.

And there’s simply no better way to ingrain these than absurdly-slow practice.

You could make a spreadsheet of all the places your notes are early or late on the grid, and practice them one-by-one, and try to remember “on the 3rd 16th, I’m always 2 milliseconds ahead, so I have to compensate”…

…or you could simply put yourself in a context where you can tell intuitively the difference between on-the-grid and not, and (much easier) just let your subconscious bootstrap all the subtle shifts to get you grooving.

At any rate, this video explores the “why”, “what” and “how” of The Cult of Slow Practice. And I hope you’ll join me out on this branch.

P.S. did you know you can sign up to be the first to hear when we open up new slots for Impossible to Fail, my flagship 1:1 coaching program? Just click here to sign up for the waitlist.

How One Song Became The Standard to Measure Modern Drumming

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I’ll keep this brief, so you can get to watching the video.

If you’re a channel fan, you probably know and love him: Brian Blade.

But more than even one drummer, the song he made famous, Jazz Crimes, has had an outsized influence on the drum ecosystem. And, due to happy and not-so-happy coincidences, it’s kind of become the bar by which modern drumming is judged.

In this video, we dispense with all the “judgment”, and other internet noise, and focus instead on what the song can tell us about our drumming, and how to learn from it.

I take the 3 primary challenges in turn:

• The opening groove

• The drum solo

• The deceptively-difficult beginning to the organ solo

Each shows us in stark relief whether our timing, subdivision, sound-control, and idea-control are squared-away. As such, I call it a “mirror song”.

And now, friends, I’ll let you get to the video.

Hope you enjoy!

Can Practice REALLY Make Your Drumming Faster?

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You can’t open social media without seeing a drummer showcasing their otherworldly single-stroke speed, and showing you exercises to “get there”.

Not to mention astounding shows of explosive speed from drummers like Tony Royster, Mike Mitchell, Ron Bruner, and Riccardo Merlini.

“If I just work hard enough, I’ll be able to play singles like those folks,” we think.

But what if that were wrong? What if these freakishly-fast folks were simply…born with it.

Today, I welcome drum mechanics expert and friend of the channel Brandon Green back to answer that age-old question. Several months ago he shared a provocative video comparing his - trained over 25 years - single stroke speed to his wife’s. (She’d never played drums.) And Brandon’s wife wins “going away”.

We then delve into the musculo-skeletal reasons some humans may have an advantage from birth.

But if you're on my list you probably already know the punch line: "who cares?"

It's actually several layers of who cares.

First, for the average drummer still working on functional technique, a hypothetical genetic speed limit on the very top end of their speed is like a 60mph speed limit on a freeway when our car is out of gas. Our first concern is going from zero to anything, just as most drummers' is "how can I go pretty fast cleanly and efficiently."

And we'll show you how to do that: Brandon with some strength exercises, I with some technique ones you can practice even away from the kit, and without making any noise.

But the even deeper layer of "who cares" is "how much would I use Riccardo Merlini singles in musical applications even if I could do them."

And I believe there are so many ways to be great as a drummer that, beyond the functional speed most-anyone can develop, you're unlikely to encounter the generic speed limit in the real world.

Hope you enjoy!

And if you want to grab a 14-day trial to Brandon Green’s Drum Forever Fitness Program, and support me in the process, you can do that here.

10 Tricks Pros Use for Better Drum Grooves - Do You?

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Recently, every time I think of another lesson idea that has primarily to do with what the general public would call “fills”, I pause and think “could I also do something around groove.”

While I generally don’t like the wall-of-separation between the two - fills can have backbeats and grooves can and should include improvisation - I’m cognizant that they’re different…”directions”. They fit different parts of a song.

To that end, and as the output of reviewing quite a few student videos in the past few weeks, I thought you might enjoy a lesson on ways to spice up your drum grooves - without adding more notes.

Obviously, there are gen-z beats. The internet has solved how to fill every possible 32nd in a backbeat funk groove. (Not that there’s anything wrong with that.)

But sometimes you want to do more with less. And to their credit, some of the very same “pros” who play those flowy/gen-z beats can also “chill” during a song, but still find ways to make grooves interesting.

From injecting “hi hat stabs” in unexpected-but-musical places, to questioning the orthodoxy of “big subdivision”, to taking a page from New Orleans, today’s 10 “tricks” are tools you can fit to the situation. Not all will be appropriate for all songs, or all parts of songs, or all tempos.

But having them in your back pocket will give you a feeling of paining with a fuller palette.

And not one of them requires more technique or faster singles (I guess those are kind of the same thing) than you currently possess.

Hope you enjoy!

The One Thing That Separates Drum Pros From Everyone Else

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To the degree anything is a “magnum opus”, that’s today’s video. My “grand unified theory” on improvisation, which is to say “all drumming”.

This has been in the works over 15 years of me “retrofitting” my own playing, and 4 years of coaching students.

A culmination of all the “what’s water” moments (David Foster Wallace anecdote about two fish, one of whom remarks “the water’s lovely today” and the other who replies “what’s water?”), which is to say discovery of things I was taking for-granted that aren’t a given for those just learning to drum.

The sum of my micro-insights from “both sides of the divide” (knowing what it feels like when I feel good playing, knowing what I worked on to get there, and also seeing things through the eyes of students based on their questions, descriptions, and progress) cash out to two big things:

First, mature drummers (“pros” for the algorithm) have a kind of “bubble” around their playing, that insulates them from “mistakes” the way we typically think of them. (“Glitching”, big unintended sounds, feeling “behind your hands”, etc.)

The best analogy I could think of was the “flight envelope protection” modern fly-by-wire airplanes have. (Very short version - they won’t let you crash them.)

Second, you and I can learn to do it too.

There are many things that make great drummers great, and having a unique artistic voice is among them. But we don’t need to be artistic geniuses to teach ourselves to have that protective capsule around our playing, so we can “lean on things”, and our ideas feel insulated from “mistakes”.

**Quick disclaimer - many great drummers will say, in interviews, things like “I make mistakes all the time”, or “you should embrace mistakes”. That’s a bit misleading, imho, since any of these drummers could play a 90-minute set without once “glitching” or doing anything we’d detect as a mistake.

So, how do we do it?

By inverting the conventional understanding of improvisation. In my experience, improvisation is often seen (passive voice) as a place where you lower the guardrails, “embrace the muse”, and hope for the best.

In my opinion, that’s only useful later on. But at the beginning, I like to think “inside out”. Literally build that protective idea-capsule bit-by-bit, and rarely-if-ever play something outside of it.

This has the obvious advantage that we can practice improvising with ideas - rather than repping the same verbatim stuff over and over - while controlling the scope, so we’re always sure we’ve had a lot of reps on anything that might come up.

Finally, I reprise parts of a couple of recent lessons with examples of this type of exercises. Examples you can apply today.

Hope you enjoy!

Sound More "Pro" on Drums With One Simple Step

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Today’s video is over something deceptively-simple, but which, once you make it work for you, is a huge unlock.

Over the years I’ve talked a fair bit “hemiola”, or making 4-beat phrases into 6-beat phrases, and repeating them to make a more interesting, syncopated shape. It’s a handy way to get more mileage out of an idea.

But what if we went “back to zero” and pretended 3 and 6 beat phrases hadn’t been discovered.

Imagine if, suddenly, by decree, every drummer in the universe had to play “symmetrical” phrases. (Phrases based on 4 or 8 beats that resolve inevitably and predictably to the downbeat.) Gartstka, Larnell, Nate, Keith - everybody could do all their fancy stuff, but they could only play symmetrical phrases.

This would be a drab universe.

For drummers familiar with asymmetric phrasing, it would be an exercise in frustration listening to our heroes “boxed in”, and none of their fast chops able to save them.

“Freeeee Carloooock,” we’d yell at the YouTube. “Let the big dog EAT!”

And for those unfamiliar with the underlying theory, our drum heroes would just lose about half their “magic”. Inexplicably, they’d just sound more boring and predictable.

Turn this around, and, by adding one simple tool, we’d restore color to the “black and white” world of boring drums.

An if this tool is powerful enough to make-or-break a Benny Greb solo or beat, imagine what it could do for you.

This is the first in a series of videos exploring elements other than fast chops that create greatness in drumming: asymmetric phrases.

But I’m not even talking about 5s or 7s.

The simple, humble 6s and 3s have been around since Haydn in European music, and probably longer in other traditions. But we started to see them in American music in ragtime and New Orleans marches.

The create a flavor or repetitive syncopation that’s more interesting and danceable, but likely won’t get anyone fired from a gig.

And today, using simple examples, we’ll explore some ways to add them to your drumming immediately.

Hope you enjoy!

The Surprising Reason "Nate Smith Beats" Are So Hard

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We see a lesson on Nate Smith style funk beats (truly James Gadson, Clyde Stubblefield, Mike Clark, Lenny White, etc. beats), and we assume “one-handed 16ths”.

And if you’re like anything like I was, you find this style of “continuous 16th funk” challenging.

But I submit to you that it’s not because of the hand technique.

If I gifted you Isac Jamba’s right hand, would you suddenly sound like Nate? No, right? So why?

To illustrate the real reason, I went digging in my analogy bag, and pulled out a doozie: the bowling alley.

In a bowling alley, of course, you have a long strip of hardwood, and gutters on either side. If you roll the ball straight down the center, you’ll miss the gutters. But you’ll also miss the opportunity to shape your shots, or catch challenging spares. The more you explore, the more you risk gutter balls.

When I watch some drummers try to emulate the beats of Nate/Corey Fonville/Yussef Dayes, their playing sounds like a bowling alley. They’ve got a narrow lane where their stuff sounds pretty “pro”, but as soon as they deviate from it, they lose control. A kick drum is early or late. They flam hands or feet. Something feels “off”.

The thing that makes Nate-style beats challenging is they’re improvisational. If you listen to Mike Clark with Herbie, practically every bar is different. So you can’t “play like Nate” simply playing “boom chick”. You need to be able to improvise within the groove.

But that’s where the trouble starts.

Because improvisation is chaos. Infinity possibilities. And you can only do a few of the confidently. Jump into that abyss, and you’re not going to get enough reps with any one thing to “widen your lane”, unless you do it for years. There are simply too many possibilities to get the “spaced repetition” necessary to improve.

But stick to “written down” exercises, and you fail to simulate real life. Then you get that familiar “stuff I practice isn’t coming out in my playing” conundrum.

The solution? Algorithms.

A system that gives you discreet things to practice, but which mirrors the “possibility-tree” of real-life playing. And to which you can add more and more conditions until, for all intents and purposes, it becomes indistinguishable from real life.

This is building a lexicon from the “inside out”.

Phew, is anybody still reading? Anyway, today we tackle algorithms through the prism of Nate Smith beats.

Hope you enjoy!

Hope you enjoy!

6 Underrated Drummers Who Should Be Household Names in 2026

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This is a video I’ve been wanting to make for a while, but couldn’t find a good way to tell the story.

The subject of “underrated” players is familiar to any music aficionado: “no, but you really have to hear so-and-so, sooo underrated” is practically a cliche at music school dorm-room parties.

But in my searches, I haven’t been able to find much on it for modern drummers. And that’s a shame.

Larnell Lewis tells the story of his rise to drum-stardom as one of a chance meeting. Michael League happened to catch his performance in a Toronto club and like it, then Larnell sat in with Snarky Puppy a few times, and it just so happened that, the following month, League had the We Like it Here session booked, and needed a drummer to fill-in at the last minute. The rest is obviously history.

Carter Beauford was a “drummer’s drummer” in a fusion band before Dave Matthews plucked him from obscurity. Nate Smith was well-known in circles who also knew Chris Potter and Dave Holland, but nothing like the international brand ambassador he is today.

Which invites the obvious question, “what about everybody with tons of talent musical genius who DON’T get a lucky break?”

Or haven’t yet.

The six drummers I’m going to chronicle today are not “obscure”. They’re working players, with gigs. Some have substantial social media followings.

But, when you ask a New School student, in line for Nublu, or when I interview new students for my coaching program, there are the drummers who tend to come up - “legacy” folks like Nate, Thomas Pridgen, Nate Wood, JD Beck, Larnell, etc, “up-and-comers” like Jharis Yokley, Noah Fuerbringer, Roni Kaspi - and those conversations hardly ever include any of these six.

But, if there were any justice in the universe, they should.

To check my picks for 6 most underrated drummers of 2026, just watch the video.

Hope you enjoy!

The Real Reason You Can't Flow Around The Toms Like The Pros

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The idea for this week’s video dawned on me when my (practice) roommate was out of town, and (as you do) I added an extra tom to the house kit to make a 5-piece.

I don’t think my hands are spectacular, but I like to think they’re pretty decent. And I’ve got a lot of experience flowing around the kit when it’s a 4-piece.

But all of a sudden, with that extra drum, it was like my hands regressed 5 years. I was getting tense, missing drums, hitting rims…

What gives?

This was my first clue that something more than simple hand speed is in effect when we see great “flow” drummers like Vinnie Colauita and Dennis Chambers - or modern greats like Gergo Borlai and Xavier Ware - fly around the toms as if the laws of physics didn’t exist.

If it’s only hand speed, try the experiment in the video - play a simple sticking pattern (as I outline) on the snare, and see what the speed limit is. Then, try to orchestrate it around the toms, with the same clarity, without missing or mis-hitting. If that’s hard, you might benefit from today’s lesson.

Proprioception. The awareness of where your body is in space. It’s what allows you to close your eyes and still touch your nose with your index fingers.

But I would argue there’s “drum proprioception” too. Memorizing deeply where all your drums are in space.

We may think we know - obviously we have eyes - but if we can’t play around the toms as fast as we can play on the snare, and/or if our speed and precision decreases when we add an extra drum, it’s not just hand speed.

No worries - the simple exercises in today’s video will get you started.

Hope you enjoy!

4 Modern Drum "Tricks" Most Drummers Miss

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Did you know that there are unique musical ideas modern drummers are “cooking up”, which could help add variety and flavor to your ideas today…

…that most drummers probably don’t know about?

I’m not talking about faster chops.

Nor am I talking about “Dilla everything”, or stacks, though both have their place.

I’m talking about some really unique approaches to the drums that aren’t hard to do - they’re just stuff you wouldn’t necessarily think of if you weren’t looking.

And they can be very musical - when used wisely.

For this video, we’ll draw from drummers from Xavier Ware (of thumbnail fame) to Adam Deitch, to Cleon Edwards and Dana Hawkins.

We’ll talk about what makes these 4 approaches unique - i.e. why it isn’t just the same old thing you’ve already seen - we’ll show you some basic examples, then we’ll show them in context and demonstrate some of the musical things you can do with them.

If you’ve seen some of the “non-chop”/”non-dilla” flavors of modern playing and wondered how to get some of that, or reached a “plateau” with your existing ideas, and need an injection of inspo, maybe one of these approaches is for you.

Hope you enjoy!

I Was Wrong About E Drums

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If you know me you know - I have historically not been a fan of E-drums.

And historically, E-drums haven’t been very good.

Sorry.

“Twacky” rubber, or mesh heads with unrealistic tactile responses.

“Gated” sounds that omit all the '“analog” gradations and “messiness” of acoustics.

And their general…unsightly…appearance.

And over the years, various E-drum companies have offered to send me drums to review, but I’ve always refused.

But this year, it just so happened that when one such manufacturer DMd me, I was in a bit of a “YOLO” state of mind. I needed a gear review for the content calendar anyway, so I said “yes” - on one big condition: there was zero guarantee of a positive review, and I wouldn’t propagandize for them. If they sent the drums, they would get a candid review - upsides, downsides, and all.

The company - Roland - agreed.

What followed was a comedy of errors: the sheer enormity of the shipment, which barely fit in my mail room, and required an environmentalist’s nightmare worth of boxes. My comic ineptitude with making sure I had all the cables, connecting them properly, then connecting everything to my digital audio workstation, so I could bring you the sound.

I really wanted to hate them. But I failed.

The truth is…E-drums have changed. These aren’t your great uncle’s E-drums. The response is way better, both tactilely and in terms of mimicking the sound response of “real” drums. The appearance is way more similar to a mid-tier acoustic “wrap” kit than their predecessors. This is a kit that actually looks good in the den or rumpus room. And the one item Roland requested I feature - the recorded sound - is really good, especially if you don’t have pro mics and a lot of experience mixing and mastering your acoustics.

Still, they’re not perfect, and they’re not for everybody.

For my complete review, including misadventures, pros, cons, and a cheeky flow warmup (the transcription), peep the video!

This Is Killing Your Progress on Drums

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This week sees a return to an old hobby horse. Practically what put 8020 “on the map”.

Years ago, while developing one of my courses, I took a survey. I was interested in the mistmatch between drummers’ stated goals, and their practice routines. I had expected something like poor time-management, and/or a few adjustments at the margins. What I found, of course, was a complete-and-total mismatch.

Complaint: “I don’t know why what I practice isn’t coming out in my playing!”

Goal: Play clean, musical fills and beats, be able to get around the kit.

Practice routine: the literal same exercises out of drum books that they’d been doing for decades. Hand warmups, abstract “independence exercises”.

Addendum: Plus a decent dollop of “literal transcription of whatever I saw on Instagram this week”.

Since then, course materials have evolved somewhat. I and others are producing materials that more resemble real-world playing.

Many of these “contemporary” materials even emphasize the “missing piece”, which we’ll get to. It’s just that many players are explicitly skipping that part.

So - what’s missing?

Let’s look at language learning. Say you memorize a bunch of literal sentences. Then you go to a bar and try to hang out with native speakers.

No one would be surprised what they practiced “wasn’t coming out in their conversation” if they hadn’t practiced making their own sentences and free-associating with the vocab they’d learned.

Heck - let’s even take this to a different instrument. Let’s say you practiced a bunch of scales, and even some simple Charlie Parker transcriptions on the horn. Then it came time to solo on a different tune. Nobody would be mystified that they couldn’t solo over Dolphin Dance if all they’d practiced was CP’s solo on one chorus of Confirmation.

But somehow we don’t notice the “missing piece” on drums: practicing improvisation.

And not just unstructured improvisation; improvisation with relevant vocabulary, with guard-rails and increasing degrees of freedom. Improvisation that begins with kernels of exactly what you eventually want to play, then steps you closer to…well - fully improvising…with that stuff.

So why?

I have a couple of pet theories.

One is that drums are less “solo-based”, in that, especially if you don’t play jazz, you can go an entire lifetime just playing the repetitive loops we call “beats”.

Another is that “written out” stuff is easier to teach - a teach has only to improvise in front of a camera or microphone, then hand the recording off to somebody to transcribe, then that goes in the book.

And the third is probably that we like written out stuff more too. It’s less cognitively demanding. More like reading a book and less like writing one.

But around once every few years I have to draw a line in the sand and say “this is what’s killing drummers’ progress”. The culture of courses has evolved from abstract hand exercises to relevant vocabulary, and even improvisation practice with the ideas.

I’m trying, in a small way, to evolve the norms around actually doing that part.

Hope you enjoy!

3 "Pro" Beats Most Drummers (Probably) Can't Play

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I’m endlessly fascinated by drum stuff that looks easy, but is hard. In lessons/videos/etc, sometimes I need to work to make the case that there’s “another layer” of subtlety. Indeed, my first few weeks working with many drummers are spent simply discovering that that layer exists.

We can tell on the surface that there’s something Tony Williams has that we don’t, for instance. But try to go into the practice room and practice a detail that will get you closer to Tony. The picture gets pretty “pixelated” when you zoom in far enough. You can lose the forest for the trees.

That’s why I love “heuristic beats”. Beats you simply won’t be able to make sound good unless these “second layer” subtleties are in place.

No disrespect to the great drumming on either of them, but songs like ACDC’s Back in Black or Tom Petty’s You Don’t Know How it Feels are songs I’d give to a more beginner student, because either the bass line buoys you along and provides “guide posts”, or stays out of the way, allowing you to simply place your beat in approximately the right spot, and it’s going to sound great.

If you try that with Aaron Parks’ Karma, which Eric Harland made famous, it will simply sag if you don’t have high level subdivision, coordination, and dynamics.

Try it with Nate Smith’s Skip Step, and it will lose tension and momentum if your lead hand technique and beat placement aren’t near-perfect.

Try it with Corey Fonville’s drum part on Christian Scott’s Twin, and unless you can layer your 8th notes 1:1 on top of the invisible matrix the bass and piano are creating, it will not only not “snap”, but create a hot mess.

So, for fun, I decided to feature those beats in today’s video. We’ll listen to the “pro” play them, we’ll dissect what makes them hard, then we’ll take you through, step-by-step, how I’d recommend playing them.

This one was transcription-heavy, so special thanks to Chris for his help with the transcription.

Hope you enjoy!

Are Drummers Today Too Obsessed With Speed?

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It’s hard to say exactly what made this “click”.

Maybe it was answering questions from commenters about “how fast should I go with xyz”.

Maybe it was my growing collection of thumbnails emphasizing specific percentage gains in speed in specific amounts of time.

But last week, the dam broke, and I made a social media post about it.

Speed is a tool for musicality.

It’s also a by-product of work on flow, idea generation, technique, etc.

But it’s become something more. It’s become the guaranteed “ring in case you need video views” tool.

And lest you think I’m calling anyone else out, I’ll own that I myself have happily availed myself of this lever. I’ll probably do it again.

But for just one video, I decided to weigh in on the contrary. To “counter balance” things.

I believe the prevalence of “get more speed” in drum instruction is out -of-pace with its utility.

If you want Andy-Prado-like chops, a large amount of that work is done slowly. (Though, yes, you eventually have to practice fast to see what “lies well” on the kit.)

And if you don’t, rest easy: the vast majority of practical drumming doesn’t require it.

But not so easy - you still have to put in the work on timing, cleanliness, and idea flow. (Doh!)

In any case, please enjoy my treatise on the state of speed in 2025.

Hope you enjoy!

The Simple Invention That's Revolutionizing Drumming (And Why)

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Drum beats had one thing constant from almost their inception until just a few years ago, and now they don’t.

Of course, I’m speaking about the snare drum.

Mainstay of “holding it down” since almost before drum kits were a thing. If you follow back to its origins, many historians credit Wynonie Harris as one of the earliest precursors. Snare on “2 and 4”.

Follow it earlier than that, to New Orleans. Snare on 2 and 4, with shades of gray, at least with press rolls.

Follow it forward: the rock age. Funk. Reggae. Electronica. Punk. Alternative rock. Modern live arrangements.

All with the snare drum as the centerpiece of the backbeat.

Until now.

I’m not saying the snare will ever go away, but increasingly, drummers are using another device as their “backbeat locus”. The stack.

But wha?

How did this seemingly-very-niche invention, by the great Trevor Lawrence in 2017/18 do what all the other drum inventions failed to do.

That includes tambourines, bells on the drums, bongos on the kick, Zil Bells, gong drums, synth pads, and a partridge in a pear tree.

Nothing doing. The snare still reined supreme.

To understand why the stack is “seeping in” to modern drum beats, in my humble opinion, we need to go back the origin of “beats” as we know them: worship songs in black churches around the turn of the century. And what do we find in recordings from that period? Hand claps.

If we take the paradigm that the snare was a “good enough” replacement for hand claps in music, it all makes sense.

Whatever else you’re doing, you have to have that “2 and 4”.

And nothing really messed with the snare when came to being a decent facsimile of the clap. (We didn’t get good synthesized claps until the early ‘80s. And synth pads are heavy, expensive, delicate to transport, and require a PA/monitor system to use.)

Until Trevor’s invention. Acoustic. Compact. Fits in a cymbal bag. Does not require amplification.

In addition to understanding how/why the stack is slowly competing with the snare for backbeat primacy, we’ll all look at some very specific beats, and ways of using it.

Hope you enjoy!

I Wish Someone Had Told Me This About Double Stoke Rolls

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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;)

The Pro Drummer Fill Trick Most Drummers Ignore

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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?

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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

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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!

Self Taught Drummer? You Should Watch This

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Today's video starts with a counterintuitive truth - not every drummer needs drum lessons.

And not every drummer who might benefit from lessons needs them at every point in their development.

This may surprise you coming from a "drum coach", but the truth is I see two periods when some drummers can really benefit from having an expert check out their playing and save them "trial-and-error" steps...

...and in many other periods, they might be better off saving their money, or joining a membership site for courses, but working them on their own.

The specific periods in which I would recommend lessons to most drummers are...

...close to the beginning, when an expert can help show you the shortest path to basic proficiency and save you ending up in "local optimums" - I.e. with habits you have to unlearn in able to progress...

...and in the upper-intermediate stage, when most of the "easy wins" are out of the way so you need more specific mentorship, but you're not so advanced you can see clearly where to go and most of the time playing feels easy to you.

But what about drummers who are good candidates for being "career-long"'self-taught?

For that, if you're tremendously disciplined and organized, but also gentle with yourself and able to detach emotionally from the hard parts and see them just as "part of the process", you might be a good candidate.

We hear from some past podcast guests who embodied some of the qualities I'd consider important.

And finally, I end the lesson with some advice to drummers who choose to "go it alone".

Who should try to succeed as a self-taught drummer? And when? And if you are, what's the best way to do it?

We'll discuss all of that in today's video. Hope you enjoy!