How to (Really) Play Jazz Part 4 - Trick Yourself into Not Sucking

Those of you familiar with the channel know that sometimes I deconstruct Other People's playing and show you how to get inside the head of, say, Marcus Gilmore or Robert McNamara (shout outs, Jacob Mann - Mad Subliminal).

But in this lesson, I'm showing you how to practice like...Me!

One of the biggest killers I face every day is Hedonic Adaptation. The drum equivalent of doing the saaaaaame workout with the same weights day-after-day. After a while, your progress slows. It's the same with time keeping. We stop getting better because we stop hearing ourselves as we really sound. We get Used To Sucking.

In this lesson, I show you a simple hack to splash some proverbial cold water on your face, and tease out some flaws in even the most basic swing beats.

As promised, transcriptions are available here.

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How to Play Like Justin Tyson 1 - Lesson of The Week

Oooooooooh shit it's here.

"The Lick", from Justin Tyson's solo on 7 Ways from the Blue Whale video, is without question the most requested transcription this year. I shouldn't be surprised - I've sought out and catered to every Mark Guiliana and Gospel Chops fanatic on the internet.

Anyway, here's my transcription and deconstruction of Justin's lick, a theme to which he returns throughout the solo. I'll do more Justin lessons soon, during which I'll delve further into the "rhythmic brain" behind some of these idioms. For this first lesson, though, I wanted to crash course you on the basics of gospel orchestration, from the standpoint of how the fuck would someone even come up with that?!?

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How to Play Like Marcus Gilmore 1 - Lesson of The Week

You asked for it.

This is the first of, I'm sure, several videos investigating the style of one of the most unique and iconic jazz drummers alive, Mr. Marcus Gilmore. (You know anytime somebody includes "Mister" before the name of a dude he's introducing, he's a little star-struck, and I'm no exception. I'm not even interviewing the guy and I can't help calling him "mister".)

(And Get 3 free lessons to improve your playing in 3 weeks just for entering your email.)

Anyway, in the words of Jay Kay, "it's hard to know where to begin" in reverse-engineering Marcus' playing. But I took a stab. Instead of transcribing a couple of licks that you can deploy verbatim in inappropriate places, like every other channel on the internet (sorry - couldn't resist), I try to give you two concepts to practice, step-by-steeze (yes, I really just wrote that) to make a couple of core Macrus elements your own.

Without further ado, I give you....Marcus.

As usual, if this lesson has helped you, please share it!
 

How to Count Brotherly's System - Lesson of The Week

Last year I covered Brotherly's System. Since then a lot of people asked me one question - How Do You Count It?

A few months after I recorded it the original show, I learned from a couple of "sources" (whose names I don't have permission to share) that I'd been counting it wrong. These same folks told me where the real "one" was. Seeing plenty of other drum covers of System on the web, but no videos explaining how to play it correctly, I thought I'd do one last dance with System - record the definitive lesson on how to count the "hook" of the song - the reason everybody covers it - the delicious metric "modulation".

(And Get 3 free videos to improve your playing in 3 weeks just for entering your email address!)

In this lesson you'll learn -

1) How to count the metric modulation

2) A simple four-beat progression that will help you hear and play it better

If you enjoyed this lesson, please use the share buttons to share it with a friend or on twitter or Facebook!

What Can We Learn From Nasheet? - Lesson of The Week

Do Nasheet and I look like we're about to drop the hottest rap record of 2015? You can thank my buddy Sean for the graphic design, and the observation. I hope the lesson's as good as the thumbnail!

All joking aside, I thought it was high time to circle back to the jazz kit, and talk about a life-changing lesson with Nasheet Waits. One that's been affecting my outlook and approach to jazz ever since. Almost my whole approach - from the "hip hop beat" method for determining what to do with the left foot, to my "back and forth sweep" with the brushes - boils down to one simple exercise Nasheet showed me in his practice studio. One I was too young and stupid to appreciate at the time.

Anyway, in this lesson I'll talk about -

• The famous Nasheet exercise, adapted from one of the great drummers of the early 20th century.
• How adapting the exercise for brushes can actually help your stick playing more.
• How to start with just 3 simple idioms and build a great swing vocabulary.

As usual hope you find this lesson helpful!

If you like the material in the lesson and want to go deeper, learn more about the 80/20 Roadmap by clicking on the button below. Most drummers have the same 3 issues keeping them from being great. Here's how to fix them.

Play "Like" Sean Chopz Wright - A Lesson for The Drum House

Hey guys flattered to be asked by my friends at the Drum House to record a lesson for them. I've been a fan of their channel every since I watched a lesson by Berklee Gospel Chops phenom Sean "Chopz" Wright a couple of years ago. Sean has gone on to become one of the brightest stars to come out of Berklee in recent years. So I thought it would be appropriate to do a lesson deconstructing just a little slice of what Sean played in his lesson, and asking the question "why does Sean sound better than us?"

Anyway, I wanted to post the transcriptions here for any fans of the Drum House channel or mine, so you can download them for free. (It's only 3 beats, but if you like to learn by reading, or if it speeds up the learning process, you'll find them beneficial.)

I should add that when you enter in your email address on the next page you'll be added to my mailing list. If you don't want to be on the list you can simply ignore the "opt in" email, or unsubscribe at any time, but trust me:

You want to be on my mailing list.

Mailing list folks get all the free lessons first, along with a 3-part video series complete with transcriptions just for joining.

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Play "Like" Spanky Part 2 - Lesson of The Week

I had a breakthrough watching some Spanky YouTubage last week, and wanted to share just a smidgen with you folks. Spanky, most recently of Lady Gaga fame, has a knack to take a normal beat and make it sound like it's from outer space without even disrupting the song.

In this lesson I'll show you how to use the infamous Looping Exercise to create the unique Spanky McCurdy "inception effect" at two levels of subdivision.

I'm also making the transcription PDFs available for free to anyone who wants them. Full disclosure - to get them you'll be opting into my email list. Trust me - you want to be on my email list.

Change Subdivision Without Bullshitting - Lesson of The Week

I've wanted for weeks to do a lesson on subdivision changes. If Microtime is the first-order differentiator between great players and mediocre ones, precise subdivision isn't far behind. I first got interested in the concept when I was practicing the Rudimental Ritual this summer and realized most people I'd heard play it were missing the most fundamental and deep part of it - the 2-against-3 and 4-against-6 tension. People were playing it too fast, just "seat of the pants"ing transitions from half notes to quarter triplets with a bossa kick drum pattern.

Duuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuudes!!!! You can't bullshit this stuff. Not if you want to be great.

So I'm gradually going to be tackling this issue, which is a challenge for me as well, but I'm starting simple. This week, I talk about the following:

• How to transition seamlessly from eighths to triplets to 16ths without guessing.
• The two "frames of reference", how they're different, and why they're important.
• Exactly what to work on to practice both.

This is a departure from the big projects of the last few weeks, but I hope you'll find it valuable.

Aaaaaaalsooooooo - I'm not borrowing anyone else's music for this week's episode, so I can be commercial as hell. Which is why I'm going to tell you about the 80/20 Roadmap, the best $5 you're going to spend for your drumming the rest of this year (and luckily it's December 21 as I write this!).

Want to be great at drums but not sure how to close the gap? Most drummers suffer from the same 3 problems. The Roadmap shows you what they are, and how to fix them.

How to Play "Like" Mark Part 2 - Lesson of The Week

I wasn't sure I could do it. (I'm still not sure I did it *well*.) Learn to solo over Now vs Now's 7 Ways in a week. Fine.

Make a video breaking down what I did into steps even a beginner could follow? Not so easy. 

That's why I made the reality show this summer. It's a lot easier to just record myself practicing and talking about how I feel than to try to explain what I did so somebody Else can repeat the steps. But that's the raison d'etere of the channel. Succeed or fail, I had to try.

Anyway, to make it easier I broke the central challenge into two challenges.

1. Play a halfway decent solo over the tune.
2. Make our solo better by borrowing some concepts from Mark.

So here goes. In this lesson I attempt to convey:

• How to "hear" the solo vamp and how to get it in your head.
• The "minimum effective beat" you can build on.
• The three things I would do (borrowing 2 from Mark's own clinics) to make the solo better.

Hope you enjoy! Transcriptions of the beat structure and the minimum effective beat will be up at my Instagram account "8020drummer" under the hashtag #lowmark

How to Play Odd Meters

Ahoy folks this week's lesson finds me pausing from my cover of Jason Linder's Seven Ways to take a trip down the rabbit hole and examine odd meters. 

Why?

Seven Ways, down to its very DNA, exploits an important feature of odd meters: the fact that 2 bars of 7/4 fit within a bar of 7/2, and two bars of 7/8 fit within a bar of 7/4. That may sound obvious, but it's less-than-completely intuitive in the real world, and that's why it can open up some phrasing possibilities you may not have considered.

To illustrate, I use a simplified example: 5. In this lesson I teach you how to conceive the "fractal" properties of 5/2, 5/4, and 5/8, and show you some examples of cool things that lets you do.

Hope you enjoy this one! No sales pitch here because I'm borrowing Evan Marien's content in the beginning of the film.

How to Play Like Mark 1 - Seven Ways - Lesson of The Week

Hey everybody for the next two weeks I'm going to be covering my process of making a cover of the tune Seven Ways by Jason Lindner, which is the number one google result for the phrase "Mark Guiliana solo". Have your attention yet?

Well, in the past, I would make "Supersize Me"-style short documentaries about learning tunes and taking on challenges, but this time I thought I'd turn my challenge into the lesson of the week.

In Part One of the Mark Guiliana/Seven Ways challenge, I attempt to break down the major beats of the song and the way they're felt in 7/8, 7/4, and 7/2. I challenged myself to approach this in a way that would be valuable for beginners and experts alike, starting with the question "if you had to sub for Mark tomorrow on this tune, what could you do to make sure you made music and sounded great?" To that end, I cover the following:

• What is the minimum effective beat, and how to find it on two of the beats from the song.
• What is the Looping Exercise, and how to use it to practice those beats.
• What is Microtime, why Mark really sounds better than us, and how to use microtime to narrow that gap.

I'll be back next week to cover the song structure and the drum solo.

No links to my paid content here because I'm using Jason's content under the Fair Use exception, but if you like this video please share it, and please use the links below to "like" the facebook page.

Peace and see you next week!

What is Microtime? - Drum Lesson of The Week

I've been getting a lot of questions about microtime. Specifically, "what's that thing you're doing with the metronome." It's true - I've been using a weird metronome placement in the last several videos, and though I explained briefly, I thought why not just devote a whole video to it.

So here it is. In this video I explain

• What microtime is and why it's important
• Where I'm placing the metronome and why, and how you can work up to it
• A quick sequence of exercises that you can play with the basic, then the advanced metronome placement that will help make your time more solid.

Want to go Deeper? If you haven't yet checked out the 80/20 Roadmap, it's my premium video series that puts all my favorite "hacks" for getting better fast in one place. My outlandish claim? I'll revolutionize your playing in 3 months.

How to Invent a Spanky Fill - Lesson of The Week

This week instead of giving you generalities, I decided to "zoom in" on one very specific thing in my practice regimen. A lot of people will teach you this or that fill or chop, but I wanted to take you into the process of how I invented it, putting the process at the forefront.

Hope you enjoy.

Want to go Deeper? If you haven't yet checked out the 80/20 Roadmap, it's my comprehensive video series that puts all my favorite "hacks" for getting better in one place. My outlandish claim? I'll revolutionize your playing in 3 months.

How to (Really) Play Uptempo Swing - Lesson of The Week

This week I'm back in front of the Migrating Birds mural here at 80/20 HQ to do a quick Deep Dive into how I really practice uptempo swing. (That's what this series is turning into, BTW - stepping you through what it actually looks like when I practice.)

I've touched on up-tempo swing elsewhere, and if you haven't checked out "How to (Really) Play Jazz Part 2 - Fast Times", it's a toolbox of idioms that will take your uptempo playing out a rut and open up the door for your expression. Now, a few months down the road, I'm meditating on what a day of swing practice would look like. Among the key concepts:

• How to begin to think of the "big beat" while keeping the microtime tight.
• Two tools to create quick variations on any idea.
• My "secret" for deploying the ride cymbal without needing Tony-Williams-esque chops.

Want to go Deeper? If you haven't yet checked out the 80/20 Roadmap, it's my comprehensive video series that puts all my favorite "hacks" for getting better in one place. My outlandish claim? I'll revolutionize your playing in 3 months.

How to (Really) Play Drum Solos - Lesson of The Week

For this week's lesson, I discuss how to practice playing drum solos. This is not a lesson about rudiments. I have a ton of rudimental exercises for free elsewhere on the site. This is about how to use those rudiments you've been shedding in a musical way during a fill or solo. I spent two weeks trying to figure out the best way to teach this, and in the end it came back to something I talk about all the time: well, time. That's right - don't practice soloing first and time second. Practice playing in time, and use the exercises in the video to work your way gradually up to more "chops" in your solos.

Want to go Deeper? If you haven't yet checked out the 80/20 Roadmap, it's my comprehensive video series that puts all my favorite "hacks" for getting better in one place. My outlandish claim? I'll revolutionize your playing in 3 months.

How to (Really) Practice Metric Modulation - Lesson of The Week

In the inaugural Lesson of The Week, I discuss how practicing the "transition" part of a metric modulation is overrated, and the "meat and potatoes" of the exercises may lie in "making loops" within the implied meter.

Want to go Deeper? If you haven't yet checked out the 80/20 Roadmap, it's my comprehensive video series that puts all my favorite "hacks" for getting better in one place. My outlandish claim? I'll revolutionize your playing in 3 months.