I’m being more active on “Reddit” lately, putting the word out about the site… by semi-crankily answering a lot of egregiously wrong things, as I am apparently helpless to not do. Wrong ideas are just persistently irresistable to a lot of people. Here are some of my comments, slightly edited to stand on their own:
Basic technique, establishing evenness between the hands: I would work some establishing a basic wrist technique– no fingers, no arm, moving the stick up and down with your hand, with the grip everybody is calling “German” now— flat wristed.
Move your snare drum high enough that you can strike it at a flat angle— no wrist bend when hitting the head.
Set your pad up in front of a mirror, open up page 1 of Stick Control, and run some patterns while checking out your hands. Do the left leading ones about twice as long as the right leading ones. Make your left look and sound like your right, correct any weird movements. Go slower as you need to to do that. They’re your hands, you can make them move the way you want at some speed.
Your fingers should not be coming into play at all; develop a simple stroke based on wrist movement.
Take a look at your hands sometime, they’re not exactly the same. Get them close, get them to sound even, look out for weird movements, there’s not a lot else to do about it.
Improving time: Your job is to play time at the tempo that is counted off, and listen to rest of the group so you’re in agreement on it.
The gap click doesn’t do anything. That kind of thing just tricks you into thinking you can vibe it— like just being able to keep it together for a few beats when the thing turns off is not the same as having good time.
First learn to keep good time with the click on all four beats. Then set it for half the tempo you’re playing, then set it to give you the 1 only. Or the 1 every two measures. Practice that way all the time.
Memory of sound is a real powerful way to recall tempos, actually. Not tempo memory, but memory of the sound, from which you draw the tempo.
It’s a negotiation— you have your own idea of the time, but you listen to keep it in agreement with the group or the recording.
When you’re working on your time you’ll have to do some pretty big corrections, it’s part of it.
You’re on the front of the beat, but consistently so— and more so as you go. That is good, your time isn’t just centerless. This wouldn’t even register as rushing if you were playing with people, you’d just have an idea of the tempo that was a couple of bpm faster than the group.
Keep playing with that recording, but be constantly correcting— you’ll have to stretch a beat or two when you realize you’re way out front. Hopefully as you go you’ll hear better and know when that’s happening sooner.
It’s part of music, in actuality you don’t just groove along like a drum machine, you listen and accomodate to keep the thing in agreement.
A bad drum transcription: Throw it away and use your ears. It’s a rock beat. Come up with your own idea of what to play.
Listen more, do it more, try to make it sound like music. Sounding professional is the last thing I’d ever be thinking about.
That’s how you listen, you put the thing on and play it, over and over.
Important to “learn songs”?: It’s important to listen to a lot of music, and to play with people a lot, but learning songs like they’re classical music, with one correct drum “part” is not important, it’s not how people play, unless they’re doing cover videos, or playing in a tribute act.
It’s better to learn drumming playing vocabulary, and learn how songs are put together— verse-chorus structure and its variants– and learn how drums support that, and how to make your own creative choices doing that.
Playing a piece of music, the job is: to play time, to make stops, to hit and set up ensemble accents, and to fill. There are lots of ways to do those things. You can listen and practice with that in mind, with the idea of learning options and developing your ear for how to play music generally.
Is it possible for a 15 year old beginner to become a concert pianist?: Are you asking if it’s possible to become a professional or to become a famous concert pianist? There are other ways to earn a living as a musician than performing major classical repertoire for large audiences.
It will take all the things you listed— substantial daily practice, good teachers, genuine love of the instrument (which you don’t know if you even have yet) and of music— to do the thing professionally at any level.
It can be done, just… becoming a concert pianist I think requires a certain kind of person raised in a certain kind of circumstances. I would be thinking about other things you can do professionally with the instrument.
As someone with a genuine passion for the instrument, you’ll be playing no matter what, of course.
“Burying the beater”: I said the reasons I think it’s not a great technique, I didn’t say don’t do it.
It works/has worked for many good drummers, that doesn’t mean it’s the best technique.
People are practicing to not be fast with that; there’s an artificial stop at the end of the every note. How fast would anybody be able to play the snare drum if they were just doing dead strokes? Plus you’re expending effort to keep the beater against the head
Nobody should be struggling to balance themselves, or trying to balance through muscular effort. Nobody’s hip muscles should be working in a way that they need to rest them, much less rest them by mashing the beater into the drum on their tip toes.
You’re not supposed to hover, you’re not supposed to float.
Do this: Sit on your throne, away from the drums, feet flat on the floor, then tap your heel. One foot, or both feet. You can do that just by activating your foot, with zero effort anywhere above your knee. Totally centered on the throne, no lifting, no hovering, no balancing.
That’s the mechanism you use for heel up technique. Work with it, just don’t resort to lifting/hovering/shifting your weight. Your whole foot will be resting on the pedal when you’re not actively playing a note.
Balance, and muscular effort become total non-issues. It doesn’t take any core strength, your whole upper body should be totally relaxed.
Club owner mad because of no “draw”: It’s his place, what’s he doing to get people in there? The place decided to feature entertainment as an attraction, you’re not there to just provide a roving band of random people. And why would he entrust the success of his business to a string of musicians doing one nighters?
They should have the same band there the same night of the week, every week, if they want to build something. Have new bands on Mondays/Tuesdays. Build up a regular clientele.
Why does Art Blakey’s shuffle sound so good?: I would just be listening for what happened, whatever intangibles you’re looking to define follow from that.
Broadly, [on Moanin’] he’s playing a typical shuffle groove, with the normal jazz cymbal rhythm with a slight accent on beats 2 and 4, with a shuffle rhythm on the snare drum— running swing 8ths, with accents on 2/4. The unaccented notes are very soft, sketched in. He’s playing the hihat with his foot on 2/4, strongly, as he does. He’s also playing the bass drum inaudibly underneath that— on the 1/3 or all four beats. You can listen for the relative dynamics between those voices.
Beyond that you can look at the timing of the swing aspect. It’s not a straight triplet feel, the cymbal is closer to a dotted-8th/16th timing, and the snare drum even more so. His coordination is not always perfectly synced within the parts.
Any concept of strictness to do with swing is manufactured after the fact, by people trying to figure it out.
Art Blakey = swing, if somebody has an idea of it conflicts with that, they’re wrong, it’s not him messing around with it.
No, that’s a faulty definition. What the thing is is what’s on the recordings, played by people like Art Blakey. If your definition conflicts with that, your definition is wrong.
That’s normal for jazz time, it’s not about everybody locking up on exact same subdivision– that’s more of a latter day R&B thing.
OMG how do I start: Figure it out, I guess. That’s all anybody else is doing. I guess lessons are not an option, so: the internet is bursting with videos, sites, music, everything you could possibly need to start doing something. If you need an assignment, buy yourself a copy of Funky Primer and start figuring it out.
An abstract painting entitled Chernobyl Nightmares: The work is fine, I think what matters with these things is commitment greater than one picture— like I would be doing fifty of them, and see where it takes you.
A lot of people posting give things these picturesque titles which… they always amount to something trite and literal. They make the picture smaller than it could be without that.
It takes away from the work when people read the title and realize “oh… he’s just trying to be scary.” Or, he’s mad, he’s sad, etc.
In this case… if you want to do something about Chernobyl, you don’t need to remind people it’s bad. You could just say dreams, or something else altogether to inspire a thought other than he’s telling me Chernobyl was bad and look this picture about how bad it was.
That’s what it says to me as a someone looking at it, who doesn’t know you, with nothing invested in the work. I keep seeing those kinds of titles, and I think people’s work comes off better without that.
Part of what this is about is creating some credibility with viewers that you’re thinking on some kind of deeper level with it. If the title is something obvious, it doesn’t give them any great reason to look at it long enough to form an appreciation of it, and maybe see more in it than that.
Either that or you make it really obvious, with something like composition in black, pink, and white, which is never real satisfying either.
If you can’t sing it you can’t play it?: I’m a drummer, I can sing everything I play. There’s no first sing / then play process happening, necessarily, but they are absolutely connected.
Vocalizing is the only way you actually know a musical idea. Your hands are brainless wankers, they don’t know anything. Not time or anything else. Somebody could dedicate themselves full time to just singing their stuff, which I don’t think is necessary, it just needs to be a regular part of the process.
There are a lot of things that sound impressive to beginners that are not impressive to people who have heard a lot of music, and who know— or know better— how the instrument is played.
Some people do just like the same music their whole lives. A lot of us, once we get exposed to a lot more music, figure out that a lot of what we liked when we were younger was actually bad.
It’s a beautiful piece of music, does it need to be something else?
I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.
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Thanks for being willing to cut through a lot of the nonsense out there Todd. I shudder to think about what it would have been like to start out playing in this era. Young and/or beginning players are up against a lot in ways people like you and I weren’t, so every bit of sanity helps.