How to play the brushes

Now we're talking- here's something substantial for you: I was able to shame Ted @ Trap'd into finally labelling his posts, and now I can link to his entire great series on playing the brushes. I plan on working through it this evening:



I've lost all patience with 95% of all "lesson" videos, but I love these things.

A little more after the break:

My big revelation about this came in about 1999, when a trad jazz organization chartered a music cruise on the boat I was working on. That week the bassist and I did our regular gig, then went to the upstairs lounge to accompany the guest musicians for another 2-3 hours, which I did with a snare drum and brushes. I've never had any kind of real schooling with my brush playing- I've never really worked much of anything up in the practice room, apart from learning a few basic moves. I developed my whole (fairly limited, functional) thing on the job.

So after a few days of playing with the trad guys, some of the fancier moves I would see the real brush masters doing just started emerging. They're very natural to the music, and to the way the body interacts with it, and I believe they came out of the countless hours players spent on the stand. So don't sweat fully developing these things in the practice room- get them together, then get playing with people. That holds for everything in drumming, actually.