Very occasional quote of the day: go ahead

“Don't be afraid. Go ahead and play.”

- Charlie Parker, quoted by Miles Davis, interview by George Avakian

Transcription: Max Roach - Commutation

Here's Max Roach soloing with his left hand on Commutation, by J.J. Johnson, on Johnson's record First Place. A nice little self contained lesson item— there's some trading after this solo I didn't bother with.

Tempo is about 256, solo begins at 2:36. 

All the notes are played strongly, except the ones in parentheses. You'll notice not all the left hand stuff lines up perfectly with the cymbal. 

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Three Camps in first inversion paradiddles - UPDATED

Updating a really horrible looking page I wrote ten years ago. Musescore actually kind of rocks, this took me no time at all, and looks way better. Musescore would make me work to make it look as bad as the old version. 

It's Three Camps, adapted for your paradiddle inversion burnout needs. Play it a lot, and fast: 

This is in Frank Arsenault form— the third camp different than I've seen it elsewhere. We get to play the third camp twice, without the extra repetition of the second camp afterwards. 

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Musescore: conclusions

So, that Billy Cobham transcription pretty well settled it: Musescore is a perfectly fine replacement for the soon-to-be-self-annihilating[? -tb] Finale. For my purposes: writing drumming materials, and lead sheets. 

There are a few very minor things I need to figure out, but the basic thing is solid. In a couple of weeks I'm as fast as I ever was with Finale— a lot about it is clearly better than Finale.

The whole endeavor is more orderly, with all the necessary stuff nice and visible. In Finale things are scattered under any of several menus. In Musescore of the universal style settings are under one giant menu (under format>style), and all the local style settings are instantly available under the properties tab. 

Note entry is more obscure at first, but ultimately more economical than Finale— it takes fewer keystrokes/mouse clicks to do the same thing. Editing generally is easier. It does behave surprisingly at times— better familiarity with the basic modes will help with that. 

Non-default spacing of staves is a little funny— it's done not by setting the actual width/spacing of the staff, but by adding a blank frame, which acts as a spacer. You can adjust that with the mouse, or set an exact size in the frame's properties. Not as direct as the staff size properties in Finale.  

Tuplets are great. Select the overall note value, then the type of tuplet you want to divide it into. EG, select quarter note, then triplet = eighth note triplet. Nesting tuplets is also easy, just select a note of the tuplet, and make a tuplet out of it. In Finale they're a pain, and often behave very strangely.

Not having a universal “text tool”— for just plopping a cursor anywhere— takes some getting used to, but it's fine. All text has a particular function, with a particular default placement. Musescore is more conducive to an orderly looking page. 

Some general thoughts/suggestions:

Make your template first
Using the settings under format>style decide what you want all your documents to look like, and save that in a file named template (and template_bac for when you accidentally save a change you don't want). Open the template for every new thing you're going to write, and immediately save it under the file name of whatever thing you're writing.   

Use the keyboard
You can't be doing everything with the mouse. Learn all the shortcuts for the major things you need to do. Get used to num pad = rhythm / hot keys = the notes / arrow keys = reassign notes that have no hotkey. 

And get used to hitting the esc key. In note-entering mode, it's easy to accidentally alter your score. Type some notes, hit esc to make changes to them, or to do something else.   

And the arrows, and ctrl, shift, strl-shift, alt, and shift-drag (with mouse, to select an area). And the number pad. I need to get better at navigating the document/program just with the keyboard— pointing at something with the mouse really slows things down.   

Rebuild the drum set palette
It's in a wild order as far as placing notes on a staff is concerned. So if you type in a note and then revoice it with the up/down arrow keys, you'll cycle through the instruments in this order: 

It's kind of random. Apparently the only way to fix that is to remake the entire thing:

1. Go to edit drumset.
2. Select an entry, and delete its name. 
3. Click the No. column so the entries are listed 0, 1, 2, 3, etc.
4. Fill in new instrument names starting from the bottom of the staff and ascending— of the opposite. 
5. Give the instrument a name, assign it a proper notehead, move it to the correct line on the staff, and assign it a shortcut. I put all of my stuff on the same stems, so I set everything for default voice 1, stems up. If you want bass drum/hihat pedal on separate stems, select default voice 2, stems down for them.
6. Be thorough and do them in order— anything you have to add later will appear out of order at the end of your palette. 
7. I assigned hotkeys as: A - snare, B - bass, C - crash, D - floor tom, E - high tom, F - hihat/foot, G - cymbal (I put both hihat and ride above the top line of the of the staff, and indicate one or the other with a written note. If they're both playing at the same time, I'll put one on another line however is convenient). 

That will give you a palette like this, which is much quicker when revoicing instruments up or down the staff. And also just using the key as a visual reference. 

From bottom to top— instruments on the same line separated by slash: 

Hihat with foot

Bass

Floor tom 2

Floor tom

Snare drum / rim click

Mid tom 

High tom

Higher tom

Hihat or ride / bell / misc diamond notehead / highest tom

Cymbal 2

Crash / China

Splash

WARNING: That may wreak holy hell on MIDI applications, I have no idea how it will affect that, and don't care. For now— I may come to regret that. Probably save two forms of your template— one with the default assignments intact, another with the new ones.

There you go. Onward and upward. Get Musescore here. 

Afro 6 - new basics

For one of my students, a new page of warmups introducing an Afro 6 groove— or various forms of it. It's as deep a thing as there is in drumming, and to begin understanding it we want to approach it from a few different angles. This is mostly for the hands, see also this page which works out the coordination with the feet. 

Play those, be able to count in 3 or in 4, depending on the time signature, as in ex. 1 and 2. It may help to count the combined rhythm of all the parts before playing a pattern, and/or to work it out as a sticking— including R hand, L hand, and Both hands. 

Get the pdf

Squarepusher beat

This came out of a mistake by a student, when we were working on some basic ghost note materials. Some things considered to be “advanced” come up naturally in the form of mistakes and general indiscipline. My student's timing was wrong for what was written on the page, but it was perfectly in time for this kind of techno beat— he mentioned Squarepusher, so that's what we'll call it.  

Here are some things to play with, starting with the seed idea: 

You can see sort of what's happening there— ordinary 16th note ghost note stuff, with some notes offset by a 32nd note, maybe doubled, and extended a little bit, with the goal of sounding hyper and disjointed. 

Tempo and sound should be frenetic. Eventually. Crank your snare drum, or play them on one of those useless little 10" snares. Add bass drum as you see fit. 

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Double time Reed tweak: one step beyond

Launching to the outer limits of what you can reasonably do with Syncopation, verging on losing the melody rhythm as a point of reference. Or not, see what you make of it. 

Using one of the more useful double timing things (the second item on this page of warmups), and changing what we do with bass drum. Reading from pp. 34-45 in Syncopation.

After playing the plain right hand lead version of the book rhythm with hands only, the steps are: 

• Do the added 16ths— single Ls = two 16ths / LR, two Ls = LRRL, three Ls = LRRLRL. 
• Add bass drum on beat 1. 
• Add bass drum to the added RH 16th notes— immediately after the snare drum. 
• Add bass drum on any remaining isolated notes of the melody rhythm. 

Here, figure it out: 

This actually creates a kind of a double time rubadub. The bass drum added on beat 1 is a little random— don't do it if it creates any kind of problem. Like if there's not a cymbal note on 1. 

On the second page of the pdf I wrote out how lines 2-3 of the p. 38 exercise will go, with each step. 

Doing all this systematically while reading full page exercises in Reed is rather difficult— we can give ourselves a pretty wide latitude for errors/inconsistency with that— if you can read p. 38 at a bright tempo with the bass drum part landing somewhere between items 4 and 5, you'll be doing pretty well.   

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Daily best music in the world: a good first jazz album

If we learned about music in a nice orderly way, where everything started at a logical beginning with music that was clear and expository, this would be a good first record for finding out about jazz: Oscar Peterson Trio + One. With Ray Brown, Ed Thigpen, and Clark Terry. 

Everything is stated real plainly, for real clear reasons. All the features of the genre are here— to the extent that jazz is a genre. And it's a good sounding recording, with Thigpen playing the drums in a modern way. 

I could have used this sooner than I ever listened to it— I had to figure out how to support this kind of setting on the gig. I came to this music differently— the first things I sought out were by Charlie Parker, Art Blakey, and Miles Davis. Also “classic” jazz, but also rougher, less obvious music. The functions weren't so plain. Listening to a lot of Tony Williams and Elvin Jones I was looking to create a lot of drum energy, but I wasn't so clear on the underlying musical duties, even as I knew the music, forms, and vocabulary generally.  

Here's one track, you can go buy the CD: 

OK, two tracks: 

Funk warmups - cymbal on offbeats

A page of groove fragments, really, for one of my students— to help get oriented working out of New Breed. We were having some difficulties with this particular cymbal rhythm.   

You could play this page by itself, or use it to work out how the coordination will work when playing a similar system in New Breed. 

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Transcription: Jack Dejohnette - Boo Ann's Grand

Jack Dejohnette open drum solo from Boo Ann's Grand, on the Jackie McLean 1967 album Demon's Dance. Tempo is about 241— about as fast you can do this kind of stuff. This is burning for jazz stuff using triplets. 

The solo begins at 5:23, and is 48 bars long, less two beats— the band comes in two beats off the 1 of the transcription. 

 

Naturally at this speed you can put a big slur marking over much of the dense activity. A lot of things written as unisons are not lined up precisely. Much of it is Elvin-like activity; he doesn't come off the cymbal much, except on the paradiddle-diddle thing in the fourth line, and at the beginning of the sixth line. He does some interactive snare and hihat stuff at the beginning and end. 

Playing this note for note would be insane. Analyze it for general principles, ways of playing, things played within one phrase. Some things are certainly happening from physical momentum that would be hard to duplicate if you played it literally. Something can be structured to the person playing it, but if they ghost some notes, it can look really fragmented on the page. 

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Daily best music in the world: Elvin recorded wrong

A little listening experiment. My brother played this record for me, I forget how he set it up— clearly there was something wrong with it, he wanted my reaction. 

I said, this is somebody I should know, but couldn't place it. Sounds weird.

You can see on the thing that it's Elvin Jones... recorded in a highly strange way, with this weird, thin, cymbal sound. He's a very distinctive, recognizable player. I have listened to him as much as anybody, on many recordings of vastly differing recording quality. We were both a little stunned— not that my ear wasn't good enough to tell it was him, but that you could make someone sound so alien to himself by recording him weirdly. And why would you do that. 

Fascination not in a good way. The playing of course is great.  

Transcription: Billy Cobham - For Someone I Love

Here's that Billy Cobham transcription— just of a busy portion of Freddie Hubbard's solo on For Someone I Love, on Milt Jackson's record Sunflower. I'm learning a lot about Musescore doing something this damn complicated. 

Ignoring form altogether here, the transcription begins at 4:25, a few measures into Hubbard's solo— the first few bars are very light, you can hear where he plays the ruffs/triplets at the beginning of the page— and cutting out after the last big insane lick, out of sheer exhaustion. Tempo is about 74 bpm. 

If it looks like a fragmented nightmare, take it up with Mr. Cobham. He packs a lot of stuff into some small spaces. I have some questions about bar 10— the end of yesterday's sixtuplet lick— but I can only let this guy beat me up for so long. It is what it is.  

UPDATE: There's a slight fault in the notation in measure 21— each of those drags should be played as a nested triplet. There are supposed to be three dots (...) printed about each of them. Correction coming when I can get to it...

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Billy, switch to decaf babe

Getting cocky about my Musescore skills now, working on a Billy Cobham transcription, from Milt Jackson's album Sunflower. On the tune For Someone I Love, he does sort of an insane thing that almost crashes the album. The whole thing is really loose anyway. 

It happens after 4:45, during the trumpet solo: 

The actual transcription isn't complete, but here's a chunk of what he plays there: 

It's kind of cursed, I can count through the surrounding four measure phrase, but I can't get the last measure of the lick (not pictured) to resolve to 4/4. I blame Satan. 

Anyway, it's essentially an eight note pattern— two paradiddles (or paradiddle inversions, I don't know how he was thinking it) played on the hihat and snare drum, with feet added. Here are some possible inversions of it, in 16ths and triplets: 

Probably wise to learn the triplet form with hands only at first. I would want to know where the beginning of the eight note pattern falls, and each paradiddle, and the quarter note pulse— most importantly. Print it out and mark it up. Have fun, make some enemies, transcription coming soon. 

Transcription: Flight For Freedom - 01

OK, first complete transcription using Musescore, doing basically everything I need it to do for this site. Same recording I've been working with, Flight For Freedom by Oliver Nelson, from his record Skull Session, with Shelly Manne on drums. There was some dispute over whether it might have been Jim Gordon instead— we'll listen to one of his tracks from this record and check out the difference. 

This is the first minute of the track: 

I think he's using a four piece set plus a couple of concert toms. Mostly rides on the hihat, and he hits that ugly sounding swish cymbal quite often. And a crash cymbal, and he gets onto the ride cymbal at the end. Towards the end there's an unusual percussion sound I can't identify— I think he's playing it, but it could be someone else. He did quirky stuff like that at times. 

I really want my thing of notating half-open hihats with a tenuto mark to catch on. 

Get the pdf

Check out this track with Jim Gordon for comparison: 

Gordon hits harder, and is more aggressive, has a little sharper edge as a pure groove player— he seems more polished for this kind of music. Manne perhaps makes some more unusual choices, and is looser. They're both playing with a lot of forward momentum, I can't define the difference in quality of groove between them— Manne feels more “behind the beat”, but I'm not sure that's accurate at all. These are pretty nuanced impressions— they're both right on it, and have done a thousand sessions at this point, and are great. I enjoy Manne's playing more, he's warmer; Gordon is like a machine for this kind of playing. Not to say he sounds machine-like— do you dig the distinction? 

Feelings and impressions are hilarious— the words that come into your head may not be the actual thing happening on the recording. 

Listen to the rest of the record. Gordon plays on Skull Session, Dumpy Mama, and Japanese Garden.
 

Musescore notes: 

I've actually got it pretty close to where I want it, with the appearance of my template, and with using it. Two or three days of fussing around is actually not bad. 

Stem length
A lingering visual annoyance was the general stubby appearance of the notes. Under format > style > notes I saw that the shorten stems box was checked by default. I set the shortened stem length to 2.95sp— a little shorter than the default non-shortened stem length.  

Work modes

Navigating the various work modes are still a little obscure. I'll be hitting the Esc key often to switch from note entry mode— which doesn't always act the way I expect it to— to doing general stuff mode, where I can select measures and individual notes/articulations/text to do something with them.  

Note entry
Entering notes I use the keys a lot— hotkeys for the major drum sounds, arrows for navigating, number pad for rhythm value, + shift key to enter two notes in unison. For drum sounds that don't have a hotkey, I highlight the note/rest then mouse click on the thing I want in the key at the bottom of the window. For anything else I use the mouse to select it. 

Using the arrow keys, sometimes moving L-R selects the next note or articulation in a stack, sometimes not. 

Exporting
Really easy. For some reason my version of Finale sucked for exporting pdfs and jpegs— I had to use a pdf printer app (cutepdf, it's quite useful) to export to pdf, and then actually upload it to a web site (online2pdf.com, also quite useful) to convert it to a jpeg. Really dumb, and time consuming. 

Musescore has a nice friendly PUBLISH tab at the top of the screen that lets you output it any number of ways quickly and easily. 

Note entry is the main thing I need to get sorted out. I'll do a dedicated post for that in the next few days. Or not— I'm not sure how helpful my personal notes will be for people. Just read this page on entering notes and this page on navigating the document. 

Working with Musescore - 02

Getting further into Musescore with an easy Shelly Manne transcription, a rock arrangement called Flight For Freedom, from Oliver Nelson's record Skull Session. I like Manne's rock playing— it's a little different, with a great deep sound and pocket.  

These are things I had to figure out while making it, in the order they came up.  

I first had to make some adjustments to my template:  

Cleaning up palettes
Under the palettes tab, there are a number of things I don't need: clef, pitch, key signature, etc.

Click on the unwanted thing, hit the [...] options button, and select hide. 

Then click add palettes and select some things to add: grace notes, lines, whatever else you want.

Editing the drumset
I want to set up my template with every drum I'm likely to need, with a proper note head and hot key.

In note entry mode, at the bottom of the screen you should see a key to the drum set, with an edit drum set.  

Under edit drum set, you can just click an empty slot on the left side of the window, and give it a name, notehead, and line/space on the right side of the window. I don't care about playback, so I haven't figured out how to assign sounds. 

And of course you can modify existing entries by clicking on them, and changing them the same ways. 

Problem: it looks like I only get hotkeys for the letters A-G. I want more than that, we'll see if it's possible.

Here is the current state of the transcription: 

I really need to figure out how entering text works.
UPDATE: In fact, you just drag it where ever you want after typing it.

Pickup measure
The drums play a little three note lead in. Select the first measure > right click > select measure properties.

There are settings for nominal and actual measure duration. Reset the actual duration to the length of the pick up measure— three 8th notes in this case.
   

Muting drum sounds while entering music
I'm listening to the piece as I'm transcribing, I don't want to hear their crappy midi drum sounds while I'm doing that.

At the top of the screen hit edit > preferences > note input > uncheck play notes while editing. 

Flams
Select the note you want to embellish, go to the palettes tab > grace notes, click on the symbol for the type of grace note you want to add. For ruffs, click repeatedly for the number of grace notes you want. 

To move the grace notes to a different drum, select the note and use the up/down arrows.

Problem: on the palette they're pictured with a little slur attaching it to the note it embellishes, but they don't render that way in the score. You can add a slur by selecting a note and hitting the S key, but the slur is not scaled for a grace note, and was not attached to the note I wanted. You can move it, but it's a little weird.   

Articulations
Select the note you want, click appropriate articulation in the articulations palette. 

To remove, right click on the articulation and hit delete. There's got to be a better way of doing that. 

To remove all articulations in a measure or region, right click the articulation then select > similar in this range > then delete.  

Annoyance: I want some articulations to be positioned further above the beams than the default. You can change that in the articulations palette— right click on the symbol > select properties, change y axis: -.5 sp (for example) But: the position change shows in the palette, but not in the score. 

I also don't like the appearance of all of them— will need to get into the settings to correct that, if possible. 

Noteheads
The first cymbal hit is a swish cymbal (man, those A. Zildjian swishes sound bad). You can permanently add something to the drum set instrument following the directions above, or change the note head for a single note by selecting the note, then the properties tab > note > notehead > select the notehead you want. 

Line breaks
In Finale we set the number of measures for each line via a setting. Ctrl-M, I think. In Musescore, reminiscent of a word processor, you just hit enter where you want the line break to be. 

Double bars
Click on the measure you want, go to the barlines palette, click the appropriate thing. Easy. 

Ghost notes
Indicated by a parenthesis around the notehead. They're easy; select the note, then the properties tab > note > notehead parentheses.

Problem: since we often deal with groups of ghost notes, having open and close parentheses on every note will quickly clutter up the page. I need options for note + open parenthesis and note + close parenthesis. 

UPDATE: There are open and close parenthesis symbols hiding in the MASTER PALETTE (shift + f9 to view), under noteheads. Click on the thing you want in the master palette, and drag it to your working palette for your template. 

It's going pretty good. I need to get a handle on entering and positioning text, and get better just navigating the program and entering/working with notes. The modes are still a little obscure— “note entry” mode, and some other kind of mode. 

The way the music is scaled on the page bothers me. Copying the dimensions accurately from Finale to Musescore will be problematic, because they are entered in inches in Finale, and in staff spaces (mostly) in Musescore. Onward. 

Very occasional quote of the day: relationships for leaders

“The only thing that is really important in your relationship with actors is that they must know that you admire them, that you admire their work, and there’s no way to fake that. You must really admire them or you shouldn’t use them. If they know that you admire their work, which they can sense in a thousand different ways, it doesn’t really matter what you think of each other or what you say to them, or whether you are terribly friendly or not. The thing they care about is their work. 

Some actors are very amusing and pleasant and always cheerful. They are, of course, more pleasant to have around than those who are morose, vacant, or enigmatic. But how they behave when you're not shooting has very little to do with what happens when the camera turns over.” 

- Stanley Kubrick, Sight And Sound interview, 1972

Alec Guinness and I were making a film called Tunes of Glory several years ago. At the end of about the first week he was very sulky. He was very low and miserable and grumpy and irritable. I said, “Alec, what’s the matter? We’re all trying very hard and you seem so miserable and depressed and it’s getting us all down. We feel as though we’re not getting a good picture and that you don’t like any of us. Is there anything I can do?” 

He said, “You know, Ronnie, I have been working on this picture for nearly two weeks and not once has anybody ever said to me, ‘'Alec, you are really very, very good. We think you are marvelous.’ 

I said, “Well, good gracious, Alec, we think that you are marvelous. What we are trying to do is live up to you. We have taken it for granted that you know we think you are marvelous.” 

He said, “Ronnie, I have to tell you something about actors.”

- Director Ronald Neame, in Directing The Film, by Eric Sherman

Snare drum vs. drum set training

The following are some comments I made in a contentious online conversation about snare drum training and drum set training— or playing— and the differences between the two, that I think stand on their own— edited slightly for clarity:

The snare drum and the drum set are different instruments, played differently.

Snare drum training is two handed playing on one drum, dealing with all areas of performance on the snare drum— reading, accents, flams and ruffs, rolls, rudiments. See any method book, technique book, and rudimental book: Podemski, Goldenberg, Stone, Wilcoxon. Intermediate Snare Drum Studies and Rudimental Primer by Mitchell Peters give a reasonable minimum standard for baseline proficiency.

Drum set training means playing the drum set, a four limbed instrument using a snare drum, a bass drum, some cymbals, and some tom toms, as a coordinated thing. Training involves things related to coordination, styles, the functions of the components of the instrument, playing and setting up figures, reading interpretively, improvising, filling, soloing. 

Much of that we develop through the book Syncopation— the most common things done with it are in John Ramsay's Alan Dawson book. I've also written a hundred or so systems for it on my site. Other books broadly outlining that are Steve Houghton's Studio and Big Band Drumming book, Ed Uribe's Brazilian and Afro-Cuban books, and Kim Plainfield's Advanced Concepts book. Those all outline the primary techniques of the instrument, and practice systems for developing them. 

You can't get where those books take you just by getting good with your ratamacues.

Much of ordinary drum set playing doesn't require a lot of technical ability as a snare drummer. Though it can be very helpful, and necessary for some ways of playing. And necessary if someone's going to be a competent professional.

The drum set has its own language now. Approaching the drum set as “snare drumming plus some other stuff” is antiquated.

Reading real old drumming materials it's kind of shocking how contemporary some of it is. And how not. Much of it is oriented around how to play a 2/4 march and how to play a 6/8 march, and that's about it. 2 feel with the bass drum / 4 feel with the bass drum.

On the snare drum alone, I don't see a great logic to playing patterns 1-72 in Stick Control, except it's a different sequence of Rs and Ls. The sequences themselves are an important part of the language of drumming, but I don't know how helpful it truly is to just learn a lot of ways of making static 8th notes on one drum. Except to work on evenness between hands— which is something, but not everything.

It's kind of like making a piano student run their scales with all the notes on the keyboard sounding middle C. The differences in pitches aid understanding the thing, they're the whole reason for the thing.

I don't know of another instrument that requires people to learn complex fingerings while sounding a single pitch.

I learned most of Stone on an actual snare drum, standing up in a little hallway at school— an hour of Stone like that. Flam pages 21-23. It was a miserable way to practice, and ultimately poor practice economy for the effort.

If you play 1-72 from Stone on a drum set with the hands hitting two different sounds, there's an obvious musical difference between the patterns— there is a reason to play one over another, an auditory difference. So you learn the pattern as a piece of musical content, not just as a mathematical sequence. 

Part of why so many drummers are such lousy musicians is they think in terms of Rs and Ls and not in terms of melodic ideas— which we get from that latter thing.

The bigger reason to do a lot of snare drum is not just for how you'll use it directly. Your hands are still where most of your facility is going to be. There are some bodies of SD materials that are pretty essential to more-than-basic drum set playing— accented singles, flam rudiments, paradiddle rudiments, open rolls and drags. And the more advanced snare drum materials cover some things that no drum set materials cover— finer aspects of rhythm, various forms of time changes, finer dynamic control, and timing control.

Different students have different goals. We start on snare drum, and continue with it as necessary, as their goals evolve. The two instruments develop concurrently. 

I teach all levels of people, with all sorts of playing goals that are not mine. Not everyone knows how serious they're going to be about it when they start. Many of them are not irrationally motivated to do it, as I was, and need to be given a chance to get hooked, and get more ambitious about what they want to accomplish with it.

The idea is not to teach limitation, the idea is to find a path forward for everyone, and teach things in a timely manner with the growth of their interest, goals, and commitment.

I get a lot of students who were poorly taught— by themselves, or others. There are a lot of very bad drum teachers (and bad drummers) out there, often teaching ideas they inherited from their teacher, that they never really understood, and never questioned. Or they try to reinvent the instrument based on some popular trends, without understanding what they're reinventing. I'm not thrilled with the way a lot of people do things on this instrument. There are a lot of lingering primitive ideas about how it works.

Nothing half assed about any of this— I put a tremendous amount of energy into helping my students become excellent and creative players to whatever extent they want to pursue it.

How much snare drum would you require before touching a drum set for a nine year old beginner? Or a 70 year old beginner? Or someone with a high pressure job who does music as a distraction from that? 

Also see this post on snare drummers vs. drum set players.