Now offering: Skype lessons!

OK, it's formal announcement time:

I, your blogger, Todd Bishop, am now offering live online lessons, via Skype.

I'll be happy to work with you on single lessons— say, if you'd like help with something you saw on the blog; in a focused burst of several lessons, to work on one problem; or on an ongoing basis, as a regular student.

At home, I teach all levels of players, from little kids, to adult beginners, hobbyists, on up to teachers and other professionals. My personal style is very easy-going, and I like working with beginners and novices, and solving problems, and helping people with things that are jamming them up. So, even though we deal with some hard stuff on the blog, there's no need to feel intimidated.

Cost is $50 US per hour, or $30 per half hour, +10% for non-US students, to cover transaction fees. If you're in the UK or the eurozone, the weak US dollar gives you a substantial discount— $50 US is only £30, or €36. See below for exact costs for all countries.

More details and policies after the break:

Lessons are a whole different thing

Metaphor for complexity.

It's easy to wonder if drummers online are giving away the away the entire store with all of the free video lessons, blog posts and whatnot. With such a massive volume of free information available, what do students need teachers for?

Plenty, actually. Ignoring the fact that most free video "lessons" frankly suck (and that most blog posts are golden), learning even a straightforward written exercise is a complex process of coordination, technique, reading, comprehension of rhythm, touch, general physical posture, dynamics, and tone production, for starters. Most students are aware that those are words, but do not know how to implement them and balance them with each other in practice. In helping a student find an entry into some materials, there is a lot of:

"Do this-- no, not that, this-- no, this-- not quite, fix this one thing... good, almost... take a second and work that out, but pay attention to this, not this... wait, there's something you're doing that's very subtly wrong, let's fix that-- good, now you understand it well enough to practice it on your own." 

That's when things are going well; often you can throw into the mix some:

"OK, this isn't working, let's take it slower--- no, slower--- no, slower. Right, you need to take this slower. Good, it's still not happening. Let's break this town a little bit-- that's not working-- try it this way instead... still no good-- try just this piece of it. Great, add one more note..."

Beyond that, there is the matter of placing the practice item in context: How and how much does should he practice it? What more can he do with it? How does it connect to other things? How does he integrate it into his playing? How is it going to turn up in real-world drumming?

It can take considerable knowledge and ingenuity, instantly accessible. Most self-teachers can't cope with the multiple levels of real-world uncertainty in the process. And no written item or video, no matter how detailed, can address all of things that come up. Even if it could, the student would have to be able to digest it, and accurately self-monitor all of this stuff. Both of which are highly dubious prospects.

Things I like: drum writing

Here's a new feature: things I like about things. Today we'll talk about something I'm seeing a lot of currently: practice materials.

1. Things that fit on a single page. It's nice aesthetically. Give me something I can either cook through in 10 minutes, or cover thoroughly in 45 minutes-2 hours.

2. Materials written in 2/4. Or 2/2. Just give me the building blocks and let me decide how to put them together. I/my students can figure out how to count to four when the time comes.

3. Interpreting a melody. I've come to appreciate other styles of writing, but making a single melodic line into a drum part is still the thing for making drummers into musicians.

4. Things written in 3/4 and 3/8. The key to any kind of modern playing, and severely under-covered.

5. Practicality, not completeness. As I've said before, I do not need every last permutation of an idea presented in tediously logical order to learn it fully. Writers, be selective about what you ask me to learn. Apply your musical knowledge. Try to imagine what will be helpful to me in performance and write that.

6. Fewer words. There's a reason the good lord gave us drum teachers and students with working brains, and not just wordy drum books no one's ever going to read. Please s-can the pages of verbiage and just tell us the obvious stuff for the beginners, plus maybe a few one-line "master" techniques for the pros.

7. Tempo markings. Not including a performance/target tempo is sort of like broadly waving your arm and saying "buh- over there somewhere" when someone asks you directions (full disclosure: I'm guilty of this, too). Tell us how fast an accomplished musician should be able to play your idea. Where it makes sense, a range of tempos in which this idea is usually found in real music would also be great.

Getting started transcribing

 There have been a whole raft of people asking for transcriptions over on the Drummerworld.com forum, so I thought this would be a good time for me to write up my long-intended little tutorial on the subject. If you read this and wonder if it's worth the trouble, you might also want to read my recent Why We Transcribe.

When I was what I imagine is your age, all I had to work with was a cheap cassette player with crappy headphones, or, God help me, a turntable (with no 16rpm). Happily, today there are computer tools that make the job literally a million times easier than it was for me back in the 80's and 90's. There are programs you can buy (Transcribe is a good one), but we'll be using the open-source Audacity, which is free to download and use (it is also spyware and other BS-free, so no worries there).

So, read on for my recommended procedure and tips. I haven't covered every single thing, but you'll develop your own methods as you work.


- Don't be frightened. This is the sort of thing you can only learn to do by doing it, and making mistakes. Just dive in, and take it one note at a time. No one will laugh at you if you screw up royally.

- Pick a tune. You've never done this before, so pick something easy- something with an straightforward drum part that is easy to hear in the mix. You are not obligated to do an entire piece- just getting one section, or one verse and chorus would be a good start.

- Get Audacity. Install it on your computer and open the audio file you want to transcribe in it.

- Hit play and listen and count through the piece. Determine the time signature. Hopefully you're starting with something in 4/4. If you can't figure it out, pick a different tune.

- As you listen and count through the track, hit Control-M on your keyboard on every beat 1. This will lay down a marker which will make it easy for you to select one bar at a time to transcribe.

- Prepare your notebook. Use manuscript paper- music paper. Put barlines in so you have four measures per staff, all the way down the page. To help make your measures even, put your first barline in the middle of the staff, then add the rest. Work in pencil.

- Back in Audacity, highlight the first measure of music by clicking and dragging from one marker to the next.

- Hold down the shift key while pressing the play button with your mouse to listen to the first measure as a loop. 

- Write out the drum part for that measure. Often this is easier said than done, which is the whole point of this. Here are some suggestions:

• Put in noteheads first, add stems and beams last. Stems and beams "finish" the measure. 
• As you sketch out the measure, place your beats proportionally. Beat 1 should be at the beginning of the measure, beat 3 should be in the middle, beat 2 should be evenly spaced between the 1 and 3, etc. 
• Do the obvious things first, and the difficult things last. If there is clearly a crash on 1, snare hits on 2 and 4, 8th notes on the hihat, but something you don't quite get in the bass drum, write in those other parts first, then figure out the bass. 
•  Tackle that challenging bass drum (or whatever) part one note at a time, starting with the obvious ones. If none of them are obvious to you, figure out where the first note falls, and take them in order. 
• Try listening to the measure all the way through, one voice at a time. Start with the easiest or most repetitive one- maybe the cymbal or hihat.  
•  If the tempo is too fast for you to hear what's happening, in Audacity go to "effects>tempo change" and use the little plug-in to slow down the tempo. If you find it's too slow/not slow enough, hit Control-Z and try again. After you finish with the measure, hit Control-Z to bring the measure back to its original tempo. 
• Simplify the instrument. Unless they are very different in sound, don't worry about differentiating between multiple crash cymbals- use one or maybe two lines, if you must. Same goes for toms- don't sweat it if a drummer has so many toms that you can't tell them apart. 
• After you get the notes in place, and add your stems and beams, go back and listen at regular speed and add dynamics and articulations.  
• Simplify internal dynamics and articulations. Some drummers (cough *Elvin Jones*) may play multiple levels of accents, regular notes, and ghost notes, multiple durations of buzzes, and so on. Keep your transcription playable by restricting yourself to 1) regular-volume notes, 2) accents, 3) housetop accents, and ghost notes (I mark these by putting parentheses around the note). Most of your notes should be un-accented and un-ghosted, if possible.   
• If you hit anything that doesn't make sense, feel free to "resolve" it to something you can play, or move on. Don't get hung up. 

- Here are some suggestions for when you hit something that seems too difficult for you:

• Use siege warfare tactics- isolate and infiltrate. Determine where the difficult part starts and ends, then locate and attack the vulnerable "easy" parts. 
• Start the playback before the beginning of the hard lick to establish the tempo.  
• Listen to the accents to see if you can get a sense of how the passage breaks down internally.
• Try picking out the rhythm of one voice and fill in the rest around it. 
• You may have to use the brute-force method of stopping the playback quickly after the first note of the hard lick. Then let it run through two notes, then three, and so on. Once you get the sequence of notes, you may have to go back and correct the rhythm. 

- As you move through the piece, use shorthand where possible- one-measure, two-measure and section repeats, or slash marks (Google it- indicates to play time in the style of the piece- you can use them if the drum part is very repetitive).

- When you complete your transcription, mark it with the title of the piece, the composer or songwriter's name, the drummer, the recording artist, the album and record label, and the start time (if you've only done a section of the piece). And don't forget to give yourself a "Transcribed by..." credit and a copyright date.

 That's it. I've got my own transcribing to do- have fun and be persistent in figuring things out.

Chick Webb drum lesson - part 2

Another time I went to see him, and I thought I'd hang out with him all night. Instead, he put me upstairs with a metronome, made that damn thing go at the slowest tempo you ever heard, and said, 'Roll to a hundred, and if you stop, I'll come upstairs and break your skull.'

- Art Blakey, Modern Drummer Interview, 1984, by Chip Stern

Chick Webb drum lesson - part 1

He came in wearing a camel-hair coat and a cap, and brought Ella Fitzgerald and a chihuahua with him. He said, 'Make a roll, kid,' and I started rolling—what I thought was a roll. He walked to the door with Ella, pushed her out, turned around, looked at me, went 'Sheeeeeeeeeet,' slammed the door and walked away. 

- Art Blakey, Modern Drummer Interview, 1984, by Chip Stern

Alan Greenspan won't let me give make-ups

Via Steve Korn, here is an economics professor's opinion on make-up music lessons:

[...] I'd like to explain to other parents why I feel - quite strongly, actually - that it is unreasonable of we parents to expect our teachers to make up lessons we miss, even if I know as well as they do just how expensive lessons are, and, equally importantly, how important that weekly contact is with the teacher to keeping practicing ticking along smoothly. I think that it is natural for we parents to share the point of view that students should have their missed lessons rescheduled, but if we were to 'walk a mile' in our teachers' shoes, we might change our minds about what it is reasonable for us to expect of our teachers.

Like many parents, I pay in advance for lessons each term. In my mind, what this means is that I have reserved a regular spot in the busy schedules of my sons' teachers. I understand - fully - that if I can't make it to the lesson one week (perhaps my son is sick, or we are away on holiday, or there is some other major event at school) then we will pay for the lesson, but that my teacher is under no obligation to find another spot for me that week, or to refund me for the untaught lesson. And this is the way it should be.

In my 'other life' I am an economist and teach at our local university. Students pay good money to attend classes at the university; but if they don't come to my lecture on a Monday morning, then I am not going to turn around and deliver them a private tutorial on Tuesday afternoon. When I go to the store and buy groceries, I may purchase something that doesn't get used. Days or months later, I end up throwing it out. I don't get a refund from the grocery store for the unused merchandise. If I sign my child up for swimming lessons at the local pool, and s/he refuses to return after the first lesson, I can't get my money back. So there are lots of situations in our everyday lives where we regularly pay in advance for goods or some service, and if we end up not using what we have purchased, we have to just 'swallow our losses'. On the other hand, if I purchase an item of clothing, and get home and change my mind, I can take it back and expect either a refund or a store credit.

So why do I believe that music lessons fall into the first category of 'non-returnable merchandise', rather than into the second case of 'exchange privileges unlimited' (which I think is one of the advertising slogans of an established women's clothing store!)?