A drumming blog written by Todd Bishop.
Most of the examples don't have much in them for actual drummers, but he's very businesslike about it. It's funny to bring in one of the top drummers on the planet to point out, OK, there's no bass drum there, here's how you hold the sticks.
This is all just an excuse to share that screen shot, which I thought was hilarious. It is funny when they get to the movie Whiplash.
Enjoy:
Taking a break from a whole lot of teaching, business related emails— there's a Seattle cymbal meet coming up, and a Germany trip in October— and whatnot. I get irritable when I don't get to practice and work on my own stuff, so I'm blowing off some steam* writing, with great hostility and in the most annoying style possible, a script for a 20 minute YouTube video, DECODING STICK CONTROL, that will be CRUCIAL to CHANGING YOUR LIFE, drumming and otherwise.
...for the worse. Oh my God, greatly. I think what follows accurately conveys the average time:benefit ratio of >95% of drumming videos on YouTube. This is what it's like for me sitting through those things... if I have to suffer, so do you.
* - UPDATE: Ehhhh I wrote this a little more EXPLICIT than I normally do on this site, I went back
and toned it down a bit. Sacrificing some primo comedy material to preserve the dignity(!) of the site.
Scene:
[user innocently types youtube.com into his web browser, searches “how to practice stick control”, list of videos comes up, the following is at the top of the list, with 6 million views]
[title card, we see the words DECODING STICK CONTROL at a crooked angle, photo of presenter brandishing book STICK CONTROL by George L. Stone, with look of inane, inappropriate surprise]
[30 second intro graphic for production company of long suffering video team]
[90 second intro montage of guy apparently wailing on the drums, with elaborate facial expressions]
HEY [edit for blown take] EVERYBODY!!! it's JJ, Jim Jackerson comin' atcha again, and [90 seconds of blather, introducing himself, his dog, and his Pontiac, which he calls “The Squealer”, etc] and working the camera today we've got Stevo, known as The Hairball, say hi to everybody Hairball! [camera view vigorously nods hello]
So in today's lesson we're going to CRACK THE CODE [makes Rubik's cube-like gesture] of one of the GREATEST DRUM [edit for blown take] BOOKS OF ALL TIME, STICK CONTROL by George Lawrence Stone, which [2 minutes of superlatives]. Now, George Lawrence Stone was [2 minutes of superlatives].
[2 minutes of superlative blather about what brands of drums/cymbals/heads/sticks he's using]
SO LET'S GOOO here's the WORLD FAMOUS EXERCISE 1. [goofy montage of guy at a practice pad experiencing various stages of perplexity / frustration / exultation]
Now the kinda notes you see here are called [edit for blown take] AYT-TH NOTES which you count ONE. AND. TWO. AND. THREE. AND. FOUR... AND.
Now you may be saying [begin funny voice] HURR HOLD UP JJ, WHAT DO ALL THOSE Rs AND [edit for blown take] Ls DOWN THERE MEAN, [affects southern accent] AH'M CONFEWSED [end southern accent, end funny voice]
WELL YOU KNOW I WONDERED ABOUT THAT FOR A LONG TIME MYSELF, AND THEN I GOT THE INSIDE SCOOP WHEN I TOOK A LESSON WITH [well known drum teacher who spent the longest 50 minutes of his life with this guy] AND HE SAYS THE R MEANS RIGHT HAND [hits pad slowly with right hand] AND L MEANS— THAT'S RIGHT, YOU GOT IT, AHH, HAHAHAHAHA YOU'RE WAY AHEADA ME, I GOTTA WATCH YOU GUYS... LEFT HAND!
SO TO PLAY THAT YOU GO: WWON [hits pad slowly with right hand] AND [edit for blown take] [hits pad slowly with left hand] TOOO [hits pad slowly with right hand] AND [hits pad slowly with left hand] THREEE [hits pad slowly with right hand] AND [hits pad slowly with left hand] FORRR [hits pad slowly with right hand] AND [hits pad slowly with left hand].
[90 seconds of superlatives about the myriad ways this is going to change your life, 2:1 ratio of words:edits for blown takes]
[two minutes of “critical” instructions on how to practice it in the wrongest / most mind-numbing way possible, emphasis on using “free stroke”]
ONCE YOU CAN DO THAT, IT'S TIME TO J**K IT [frenetic graphic text to that effect, with high speed background video of host jacking up his Pontiac, brandishing wrench at camera] and LEVEL UP TO JACKERSON LEVEL and do it... A LITTLE FASTER. [crazee montage of drumming mayhem, funny camera angles] SO YOU READY, HERE WE GO, JJJ-STYLE:
NOW THE REST OF THE BOOK [riffles pages at camera] IS A LOT OF STUFF YOU PRAHHBLY DON'T NEED, I MEAN EVEN I HAVEN'T DONE IT. [flings book off-camera]
BUT [90 seconds of earnest, near religious superlatives about how it has changed his life, opened the gates to a paradise of freedom of creativity going dooga-dooga on the drums.]
[3 minutes of entreaties to “like” video, ways to follow on social media, ways of contributing, etc etc]
End scene
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| Photo stolen from the cover of The Cymbal Book by Hugo Pinksterboer, which you should own. |
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| Tiny hat cymbal |
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| My '70 Buick Elektra,.en route to Las Vegas from Los Angeles, 1989 |
Another funny item I dug out of my archives. I believe it's from the jazz festival at UC Berkeley in 1989— I was there playing with USC's guitar ensemble. A bassist and drummer gave a clinic that was mainly about time, and I think this was a handout. I forget their names, but they were Bay Area jazz professionals, not an 80s pop band from Indiana also called The Phonz.
They've padded it out with some jokes, but there are some good points:
The main thing I took from the clinic and never forgot was:
Laying back or playing on top are confusing terms, they are a smokescreen. Time should be played in the middle of the beat by the rhythm section.
It simplifies your thinking if you just decide to be the reference point stating the tempo, and let everyone else play ahead or behind. Which may put you seemingly ahead of / behind the beat, depending on the other players' ears / time concepts. The main thing is that you're being the reference point— you're not getting the time from them.
Cleaning out my mom's house I found a box of all the siblings' music materials that she saved, including a bunch of my archive items, that are pretty interesting.
The thing below was written and sent to me by my friend Kirk Ross, mainly a bassist then, now mainly a songwriter. Kind of an extreme personality. We played in a couple of bands at the University of Oregon, then we went off to different schools— me to U. of Southern California, him to Berklee. Later he got me on my first cruise ship gig, and he brought me to Los Angeles ~7 years ago to make a record with Geoff Keezer on piano, playing Kirk's songs and a Neil Sedaka cover.
His first year at Berklee he was getting into some things from Gary Chaffee that I showed him, and he really ran with them. Following is a one-measure sight reading exercise— the left side got cut off, but top to bottom, I think each line was meant for snare drum, hihat, and bass drum:
A joke, clearly. I'm sure it works out mathematically. After this Kirk moved to LA and sought out and befriended Vinnie Colaiuta, and jammed with him a few times. He had a big moment was when he was able to lose Vinnie playing the above kind of nonsense— I guess even he needed a foundation to play off of. We each had our course corrections shortly after this— Kirk going back to Berklee and getting really into James Brown, me at SC getting into Elvin Jones.
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| Tenue des baguettes |
derecha izquierda derecha derecha
izquierda derecha izquierda izquierda
It's only possible to do it at baby speed, with a giant space in between words. Derecha. [Whack].
Italian is almost as bad, they shaved off a syllable:
destra sinistra destra destra
sinistra destra sinistra sinistra
If you say it fast you have a Bulgarian rhythm.
German is acceptable, with rechts (or rechte?) and links. French droite and gauche are a mouthful, but sound cool, especially the word gauche has a good sound for percussion, like a Pinstripe on a snare drum. Goosh. Drummers speaking most other languages are burdened with extra syllables. I don't know what they do, call stickings by their letter name? Assuming the letters themselves are only one syllable?
Sidebar, step into my office: Where the hell did the Danish get venstre for left? It's similar to das Fenster in German, meaning window. We can only speculate on that etymology, remembering that usually words meaning left are derived from weird, dirty, evil, weak, clumsy, suspect. The left hand is out the window, like the rotten herring seems the likely word source.
[...]
Fellow drumming blogger Ted Warren suggested you could have a whole new rudiment if you played a note for all the syllables in that Spanish version. We have the choice of keeping the beat the same, or keeping the rate of notes the same:
That first one will give you a little left hand workout. I imagine in a parallel Star Trek universe where I speak Spanish, I say izquierda in a lesson, and the student says so I hit it four times, IZ-QUI-ER-DA? [whack whack whack whack] and I say NO! It's quite simple! etc endlessly.
Lots to think about.
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| The genesis of this post. |
First you'll notice that these people are all very successful, while the jazz musicians who torment them are losers, forced to do very shameful work:
“I wanted to make a living. I found I had many hard jazz heads talking down to me as I was making a good full-time living doing tv shows, movies, and pop recordings. They play great and work at Walmart.”
One man was scarred by an event decades ago:
“...about 25 years ago I was taking a long lunch in downtown Everett, Washington and I noticed some jazz people setting up. So I casually walked over and asked what they were playing... 'Jazz' he said very snobbishly... That much was obvious ..... I was planning to hang out and listen top them, but instead I cut my lunch short and went back to work... You can abuse me to a point, but you are going to pay me to do it...”
“When I was in music school, the group of drummers asked me- a freshman - what music I was listening to and who my favorite drummers were. I said “Rush - and Neil Peart, Vinnie, Stewart Copeland, Manu Katche...” the collective disdainful gasp is nothing I’ll forget soon”
This happened. People do make exaggerated, easily-readable expressions of shock when a drummer lives up to their expectations.
“There's nothing more ironic than a term like "jazz police"
A Music genre, that was forbidden, whose interpreters were prosecuted by a society in where they dared to be outlaws... Has a "police"
Elitism kills music scenes...”
Note: “Jazz police” are not actual police. It is not some enforcement body created and named by jazz musicians to root out heretics and unbelievers and too-creative neophytes. A made up thing fulfilling the disparaging name you made up for it is not an irony-type situation.
“Jazz has become an orthodoxy and anyone who truly challenges that orthodoxy will get rejected. Too many years of jazz being 'taught' has created a glut of jazz musicians who don't know how to work in the modern music world but will be able to have an opinion on how you should play jazz. There is a huge difference to what Ornette and Monk were doing compared to what most modern jazz musicians are doing today. And this can be heard in how similar modern jazz musicians sound. This video really seems blind to the real problems that exist in the current jazz ideology; It can't cope with true iconoclasts anymore....”
...oh, I remember, these are comments from the 80/20 guy's “authenticity” video, which I wrote about, to which he responded in another video, without naming this site or linking to it...
“Jazz” didn't necessarily cope that well Ornette and Monk at first, either. Iconoclasts are never welcomed by everyone, and having iconoclasty be an expected thing is not necessarily good. You get a situation like in the art world— a certain attitude in it— where every new thing has to wipe out what came before it, and nothing gets developed. It becomes a form of commercialism. It would be great if people were more accepting of individual voices, and were more original in their creative work— we'll have to take that up with the human race.
As for jazz being an orthodoxy— I think somebody probably was told to do some homework and didn't like it, and couldn't respond to that person at the time. Or the authority figure didn't validate the commenter's objections.
“Jazz cats are among the most insufferable jackasses on the planet. And this is coming from someone who’s worked in two different music stores and attended three different schools of music. I once asked an unruly jazzer 'why are you knocking yourself out to make elevator music?'”
Note: I shall not comment on a music store guy calling other people insufferable. Equating jazz to elevator music is evidence of a thorough and deep understanding of a world wide field of music spanning a >100 year period.
“Jazz is that ugly place where all the toxic mistakes of history ferment.”
This I could not have said better. Finally someone gets it.
...so yeah. These are all basically the notes from a story-writing session for the movie Whiplash.
My theory: I blame this type of thing on the South, and the southern diaspora. Sorry, South. There seems to be some kind tribal instinct to demonism and mob frenzy down there, where you identify an enemy, and then make things up about it, get good and mad about that, and everyone piles on more made up things, and everyone has a good homicidal wallow. There's also a particularly American kind of self-defeating belligerence towards moral, intellectual, scientific, professional and artistic authority— any non-violent authority— while being slavishly submissive/worshipful to the punishing kinds of authority.
And there are a lot of very fragile egos. Many folks seem to be mostly concerned with building some kind of fraudulent appearance of status, and with cocooning themselves in self-delusion about their abilities, and they get very angry when someone doesn't help them with that project.
Most jazz musicians I know, and I, are painfully aware of their/our real and imagined shortcomings, and spend many years learning to deal with that— not by BSing, but by working really hard at learning to play. So by the time we are done(?) being beaten up by our insecurities, we're pretty solid about what we know and do not know, and we don't concede points of music to just anyone who wants to disagree. This also makes some people very angry.
The thing to do, instead of what these people did, is to get serious about learning. All that requires is to have some humility about the task ahead of you, to stop the BS, and to learn to listen and take in information— all the time, from any and all sources. And not get mad at people who outperform you, or that know more than you, or that don't stroke your ego and self-delusion. Those are all learning opportunities, and only the biggest losers in this game pass them up for the sake of their ego.
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| NO |
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| This is you trying to play a normal drum set. |
A drum is simply any percussion instrument beaten by the hands or with some tool, as a stick or wire brush. However, the use of only a single drum may not be able to utilize the full capacity of a skilled drummer. This then leads to the development of the drum set.
The drum set or drum kit is a collection of percussion instruments to be struck by a single player seated at a drum throne/seat. It is, as often said, the backbone of every band, keeping the pace and driving the rhythm section of every performance. A standard set of drums consists of a snare drum, a bass drum, a hi-hat, two tom-tom drums and one or more cymbals. The hi-hat could be operated by the left foot; the bass drum is operated by the right foot, while the other drum components are struck with drum sticks. Drumsticks are normally held at their fulcrum points.
Though the drum kit arrangement is arbitrary, there is a common set-up widely used by drummers. The image shows the common arrangement of a drum kit (Fig. 2).
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| Fig. 2 |
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| more science |
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| Don't do this. |
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| See, yeah... no. |
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| Just get something reasonably-priced that looks like this. |
