Stickings in Finale

A quick thing for you frustrated Finale users*: Here's how you write stickings. You probably tried adding them as text, and met with bitter failure, then you tried them as lyrics, met with bitter failure, and you felt deeply sad and ridiculous. 

* - Insert obvious joke.  

The answer is to enter them as articulations. Articulations. 

Yes, articulations, the same tool you use to do accents, rolls, dots, staccato marks, etc. To do that: 

1. Select the articulation tool. 

Well, first open your template file— a blank file with all your usual settings in it, so you don't have to do this every freakin' time you write something. Then: 

1. Select the articulation tool. 
2. Click on a note. 
3. When the articulation selection window opens, select CREATE. 
4. That will open the ARTICULATION DESIGNER window. Copy these settings:  

Don't think, just do it. 

5. You'll have to select a normal text font— so hit SET FONT. Assign whatever you're using for all the text in your template. 

Click OK to seal in your decision, and close that dialog.  

If you don't know what to use, use Arial. Don't screw around.

6. Back in the ARTICULATION DESIGNER dialog, click MAIN to select the character you want to use for your sticking. I suggest starting with good old R. Click OK to close that, and OK to close the ARTICULATION DESIGNER dialog.  

7. Back in the ARTICULATION SELECTION dialog, click on the sticking you just created, and then click DUPLICATE. Scroll down to the duplicate sticking you just duplicated, and select EDIT. EDIT. Then hit MAIN to assign the sticking you want. Logic and convention dictates that we make this one L. 

Repeat for whatever other stickings you want— duplicate, then edit. 

8. Save and close.

PROBLEM! When you use your new sticking articulations with more than a single line of drums, you get something like this:  

I haven't figured out how to get them to render in a normal straight line when the notes are on different lines/spaces. So when you're all done writing your page of stuff, you need to highlight all the notes on the same line (hold down shift and select with the mouse), and use the up/down arrow keys to move them where you want them. It helps if you hit VIEW>GRID/GUIDE>SHOW GRID. 

It's a pain in the butt, but that's Finale for you. Like everything else that's a PITB, you learn to get pretty fast with it. 

BONUS! You can also use this same procedure to put counts in your music. Do all the same stuff, but use these settings: 

I have symbols for the numerals 1-7, e, &, a. Unfortunately we have the same problem when doing this on more than one line of music, but you shouldn't be marking in the counts very often anyway. 

On Stanley Spector

In the spirit of that recent quasi-paranoid rant, here's something I wrote some years ago and never posted. Any time I think I'm getting too dogmatic in my writing, I look up the following personality.

I was re-reading an extended rant from the 80s by Stanley Spector, a drum teacher based in New York from the 50s through the 80s. All I know about him I got from his wordy advertisements and occasional letters to the editor in in Modern Drummer magazine. They had approximately the same tone and content as we see here:  

Would you imagine in your wildest hallucination that a jazz or rock drummer of yesterday or today could derive artistic stimulation and creative preparation through a method of drumming accepted in 1869 as a Manual of Instruction by the United States Army? When you sit down at the practice pad every day and go through the 26 rudiments of drumming to build up your "technique" so that you may better express your "ideas" what you are actually practicing is the Strube Drum and Fife Instructor approved by John A. Rawlings, Secretary of War, War Department, Washington, D.C. 111 years ago. That was years before the invention of the bass drum pedal, hi-hat cymbals, wire brushes, and the discovery of the rim shot. It was years before Louis Armstrong first picked up a trumpet and discovered that when he blew in one end that jazz music came out the other end. When I see that the Strube Drum and Fife Instructor came off the press at a printing shop located at 284 Asylum Street in Hartford, Connecticut, I get the feeling that somebody is trying to tell us something. 

Is it reasonable to suppose that in the present age of space travel, atomic energy, and television that what was good for a Board of Officers meeting at Fort Columbus, New York Harbor in 1869 is still relevant for the jazz or rock drummer? Are we to believe that Major General G. L. Hartsuff, Brigadier General H. D. Walden, and 1st Lieutenant E. O. Gibson, the officers of that board knew where it was at with drumming for all-time when they decided that the Strube Drum and Fife Instructor had to replace Upton's Tactics because the latter was "deficient in preliminary instruction" for training drummers and fifers of the United States Army in the Army Camp Duty of 111 years ago?

It goes on and on like that. He had a real thing about rudiments. But he never getting around to explaining his own concepts— a recurring theme, we'll see.

Spector died in 1999 [correction: 1987], but there is a site selling recordings of lessons with him, and the people running it have really amped up the mysterious/hard sell/paranoid angle:

WARNING. This was and still is considered the most controversial course in drum set study ever created. It's for the most discerning and ambitious drummers worldwide. When it was first introduced almost Fifty [sic] years ago it divided the drumming community. Either you tried it and believed in Stanley's method or you were a doubter who went with the conformist crowd, never to consider it. 

Then they make you pay way more than you should to find out what it is. 

Keep in mind, we're talking about teaching people how to play bebop. It's music for grownups, but we're not re-splitting the atom here. In the old days you would get yourself some Chapin, some Cusatis, maybe Wilcoxon, and go to town. It's hard but not that hard.

And valuable drumming information isn't that valuable. Personalized expert guidance on what you should be doing right now is valuable— that's what private lessons are about— but a book of information and exercises is not valuable. The best things the best players and teachers in the world could think to write down sells for about $8-30 for permanent, total access— 40-100 pages of written materials. 

You have to give it up: put out a book, charge $0-30 for it, and let people see it and use it... or not use it, if it proves to be not good enough.

If you like being frustrated, listen to the free introductory lesson from Spector's site— it's a cassette recording of a lesson given in the 70s. 

The main point of that lesson is to figure out what the lesson is. Spector gives incomplete information, then spends a long time critiquing the student's thought process when he isn't able to figure it out. It's very strange. He's trying to have a student play a three beat pattern while counting in 4, a simple polymetric thing we do every day, which is normally learned by doing the thing, not by having to figure out what the thing is in the first place. Even if I wanted a student to do that, there's an effective way to communicate it— you stay focused on the problem, you don't wander off into meta-issues about how the student is thinking wrong. Who knows if it's a fair representation of his teaching. 

I imagine there was more to the guy than is apparent today. People who were in New York in the 60s-80s probably could tell us. Otherwise we don't know, because he didn't publish anything. He decided secrecy was his ticket to business success, and then died, and now we have nothing to gain from his career, except for some written rants, and some taped lessons locked away behind a paywall.

You have to write, you have to publish. 

Writing tips

First get the leaves off your paper and
learn how to hold a pen. Start writing
at the UPPER LEFT. Come on. 

“You have to have a command over the English language or you're just nowhere.”
— Steve Martin

Writing is a basic thing all musicians should be able to do. If for no other reason than to come off well writing your own press materials and site content. We're small businessmen after all, and we are usually our own heads of communications and public relations. Maybe some people actually want to get into writing about drumming or music.

Here's what I try to do— actually, these are all negative suggestions, so here's what I try to not do:


Don't try to be an authority
Everyone seems to feel a need to project authority. Don't try to trick people into thinking you're a cat, and therefore have the right to speak. Just assume you can speak, and let other people judge whether you know what you're talking about. Do scale your pronouncements to your actual level of knowledge, experience, and achievement.


Don't be an opinion monkey
Part of being a cat is having your judgments sought out, and having them automatically taken seriously. It's the life's dream of a lot of musicians, and it's pure ego, and it's totally stupid and useless. It's such a part of the musician mentality, that it may take a lot of work for some people to figure out what to write that is not that.


Don't talk people to death
Do you know what seeing a big block of text makes me want to do? Not read something.

Use fewer words. They are your medium, but they are also a drag on actual communication.


Stop being so damn entertaining
A lot of drumming writers try to engage readers by prattling, like they do in lessons or clinics. I guess it works in person, sort of. In print it's a total drag on communication. Read a transcript of a Donald Trump speech some time, and you'll see the approximate effect you're creating.

Exhibit A of what not to do is the text of Tommy Igoe's Groove Essentials. The information is good, but it's laden with so much conversational bullshit, I promise you no one has read the whole thing. Mike Mangini's Rhythm Knowledge book is another egregious example of that.


Stop selling
A lot of musicians suffer from a crushing inferiority complex, an irrational feeling that society has no use for us whatsoever [HAHAHAHAHA -tb], and that we therefore need to constantly sell everyone on the value of what we do. Often this takes the form of trying to win people over with our enthusiasm.

Don't do that. People care even less that you're excited about something than they do the thing in the first place. It seems desperate.


Stay in your lane
Your job is to present your idea. Your job is not to teach the idea. You can't anticipate and preemptively explain every single thing readers may not get. That will make your article into an unreadable pile, and then no one will get it.


Everyone hates to write
A writer is a person desperate to avoid writing. You just have to start making that shitty first draft, and then continue with the long slogging process of fixing it up into something good.


Oh, don't write in the negative all the time. 
Form an idea of what something is, not just what it is not. What to do, not just what not to do. Maybe I'll get to that in another post, sometime.

Write your own book

Like this, but words— throw them down.

Here Jeff Goins, a writer, gives 10 Ridiculously Simple Tips For Writing A Book. Here are the ones I like most— and these apply to many other things in life. Do hit the link and read the whole piece.

Start small. 300 words per day is plenty. John Grisham began his writing career as a lawyer. He got up early every morning and wrote one page. You can do the same. 

Have an outline. Write up a table of contents to guide you. Then break up each chapter into a few sections. Think of your book in terms of beginning, middle, and end. Anything more complicated will get you lost. If you need help, read Do the Work by Steven Pressfield. 

Have a set time to work on your book every day. If you want to take a day or two off per week, schedule that as time off. Don’t just let the deadline pass. And don’t let yourself off the hook. 

Ship. No matter what, finish the book. Send it to the publisher, release it on Amazon, do whatever you need to do to get it in front of people. Just don’t put it in your drawer. 

Embrace failure. Know that this will be hard and you will mess up. Be okay with it. Give yourself grace. That’s what will sustain you, not your high standards of perfection. 

Write another. Most authors are embarrassed of their first book. But without that first, they never would have learned the lessons they did. So put your work out there, fail early, and try again. This is the only way you get good. You practice.

Your bio sucks. My bio sucks.

OBLIGATORY TENUOUSLY-RELATED

IMAGE AND CAPTION: Boilerplate should 

never be anything but a creepy, late-Victorian,
steampunkish, fictional robot in your life— it

has NO PLACE in your bio! 

Via Ted Gioia on Twitter, here's a good piece from NPR on artist bios, by classical writer Anastasia Tsioulcas. Basically, artist bios suck, and they tell the reader nothing about who the person is as an artist:

Paragraph 1: six quotes praising their brilliance from major American critics, crammed together then lightly glazed with enough subjects and verbs to form sentences. 

Paragraph 2: a list of their awards and international venues where they've played. 

Paragraph 3: a long list of composers who have written for them (most of whom very few people would be familiar with, unless the reader were also a composer or performer). 

Paragraph 4: a list of academic institutions they've worked with. 

Paragraph 5: a list of other performers they've played with. 

Snooze.

Jazz musicians are particularly egregious with this— who I played with is the bulk of a lot of bios. If somebody ever got near a stage holding an instrument while somebody famous was present— in a clinic, at a jam session, whatever— into the played with list it goes. Paraphrasing something my brother once said, Right, they played with Herbie Hancock for one concert when there was no budget for him to bring in his own players, Herbie didn't dig it, and that was the end of it.

This is an American thing, incidentally— everyone thinks the arts are a joke, including the artists, so they fall into this thing of proving they're serious by just listing all the serious things they've done.

Tsioulcas continues:

[T]his is an opportunity to shape one's personal brand. In my experience, classical artists often pride themselves on not having to debase themselves for the sake of commerce. Maybe that's part and parcel of existing so far outside the musical mainstream. But what such artists fail to recognize, in my opinion, is that this can be not just a marketing exercise but a chance for a bit of self-reflection. What makes what you do — and what you want to express — meaningful? 

To be more blunt: Why should we listen to you, whether you're an international soloist or still in school? Think of this as a chance to craft a compelling narrative in a truncated form. Who was your inspiration? Who was your teacher? What other music do you listen to, aside from your own repertoire? 

It's difficult for musicians to say why people should listen to us, not least because we're not confident that people should listen to us, having had feelings of unworthiness pounded into us in our early careers. And we just deal in an abstract medium, and we're generally unclear about its value, and of our value as individual players to our consumers— writers, radio people, venue bookers, and the public.

It's not actually a real productive way of thinking about it: Oh my God, why should they listen to me? I don't know!!! God, I suck!!!  Instead, maybe tell them what you are, and let them assume you're good. Figure out your high concept— the three or four general things that you're about. Thinking of Bill Frisell, you think: Americana, Hendrix, avant-garde noise, composer. Thinking of Don Pullen, you think deep blues, classical chops, tone clusters. Thinking of Paul Motian, you think primitivism, simple tunes, heavy swinging groove. If you can't come up with a compelling similar description of your own work, you might need to dig a little deeper in making something special out of yourself. “Just another pretty good modern jazz drummer who plays pretty good because college has figured out how to make people play pretty good” is not good enough.

I got away from listing influences some years ago, after seeing a comic strip in an alternative paper with an illustration showing a lot of 90s hipsters walking around thinking “My main influences are Sonic Youth and Pavement.” It rather indicates an amateur mindset— if you don't already have a reputation, or if you're not real good writer, I think it can sink you with a skeptical reader. If you've made an exceptionally serious study of someone in particular, or are his protégé, go ahead and say it. Same with inspiration— it's a sappy word, and you have to handle it carefully.

None of this is real easy. You can screw up in all sorts of horrible ways:

• It can take years to figure out who you are, and to figure out that who you are is more interesting than who you think you should be— like, don't pretend you're a some kind of thrilling hard-core New Yorker with deep jazz roots, when you're really from a fracking town in North Dakota. A noise artist from a fracking town is actually a lot more interesting. From NY? Whoopdedoo, dog bites man, WGAS? From ND? What, wow, really? That is so WEIRD! I want to hear that!
• You want to have a story, but you also don't want to tortuously act like there's a story where there is no story.
• Emotional appeals and hyperbole have a tone of pleading, and are best avoided— let it be assumed that you are sincere, and are emotionally invested in your work.
• Also avoid myth making: Then in 2007 Cory got his first copy of Stick Control and his universe exploded like God Himself rode a hydrogen bomb onto Cory's mom's house, and he realized that being a drummer was indeed his true calling— Cory, I mean, not God... yeah. No.

So there. We have a big mess of stuff to think about. Time to get out our copies of Strunk and White, and get cracking. And don't go looking at my bio for examples of not doing the things I'm telling you not to do. 

The map is not the territory...

...and this is not a pipe.

Sometimes I worry that with the things we cover here— and the way we cover them— I give the impression that those are the most important things about learning the drums and being a musician. Actually, we just talk about the things we can talk about; that doesn't necessarily mean that they are the most important things. There is often little to say about the things that are actually important.

Like, playing with people is just the true arena for learning music, and being a musician. That's where everything happens. If you're not doing it, there's not much to say about it except, “start doing it now, even if you suck at it. Especially if you suck at it.” And listening: there's nothing to say that's going to replace, or assist in, actually parking it in front of the stereo with some records on a regular basis. To be a musician you have to do those two things a lot, and there's no way to talk, study, or practice your way around them.

Your own drumming blog: final thoughts

...or on the blog. Thanks Librarian.net
and Timothy Vollmer.

A few final thoughts on writing your own drumming blog, and things I forget to mention in our previous entries. I know I promised to outline my workflow for a downloadable post, but this writing-about-non-drumming stuff is getting to be a grind. If you want to know about it- how to use ftp, or accomplish any of the obscure Finale tasks you need to know to make a decent-looking pdf- email me your question and I'll do a dedicated post about it in the future.


Copyright, fair use, and just not being a jerk
This is largely a sharing medium, so it's a good idea to get at least a passing acquaintance with this, so you do it legally, ethically, and gentlemanly-ly. In general:

• Credit and link to non-original material- both the original author and your online source- or chain of sources. Like if someone on the Drummerworld forum posts a link to something written by someone else, published in a magazine, and posted on the Four On The Floor blog, it's good to credit and link to the referring DW user, FOTF, the author, and the magazine.  
• Don't copy the whole thing. You're allowed to excerpt; you're not allowed to republish without permission.
• Don't link to copyright-infringing sites. I've mostly stayed true to that one, though I've bent it occasionally for the greater good, when it's basically harm-free. That's what I tell myself, anyway. But linking to pirated material that is currently available commercially, especially by living artists, does actually hurt people. And by people, I mean artists. Not corporations.  

Quite a bit more after the break:

Something stupid

I hope you're ready for a descent several circles deeper than usual into pure drumming geekdom today, as I've been fooling with devising a sticking system for all limbs, and combinations of limbs. I don't know what the practical utility of this is yet, if any- we'll get into that later- it's just something I started working on.

The rules I gave myself were that the symbols should be keyboard characters found within Arial font, with normal available capitalization and formatting (bold, underline, italics, upper and lower case), that the logic of the character assignments should be not be completely arbitrary or obscure, and that they have to consist of one character only.

The system so far:

R - right hand
L - left hand
R - right foot
L - left foot

H - both hands
F - both feet

So far, so good. For other combinations of limbs the characters form a little diagram the logic of which should be clear:

X - all limbs
< - right hand and foot
> - left hand and foot
/ - right hand and left foot
\ - left hand and right foot

The combinations of three limbs are a challenge. Some possibilities:

L - left hand and both feet
7 - both hands and... left foot?
/ - (underlined slash) right hand and both feet
\ - (underlined backslash) left hand and both feet

Reversing and/or inverting an L (or 7- I think I would prefer that, actually) would cover all of those, but there does not seem to be a way of doing that within normal keyboard functions. There are some little jive web applications for doing that, but that's not an acceptable solution- the most involved I would want to get is some kind of special character (for example, you can enter alt-0169 to make a © symbol). I'd prefer to follow the same logic as for the other combinations of limbs, and to not use Greek/Cyrillic/other foreign characters. If anyone has any suggestions for something in Arial font, I'm all ears- get out your character maps or ascii table...


So, what's the point?

So, assuming we get that last thing ironed out, what's the point of this? What's it good for, if anything? We'll get into that after the break:

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.

Best books: some non-musical selections

Here are several books that have been valuable to me creatively over the years.  


The Adding Machine by William S. Burroughs
Great essays about art, language, and the craft of writing. Along with Exterminator!, my favorite Burroughs book.

"When Anthony Burgess was teaching a course in creative writing, a student asked him: "Why should you be up there teaching writing and not me?" A good question; and I wish I could give as definite an answer as can be given in regard to other subjects where the technology is more defined. No one, unless he is an experienced pilot, asks why the pilot of an airliner should be in the cockpit and not he. The answer is that the pilot knows how to fly the plane and you don't. Nor would a student of quantum mechanics, engineering, or mathematics ask such a question; the teacher is there because he knows more about the subject than the student. To say he knows more presupposes that there is something definite to know, that a technology exists  and can be taught to qualified students.

How many writers have taken courses in creative writing? James Joyce for one, took a course with some literary lady who had her students imitate the styles of well-known writers ... write Hemingway for a month, Graham Greene for a month, and so forth. A good exercise I think. But there are certainly, I think, more writers who have not taken courses in writing than writers who have. How many pilots have taken courses in flying? All of them, we hope. How many physicists have taken courses in physics? All of them. Which brings us to the question I intend to raise in order, I hope, to arrive at some answers: Is there a technology of writing? Can writing by taught?"  

The Natural Way to Draw by Kimon Nicolaides
One of the great modern method books on drawing. Here are instructions for making a contour drawing, one of the best exercises for learning to really use your eyes:

"Sit close to the model or object which you intend to draw and lean forward in your chair. Focus your eyes on some point- any point will do- along the contour of the model. (The contour approximates what is usually spoken of as the outline or edge.) Place the point of your pencil on the paper. Imagine that your pencil is touching the model instead of the paper. Without taking your eyes off the model, wait until you are convinced that the pencil is touching that point on the model upon which your eyes are fastened. 

Then move your eye slowly along the contour of the model and move the pencil slowly along the paper. As you do this, keep the conviction that the pencil point is actually touching the contour. Be guided more by the sense of touch than by sight. This means the you must draw without looking at the paper, continuously looking at the model.

Interview: drum author Joel Rothman

[UPDATED 5/16 - Something I had to add to the piece came up in my correspondence with Mr. Rothman. See the new section labeled "PROFIT"]

Joel Rothman is one of the more mysterious figures in the drumming world; he is an extremely prolific and widely-known author of of well over 100 drum books, over 70 of which are still in print, titles including the popular Mini Monster Book of Rock Drumming, and "the pink book", Basic Drumming (read my review), as well as the massive c. 2500 page "compleat" series of hard bound books. He has sold well over a million books through his publishing house, JR Publications. For other publishers he has also written approximately 35 humor books for both children and adults, a dozen or so hardcover children's books, as well as several crossword puzzle and quiz books. He has nevertheless remained largely unknown personally, keeping a very low profile into the Internet age, with virtually no personal information available on line.

Though published over a period of five decades or more, his books continue to be absolutely relevant, and are an important contribution to the literature of drumming. I'm not going to attempt to summarize such a large body of work, or analyze its appeal- I have several new reviews coming in the near future that will delve into that- but I'll say he investigates areas of drumming unexplored by others even today, dedicating entire books to very particular drumming problems- slow tempos, hi-hat splashes and endings, for example. Over the course of many volumes he has expanded upon the world Stone's Stick Control in ways not found in that book or in its other successors. He deals with more familiar material with a unique player's logic I believe is very well adapted to the practical needs of drummers. It is not difficult to fill many volumes with variations on familiar materials ("now play the accent on the LOW tom"), or by mindlessly reeling off mathematical/logical permutations, as many have done; so creating such a large volume of work of continuing value, with minimal redundancy, is a major writing feat. Writing even one good book is beyond the capability of most authors.

I wasn't sure what to expect when I contacted Mr. Rothman- I thought he might be very protective of his privacy- but he has turned out to be a very affable person with a fine sense of humor. Here he has very generously agreed to share the story of his life and business:

BEGINNING
I'm 73 years young, but if there were 24 months in a year I'd only be 36 1/2. And in dog years I'm just over 10.

I was born in Brooklyn, NY in 1938. My mother understood me to be a musical prodigy, but she was wrong. I was much more than that- I was probably a total pain-in-the-a--.

Continue to the complete interview: