Spent nearly the whole day working on music. Most of it was trying to resuscitate a piece that has choked my DAW like a quad wad of double bubble. Then I conned Nora into doing some recording with me. That got me working on a different piece, and, I am ecstatically happy to report, led to finishing it. So it’s been a good weekend, all in all. Easy, six hours spent on music.
Last week, I started working on Gary Chaffee’s drumming book, Linear Time Playing. Holy moley, this is one of thoese "keys to the kingdom" books. Fried my brain on it two days in a row and could barely touch a drumstick the next day. I just love the challenge waaaaay too much.
I got to the end of my second Phil Perkins book this week, The Logical Approach to Rock Coordination. By ‘getting to the end’ I mean, being able to play each exercise flawlessly all the way through. It often took three or four tries for each one, but I’ve done it! Yeah, yeah, I tell myself, I still have to master these techniques, integrate them into my playing. But man… just being able to do them at all is a major accomplishment for me.
Great things in music the past few weeks. And I mean, capital G great.
1. Kit lessons. Last week the assignment was on counting. Count everything. And I went to town on it as if there was nothing else worth learning. Did it ever pay off.
2. This week, the lesson is permutations. Start a groove, vary it every four bars in a progressive, tension-building way. I had a lot of trouble the first couple days, was paralysed with frustration at my slow progress. Now I’ve got it. And I’m completely nuts about this approach.
3. Still ga-ga about Claude Challe. I listen to it non-stop. Listen to nothing else with the same interest. The guy kills me.
4. Got an email from Phil Perkins. THE Phil Perkins, the author of the three drum books I’ve been studying almost exlusively for the past few years. He just wanted to thank me for my complimentary mention of him in my little blog here. Freakin blew me away. If you’re studying drums or percussion, buy his books. It’s all in there.
Much happening with me and music these days. I just finished my seventh Raving Poets remix. I had my first drum lesson with Sandro Dominelli last week. I’ve stepped up my drum pad practice to a full 60 minutes every noon hour and at least an hour of improv on my kit in the evenings. And I’ve got a ton of new music to inspire me.
Claude Challe. What the hell? Why haven’t I heard of you till now? Just bought “Je Nous Aime” the other day and my god… I’m pretty much crazed over it.
On my kit, I’m finally getting to the stage where I can play a very complex beat and transition in and out of it with ease. That’s been a goal for months. Sure, I could always sustain a simple beat, but not always a complex one. Now I can play a complex one and start and stop it with whatever bizarre transitions I please. It’s a huge deal. All those rudiments are finally paying off. I can sight-read any intermediate snare music and quite a bit of advanced stuff. In my snare book, it’s getting to be slim pickins of what I can’t play.
What’s really amazing to me is how much I have to rely on muscle memory to play difficult stuff. With flute, guitar and piano I would just read and play. With this beast… my god. The injection of a microsecond of conscious thought throws everything out of whack. I have to maintain this total suspension of disbelief (that my arms and legs know what they’re doing) and concentrate my full attention on the music – as opposed to my body making it. Friggin cool. You can never ask, How am I doing that? ‘Cause I’ll screw up. It be like taking my hand out of the puppet for a second to look at it. It just don’t work that way. Either you’re in it or you’re not. You make music or you make confused silence.
Having a blast learning drums. Huge breakthrough this week in playing double stroke rolls. They were my freakin nemesis for a year after I started on snare technique. It’s taken me months to learn fives, sevens, nines and elevens. Not the playing of them so much as the reading of them. Fucking things all looked the same. I had to write in what they were and just read my scribbles if I had any hope of keeping in time. But this week I concentrated on thirteens and nailed them – both in the playing and the reading. And now that I got it, I can’t stop playing the exercises that mix them all up – 5s, 7s, 9s, 11s, 13s. I can now play about 3/4 of this book straight through.
Now that I have a kit I can play on all day, I’ve gotten into this new paradiddle book with a vengeance. The exercises aren’t that hard, but holy shit… when you get the technique going on a full kit it sounds like somekind of Acid/Latin/African/funk/jazz thing. It makes everything else sound like child’s play. Huge, huge fun.
Finally got coated skins for my Slingerland kit yesterday, the snare and two small toms. Holy crap… does it ever sound good with brushes.
Been playing lots on my new Motif ES. The other day I recorded a ton of instrumental variations of the same melody and tried stringing them together in Acid. Completely whacked ambition. The thing to do is create patterns on the keyboard, tweak them with quantization and get the dang machine to play the different variations when I’ve got a metronome behind me. It wasn’t a complete failure. I’ll get a song out of it eventually. But that day has to be all written off as practice.
Bought the drum kit. Yikes, can I ever make a racket. The cymbals are ancient, and I’m not keen on the retro pedals. Already there are major complaints about the noise in the house. Can’t wait to get the Yamaha DTXtreme.
The other I’ve been going at for the past couple of weeks is called, “1001 Drum Grooves”. Most of it is basic snare, bass and hi-hat exercises. Spectacularly good for me. I can play 60 exercises in a row before I can’t hold the sticks anymore and have to take a rest and stretch. Holy god… am I ever learning a lot. Have just started on the Funk/Rock section am just squirrelly about getting these down. The straight rock grooves just seem like exercises in endurance. The funk ones are the serious coordination exercises.
