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@samuel_wade Oh yeah, look forward to working my way through these…

This looks like a wonderful resource.

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absolutely - summer before last, i majorly messed up my big toe on my right foot with a 1 second stupid mistake - couldn’t put weight on it for weeks, the nail fell off eventually… all sorts of fun. i couldn’t use my right foot on a pedal for months. not only am i in bands, but i’m a drum teacher - so not playing simply wasn’t an option.

i had to fully play a lefty drum kit for months! i did that at work, and came up with a weird righty-on-a-left-footed-kit setup with my band, and had to play my first show since lockdown that way. switching the feet was SO hard for me, the only way i could transition into it with any sort of effectiveness is i’ve gotten bored enough to flip my kit at various times in the past.

you never really notice how differently your feet learn to play the kick and the hat until you switch them. at least for me they’re fully different techniques.

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One of the weirdest feelings was realizing my left foot didn’t have the muscle memory for heel-toe like my right did. Going “Why is that so much harder?” and having to consciously watch my feet to realize I was using my left like I didn’t know how to play drums while not thinking at all when just using my right.

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Not the same thing, but switching to heal down / playing off the head after 20 years of burying the beater about broke me. Unlearning something so engrained was insanely frustrating for me. Took like 2 years to stop thinking about it. haha

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took lessons and classical training in college.

I was stuck focused on a couple of drummers early on in my learning…then my brother came home from school and dropped the needle on ELP’s Brain Salad Surgery and Zappa’s Apostrophe…I then realized that the drummers I was focused on were just no where near as what defines a MASTER drummer or percussionist.

daily routines of rudiments and exploring rhythmic permutations always with a metronome or a drum machine.
also…just jamming along with a horde of random songs from a playlist on my phone.

  • watch all sorts of vids on YouTube.
  • join PAS and go to PASIC.
  • avoid most over produced music and look for more obscure and inventive artists pushing drums and percussion. :stuck_out_tongue:
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That’s where you just need to get your hihat bossanova exercises going :joy:

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I’ve been getting really into Richard Spaven (Flying Lotus, Cinematic Orchestra, solo, etc) …

(Lots more on YouTube.)

… to the point of signing up for his Patreon to get access to his tutorials. There’s a great mix of videos—performances, breakdowns of recorded parts, exercises for ghost notes, independence, etc—and useful extra materials like PDF notation and drum-free audio tracks. A lot of it’s pretty challenging—he talks in the first tutorial video about renaming it from “Basics” to “Essentials” after sitting down to play through it all—but well worth the investment if you like what he’s doing.

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Thanks for sharing Spaven’s stuff… I have been focusing mainly on learning breakbeat-type playing since starting, so this is inspiring. Just tried learning the Amen Break last night, and was delighted to find I could pick it up pretty quickly. It’s a blast to play.

I’d be interested to hear your thinking here, of why you switched?

Bass drum technique is something I am trying to get straight, particularly playing fast doubles.

I started out following tutorials which recommended heel up technique in general, and a double-tap for fast doubles, with the foot moving slightly back on the first tap, then back to normal position for the second tap. That got me quite far with doubles but I have found it difficult to be consistent with that technique in some scenarios. I have since tried heel-toe technique for doubles and it feels much more right and reproducable, when I do it properly. I am struggling to fix that in my muscle memory though, even though I’ve only been playing overall for about 6 months. I feel that I will need both techniques to handle different scenarios, but at the moment I’m a bit stuck in the middle.

Regarding playing off the head – it was interesting to see Bernard Purdie in the Drumeo video above, playing with heel down a lot of the time. Trying that with a shuffle groove I’ve found it much easier to get the timing right than with heel up. I’m not really bothered about volume as I’m not so interested in rock drums. So playing heel down sometimes seems like a nice option to have.

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thank you

i too have been on the brink of signing up for his patreon but held off

he’s phenomenal and i’m always impressed by his technique when i watch or listen to him

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Dont know Spaven but I have clearly heard his drumming before ona couple of the acts you mention. Gonna do some watching and listening today. His drumming is incredible on the little clip I’ve watched so far.

Thanks for sharing!

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I ended up using a little of each naturally. I switched to playing off the head just because it sounds so much better with a small open tuned kick drum (aka jazz tuned). Letting the drum ring out as opposed to choking it with the beater. For quick doubles and super fast feet work, it is definitely harder to play off the head. I don’t put anything in my kick drums anymore and have just sort of adopted a way of letting the drum ring as much as I can. When I say off the head, I sort of mean heal down. You can’t play heal up and not have the beater resting on the head.

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Holy crap. Thanks so much for sharing this…his playing captures so much of what I love about drumming. Impressive!

Man that makes me miss having a kit. Kept the Turkish cymbals, fingers crossed for the future.

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I Can only speak for myself but this is how i learned to become a better player.
I first started to play in punkbands as a teenager, that developed some muscle and stamina and ofc speed, then was couple years that i did not play at all, and that was a huge mistake. I started to practise again, with pad and with my kit, and now im better than ever.
What ever you do, do not stop playing, you have to keep the routine on! that is the number one first thing to do!
also: find inspiration in drummers, i think i have found my own voice in drumming just like a year ago or so, since i found out that there were other drummers like me that think the same (mostly Milford Graves <3)

Tips:
Practise is key, if you focus only on tecnique you will learn fast i think, but its more fun to jam out and play with friends or synths whatever, it really depends on what you really want! I myself practice like an hour of syncopes and rudiments and then the rest of the time full on solo jamming improvisation, since that is what i like most nowdays!

Find good drummers that you are intrested, copy their work and try to find your own sound, copying in the beginning is always accepted, and thats how you learn!

hold the sticks correctly

good posture!

i will list some good drummers for you all to enjoy (mainly more experiemental drummers):

Chris Corsano
Tatsyua Nakatani
Greg Fox
Julian Sartorious
Ari Köning
Milford Graves
Zach Hill
Brian Chippendale
Greg Saunier
Okko Saastamoinen

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Yes you can. A lot of drummers do rest the beater on the head when playing heel up but it is totally possible not to.

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Yes, I second this.

Back when I played, I loved refining my technique to balance my core so each limb could work with minimal effort. I spent a long time learning to coordinate with the pushback or ‘spring’ of each pedal, initiating my strokes from the largest muscles in the hips, and letting gravity do most of the work on the way down (the ‘hammer drop’). This lets motion efficiently ‘whip’ through the limb, and bracing against the pedals is unnecessary for maintaining balance.

Tuning the heck out of each pedal’s response helps, too. If the pedal spring is set at a decent tension, you need to exert pressure to have the beater buried in the head when at rest. Apart from the wear on the head and issues with tuning stability, this ends up being less efficient and more tiring.

As long as you’re not going for maximum head excursion and volume, relying on gravity and springback feels a lot better while balancing the work and rest portions of the exertion cycle. Letting the equipment contribute in this way means cleaner technique, more speed, and increased endurance.

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Speaking of which, another tip for early on: you’ll want to spend your money on sexier gear, but get a good kick pedal as soon as you can. I’ve had plenty of fun playing with broken snare drum batters and cracked cymbals, they can even make it more interesting as you learn to work around them … but a crappy kick pedal is just miserable.

I think I read in an old Rhythm Magazine interview that the first places you should invest money are the parts of the kit that you actually touch: sticks (find ones you get on with, don’t just settle for whatever’s to hand, and make sure you have spares), pedals, and stool. I don’t know if I’d treat that as an iron rule, but it wouldn’t be a bad one, and might help balance the temptation to get another new cymbal while you keep sitting on that old hifi speaker. (Yes, that might have been me.)

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I have been using the kick that came with my used sonor drumset for years now. Its broken to a point that i had to make a DIY-Repair to it, which is some random spring that i found on the floor of our training place keeping the beater connected to the pedal…
I have been using this for years, and im worried that when it brakes I wont have the same speed to my kick anymore, Im really proud of my leg speed at the moment and Im so worried :smiling_face_with_tear:

wish me luck when I buy an iron cobra…

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When I started playing drums again, first thing I got was a super comfortable stool. Even before getting the drums themselves :smiley:

Nicest part of my kit are the pedals and stool, 100% agree with that advice.

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Oh yeah of course you can, I worded that weird. I just found it terrible for balance levitating my my heal up like that without resting the beater. I stared watching a lot of jazz drummers and got influenced by their foot work. Looking for as much dynamics as possible. I rest my heal in between strokes, but lift for power when needed. This is a good example of what I’m taking about. LUDWIG Speed Flyer and Speed King pedal REVIEW - YouTube

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In my experience, so much of this can be helped by strengthening core muscles and making sure to balance on the sitz bones with a stable throne.

I also found it helpful to visualize an iron ball hanging from a chain attached to the center of my core, descending through my seat and below the ground.