Next, check out my “get to know me” playlist below…
"Impossible to Fail Program" - Hear From (And Watch) Real Students
What can you expect from coaching with me?
If you’re seeing this, it means you’re scheduled for an interview for the “Impossible to Fail” 1:1 coaching program.
Funny story - when I first offered this to a pilot group of students just after the new year, I was pretty sure it would work.
Fast forward 9 months, and I’ve never seen anything make such a difference in the progress of my students - and I can’t take all the credit. They bravely followed me over a cliff, took big risks, and changed their playing forever.
The Impossible to Fail program is not for everyone. It’s an investment. But if you’re a drummer who’s tired of “false-starts”, getting your hopes up only for life to intervene, and losing your confidence when things get challenging, you can make a definitive and lasting jump in your playing.
Below, I’ve compiled a bunch of past and current students speaking about their results with the program. You may have seen some of these. But if you’ve applied for this program, you may want to learn more about what these students are saying about it…and how their playing has changed. Check them out.
Early Access - YouTube Video AND Podcast - Gordy Knudtson and Practice "Science"
From practice-science to the literal hand-whisperer, I couldn’t be more excited about this Wednesday’s list-exclusive pairing.
When Gordy Knudtson was gigging in the late 70s, he was using almost exclusively traditional grip, and suffered an injury he says caused doctors to doubt he’d be able to continue playing.
Desperate to “work around” his tension, Gordy switched to matched and did one of the great deep-dives on hand technique. You could say he “John Dahaner’ed” drumstick mechanics, but it’s more accurate to say John “Gordy’d” jiujitsu.
One of the points I bring up with Gordy is that just as before and after Danaher, plenty of practitioners embodied solid mechanics, if you watch the hands of any of myriad great drummers, from Joe Morello to Philly Joe, to Tony Williams, to maybe Tony’s most famous fan, Vinnie Colaiuta, to modern technicians like Dana Hawkins, it’s clear there’s no shortage of drummers putting mechanical principles into practice.
But it’s probably also true that Gordy has extended the understanding of what’s actually happening when these greats play more than anyone at least since Murray Spivack, and, just like Danaher, made it more efficient for beginners to learn.
As you’ll see, Gordy also gives me something of a “free lesson”, showing how I could extend on my technique. Video of my thoughts and experiments on this in the pipeline for sure. There’s been much chat around this on calls with my coaching students.
From Gordy, we go to some first-principles practice science, and tackle the question “can better practice shorten the journey” (it’s pretty obvious where I’ll come down) through the lens of a specific challenge I’ve been tackling for the past month. When one watches my friend (I think I can call him that since he made the hang at 8020 hq;) Zack Grooves play, it’s nothing short of dazzling. But, as I discuss, it’s more the how of how he’s stringing together combos and playing them with creativity, power, spontaneity, and precision, than any one magic combo that makes Zack Zack.
Hence, I wagered I should spend a month in what I call “The Rage Cave” (see my earlier video about the paradox of unhealthy obsession and self-acceptance) just workshopping my existing vocab to survive the “heat of re-entry”. I’m only about 10 days into the experiment but I think it’s going well.
(It’s also full-circle, because as I apply pressure to my playing, Gordy’s concepts have helped keep me clean and relaxed.)
From that jumping off point, we try to speak axiomatically about how we know good practice works, and to pull out some first principles.
Know you’ll enjoy this Wednesday wine-and-pod pairing!
Exclusive Access - Full Length Jazz Swing Lesson
Here’s the free download to accompany this lesson.
While there may be no global conspiracy to keep aspiring jazz drummers in the dark, I find that certain things are…”under-emphasized”, perhaps because they came naturally to great players.
If you’re looking to learn jazz swing beats, you’ll find an abundance of material from the best drummers and teachers in the world, several-and-counting of whom have been on the podcast.
As I feel they do an adequate job communicating the tradition, and going through basic concepts like “walking the dog”, we’ll cover those only briefly at the top of the lesson.
What’s more interesting to me is stuff that was hard for me as a novice, and which - while teachers did tell me about, I needed a decade of grinding away on gigs and jam sessions to understand its centrality to jazz swing.
What I’m speaking about are…
(1) the precarious balance of kit voicing, subdivision, time, relaxation, and original ideas
(2) how to improvise “semi-broken” time, which all modern drummers do, but few seem to talk about
Naturally, we’ll have to tackle those in order.
So we’ll go through some of the traditional “walk the dog” instruction, but with an emphasis on maintaining that balance. (It doesn’t count as surfing if you can only balance on the board on the beach.)
Then, in the “list exclusive” second half, we’ll get into an algorithm my students helped me develop for improvising the meandering-but-anchored ride cymbal beats we associate with Max Roach, Connie Kay, Joe Morello, Mel Lewis, and more.
It was a lot of fun making this lesson, and I hope you get some utility from it.
Enjoy!