How to Recover From Any "Mistake" on Drums

First things first - download your free transcription.

One of the most debilitating fears behind the drums is this: “what if I mess up?”

We imagine the jig being up, onlookers suddenly “onto us”, and the thin facade of our apparent drum ability crumbling…

…after, say, one dropped stick.

If my ultimate point is “don’t worry about ‘mistakes’ because you can’t fake being bad any more than you can fake being good”, we need to do some work to get there, because saying “realize mistakes don’t exist” is a little like saying the age-old “don’t think of an elephant”.

So we bootstrap our way there.

First, by learning basic “recovery methods” from common mistakes. Mental “glitch” during a fill? No problem. Drive a stick into the rack tom shell when you’re trying to play it? We got you.

By practicing these basic recovery methods, you build confidence, and then you can move onto to things like “practicing messing up” - literally looking for mistakes.

The aim of today’s video is to make you more “zen” about playing in public, because you realize there’s nothing you can “mess up” that you can’t recover from, except maybe being boring.

Know you’ll enjoy this one.

Gianlucca Pellerito - Drums Are Meant to Be Shared

If there’s a drummer I tried to have in mind over the past few months as I’ve been retrofitting my hand technique, it’s Gianlucca Pellerito.

And the Italian instagram sensation has a message - drums are meant to be played in real life. One can make a career out of “content”, he says, but it’s important to play with humans. (If you follow the channel, you know this is something I’ve been getting back into myself.)

In addition to recounting stories from his mentors, like Tony Royster, Dennis Chambers, and Ron Bruner, Gianlucca joins me in a semi-deep-dive on hand technique. As a leftie, Gianlucca built his unconventional style based on what “felt best”, and though he credits his teachers with some great lessons, it’s clear he’s done a lot of “problem solving” on his own.

Finally, we speak about different approaches to improvisation, what we might call “in the grid” vs “ambient”, and Gianlucca’s love for the freedom of his jazz fusion heroes like Ron Bruner and Andy Prado.

Overall, it was just fun to spend an hour with Gianlucca, because his vibe is relentlessly positive, and obsessed with the drums.

Know you’ll enjoy this one!

The "Secret" Move to Make Your Drum Beats Funkier

First things first - download your free transcription.

A couple of weeks ago, checking out the instagram videos of the excellent Daniel Pinhiero, I noticed him doing something many modern drummers do, but which not everybody knows about. When you’re as content-brained as I am, you immediately think “video idea”.

I thought back to the moment, in the early 2010s, learning a Darion Javon transcription, when I realized this move was a thing.

I call it the “cross under”. Once you see it, you’ll realize how absurdly simple it is. But it may be one of the few things that actually qualify as “secret moves that can immediately improve your playing”. (Very few things can, of course.)

But if you think about how playing on the hi hats evolved, we started “crossing over” our body - already not super optimal for a lot of reasons. Then, sometimes we’d want to play with both hands on the hats. This left us with a conundrum. A seemingly-awkward “arm swivel” at the elbow that took a lot of space, and risked compromising the sound because the elbow would be in a weird position for…time.

That “uncanny valley” ruled out a lot of "dabbling” in hand-to-hand stuff. You’d either have to commit to lead-hand lead, or two hands on the hats.

Until the crossunder.

Hope you enjoy.

Ben Wendel on Composing for Drums, "Keeping Up" With Nate Wood, And More

Today I bring you the full-length “talk and play” interview I did with Kneebody’s Ben Wendel.

Ben’s the first non-drummer to appear on the 8020 podcast, but if ever we were going to broaden from drummers, he gives us a good excuse: he’s been writing his own drum parts since way back.

In fact, many of the famous drum beats from Kneebody songs, and Ben’s own bands, no matter the drummer, were Ben’s creation.

Before the interview, we chose 3 “Ben-composed” drum parts from 3 famous songs: 2 from his groundbreaking 2012 album Frame, and 1 from Kneebody. Nate Wood made all 3 famous, but they were all Ben’s creation.

Then, we played through the songs, and I interviewed Ben about them. And in the course of our conversation we touched on the evolution of his influences, what it’s like to play with Nate, what he likes in a drummer, and more.

Know you’ll enjoy this one!