The "Ultimate Guide" to Odd Meters on Drums

First things first - download your free transcription.

3 weeks ago, I finally fell into the Jesus Molina vortex. I’d managed to resist the gravitational pull of Night in Tunisia in 11 for the better part of a year, but this past month, it got me. It’s not the “drum part” - most anybody with decent coordination and time could learn that in a few minutes, even if they’d have to play it slowly.

It’s Roni Kaspi. (To whom, in case you’re wondering, I’ve made invitations to come on the podcast, and I’m hoping we make it happen.)

Like Marcus Gilmore, Steve Lyman, Yogev, Nate Wood, Guiliana, Ofri Nehemaya, Arthur Hnatek and many good drummers of this generation, Roni plays over the 11 with total freedom. Unmoored by barlines. (Yogev, in his recent podcast interview, characterizes it perfectly as being like driving down an avenue where all the traffic lights are green, and registering going through the intersections but not needing to stop.)

Then I tried it, and I could not do it, without “boxed-in”, restrictive phrases that would keep coming back to the 1. And cue rage montage. Cue “whiplash”/hands bleeding practice montage. Gawd it pissed me off. And as many of you well know, “f@#$ it makes me mad that I can’t do that” ego rage is the font of many a day of motivated practice, and many a video.

So I decided to “donate my body to science” - to use my process learning Night in 11 as a generator for insights about anything that could short-cut learning odd meters. And, miracle-of-miracles, some non-obvious insights did drop out.

Four of them, to be exact.

And these insights don’t just apply to 11. You can use them to shorten the learning curve for any odd meter. In this video, we get into them, with a little context, and (hopefully) some fun.

Hope you enjoy.

My Jam Session with Ben Wendel From Kneebody

First things first - download your free transcription.

I’m back to present the second video from my recent “IRL Week”, in which I jammed with, traded licks with, and interviewed two of my favorite musicians. (If you didn’t catch last week’s installment with JP Bouvet, check the article immediately below this.)

This week we have Ben Wendel of Kneebody who, in my humble opinion, is among a small handful of truly great sax players of his generation.

That I happen to know Ben, and that he’s taken the time to play with me a few times over the years is more a testament to his generosity with his time and gameness to share his gifts with fans than any of my abilities. But I’ve been lucky all the same.

The idea for this week’s video actually began more than a year ago, when Ben and I discussed doing some content together. Wouldn’t it be fun, we mused, for us to discuss some of Ben’s most famous drum parts. We’d play them together, then I’d interview him about them. After some scheduling snafus, we finally made it happen at the beginning of December.

That complete conversation is coming soon, but today I give you our “jam session” - live takes of the 3 songs we talked about, with added context, and some of that “good old” 8020 teaching.

The songs we play - Blocks and Backbou from the album Frame, and Drum Battle from Kneebody - are 3 that shaped my drumming and musical tastes as I was developing as a player. Being able to play them with their creator was a ton of fun.

Hope you enjoy.

JP Bouvet - Full-Length "In Person" Interview

You’ve probably seen the short version, but today I’m back with the complete “part deux” interview with JP Bouvet.

To catch you up, two weeks ago I invited JP to the studio for an “in person” podcast interview, in which I wanted to “compare notes” about our teaching philosophies. It seemed like a fun thing to do considering I’d avoided consuming his teaching directly for around a year, to avoid any doubt about whether the ideas I was putting into my videos and courses were “my own”. Now that a bunch of that stuff is already released, written, or in the can, I thought it would be fun to get together and hash out our approaches.

While the short version covered one aspect - our approaches to a similar method he calls “building blocks” - the full interview delves into a bunch of juicy subjects:

• Why we paradoxically need restrictions to feel more free

• Why “drum solos” are the wrong way to think about improvisation on the drums

• The one way in which JP never wants to have to move his body again

• “Weak hand” technique and generating volume

Know you’ll enjoy this one!

JP Bouvet Schools Me on Improvisation

First things first - download your free show notes.

So I had JP Bouvet in the flesh at 8020 HQ this past week. And what a treat it was.

I’d deliberately avoided looking to specifically into the guy I consider maybe the foremost drum teacher…out there…

…because I had a bunch of my own stuff to shoot, and I didn’t want to worry I was being influenced. (i.e. if we had a parallel thought I didn’t want to wonder if I “stole” it.)

But given that it’s the end of the year and most of those things are in the can, I reached out to JP with an idea: come over to the studio, and let’s mic us up and just “hash out” where our ideas overlap.

The result was a nearly 90-minute interview, complete with playing, talking, and switching places at the drums, which I’ll release as a podcast next Monday.

But for the lesson of the week, I wanted to give you just a taste.

In this 15-minute clip, JP and I discuss his concept of “building blocks”, which overlaps somewhat with my idea of “the switching exercise”. As you’ll hear, our ideas had different origins, but we ended up in similar places. (He also guessed correctly with only about 10 minutes of thinking something that took me years of working stuff out with students to learn. See if you can see what I’m talking about.)

Hope you enjoy.