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Even if we’re groove hounds, most of us, in our unguarded moments, probably dream about being to “throw our hands down the kit”, and have it all make sense.
I can think of a few recent examples of this type of playing that’s made an impression on me. On the shoulders of people like Vinnie, we have my fave Thomas Pridgen, and also younger players like Josh Crawford and my new “shiny object”, Stan Bicknell. I mention these players very explicitly, rather than “single stroke assassins” like Cobham, Chambers, Bruner, or Mitchell, for a specific reason that will become clear soon.
Anyway, many times when we try to “flow” in real life, we hit a wall. Whether it’s psychological or physical, that wall is actually surprisingly specific. It’s the difficulty of moving the lead rapidly from the snare to the high rack tom. If you try moving the lead hand from the snare to the floor tom, it’s easier. But moving to the rack tom requires lateral movement, and - especially if we haven’t optimized our setup a’la Brandon Green - vertical movement too.
And while there are exercises to make this easier, and setup optimizations to reduce the distance traveled, approaching kit-flow in a lead-hand-lead configuration is, like the jazz ride cymbal, a valiant project, but a “slow burn”.
A much faster way is to realize that many of our favorite players are using something else entirely to generate that kind of kit flow: entering the high rack tom with the non-lead hand. There it is. The head-exploding/”I’m saying when you’re ready you won’t have to” Morphuis-to-Neo moment. Now it’s just a matter of how.
And that’s exactly what I’ll discuss in this “old-school” drum lesson.
Know you’ll enjoy!