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Double Your Drum Vocabulary with A Single Trick
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The Ultimate Left Foot Hi Hat Survival Guide
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Drum Warm-Ups Are Probably Overrated (But I Still Do Them)
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3 "Impossible" Instagram Drum Licks You Can Actually Learn
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3 Ways to Stop Sounding Like a Beginner in Just 90 Days
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Advanced Triplet Fills
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I HATED Odd Meters - Until I Discovered This
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Stop Trying So Hard to Groove - Try This Instead
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What The Haters Taught Me About Playing Faster
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My 3 Best New Flow Exercises
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How Eric Moore Plays Fast
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The (Second) Coolest Groove on YouTube
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Tony, Connie, and Mel All Did This - Here's How
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The Top 5 Stewart Copeland Beats of All Time
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Josh Crawford Transcriptions
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Avoid This "Catch 22" at Your Next Jazz Jam Session
Four Exercises to Improve Your Time on The Drums
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Two Straight 8th Jazz Brush Patterns
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Why not play brushes on everything?
That’s the question John Riley asked me, many years ago, for which I didn’t have a great answer.
Through the years, I’ve tried to wage a “booster” campaign for the humble brush - to coax others out of the resistance that kept me from getting great at the brushes for so many years.
Eventually, it was my love of the great jazz drummers, from Ed Thigpen, Vernel Fournier, and Roy Haynes to Blade, Bill Stewart, and Hutch.
But I’m painfully aware that my channel attracts both jazz enthusiasts and…not-jazz-enthusiasts alike, and…well…the brushes have an image problem the sticks don’t share.
Sticks, you see, are equally appropriate in any musical genre.
Only play country two-steps? Great. Sticks.
Like zydeco? Fantastic. I’ve got an idea: drumsticks.
You get the idea.
Brushes, however, and with few exceptions, are only associated with jazz.
Which left me in the difficult position of making the case that we should “liberate” the brush from simply a jazz implement…
…without seeming to disparage the great drummers who developed the idiom.
Let me put it this way:
Papa Jo, Connie Kay, Ed, Vernel, Roy, Philly Joe, Art Taylor, Paul Motian, and everybody else took the brush tradition so deep that, for aficionados, their music needs no qualification.
But, for people not familiar with these greats, are we going to say brushes are “off limits” for them?
Nope.
Play brushes along with Jack White.
Play brushes with Cardi B. With Rihanna. With Hova. With Soundgarden.
They’re just another texture - and a great one.
Play Brushes On Everything.
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What Makes These Tunes So Hard to Play?
So there's something that happens when I see a difficult tune I can't play.
It's akin to Biff Tannen calling Marty McFly "chicken".
I'm all set for the day in the shed...
I've got my life in a good balance...
I don't want for anything.
All I have to do is walk away.
Then, I hear the tune calling "what are you...CHICKEN?"
"NOONE CALLS ME CHICKEN"
So it was was the tune that inspired this week's lesson. And, like many of the tunes that "call me chicken" recently, it's by Tigran Hamasyan.
But let's get deeper.
I realized there's something specific that make a lot of Tigran's tunes particularly difficult.
It's not just the shifting meters you have to remember - though some tunes certainly have those.
It's the way you often have to keep two rhythms - of two different phrase lengths - in your head at once. And, I realized, it's not unique to Tigran.
In today's lesson, I'll examine 3 tunes by 3 different composers, all-of-which place a similar demand on our cognition.
Oh - and don’t forget Le Transcripcion: