Drum geek sick chops youtube thread

that dude can do awesome drum things

Giuliana redefining the temporal structure of the universe

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I874OgU3qMY

I had never heard of this guy somehow, beautiful soloing! It's like elvin jones refracted through a waterfall or something.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=n-mtsu-JOk8

Nice. He's like the house ECM guy, right? I'm not very familiar with his playing tbh.

his playing is excellent, and i love his facial chill

to put it in neutral wikipedia terms:

He, along with Jan Garbarek and Palle Danielsson, was a member of the legendary Keith Jarrett "European Quartet" of the 1970s which produced five excellent jazz recordings on ECM Records.

Been appreciating Ulysses Owens Jr recently:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dWyztLU4ARg

niice

p sick chops https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Njy7pMVKJ8Q

Still the best!

This guy is so dumb

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1qMkWFDV8ds

I've been working on open/close a lot lately, jury's still out on whether I can get it reliable, comfortable, and coordinated enough to pull out on gigs.

Let's just keep going here.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3XN3PxVS5SQ

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ak410L2Z5d8

Love this (esp the Mark Guiliana one at the end where everything keeps falling apart)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DBYl4E2YJI

love it!! i needed this
thank you for posting

this goes on my inspiration board. more drummers need to scream

https://imgur.com/gallery/QDW1KSb

My co-drummer pulling the curtain back on a lot of stuff here, it's pretty technical but also a trove of good information about technique, swing, New Orleans drumming, etc
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Xb91LwtZEJQ

VERY USEFUL AND INFORMATIVE
thank you for posting!!! i was proud that i understood it and look forward to trying it the next time i practice
really into the groove-based approach

i want to learn more like this

Glad you enjoyed it! I've been listening to & playing with him for years and I picked up a few things too.

I really love the "here's the groove, here's how you can personalize it" teaching approach and playing approach. That's basically what Tony Allen did when I went to his master class! It was really fun and easy to incorporate what I learned from him into my own playing. I am into it!!

*alert* Rational Funk is back *alert*

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5LwWpMvNuPY

Ok Rational Funk is cool and all, but this reminded me that Dave King truly has the best banter in the music industry

https://www.facebook.com/31969693620/videos/3456413244372231/

I've never really paid much attention to post-Coltrane Elvin, but damn
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WjAz7sTdo90

random youtube find, no idea who this guy is but love it
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tahvdBsHvLY

Good find!

This guy is pretty funny and also insanely good:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RFXYEJmO6FY

Drummers are too good nowadays, they should not be so good. I went through this guy's insta after hearing a track from him, really nice stuff.

https://www.instagram.com/mattdaviesdrums/

Also my co-drummer made a tutorial video on playing tambourine in the New Orleans/gospel style, it's really good imo:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nn0_d0iDnKk

why is that video so looooooooong

Haha I told him he should release it as a series of shorter ones, but at least there are timestamps. It's a tambourine manifesto. The main technique is like 5 - 9 min.

Kevin Shea made an album of drum pad music
https://kevinshea.bandcamp.com/album/love-letter-to-my-drum-pad?fbclid=IwAR2VNjdwaPCQQP3O0W96jxGAtdnxR4tcXP0KnasXwtPR-qCfPyXc_FAT-60

Drummers are too good nowadays, they should not be so good.

I've been thinking about this statement a lot lately, because it really does feel like there's a proliferation of incredible drummers out on instagram on youtube, people that just like effortless flow from a perfect dilla feel groove to a 5 against 4 against 7 insane prog thing (but that actually sounds good) to gospel chops to perfect pocket funk like nothing, and add in all kinds of creative sound use, great tuning, etc. IDK if it's just because the internet makes us more aware of them, or also that the internet makes drummers more able to incorporate more techniques and styles into their playing, or what. I remember there being a sort of half-pisstake thing in one of John Fahey's liner notes about how the population is larger now so there are more mozarts, and there might be something to that too.

OTM. remember Adam Neely telling me about his buddy (roommate at some point, I think) Shawn Crowder being able to do all kinds of polyrhythms up to those involving 19. That was a few years back so it’s probably higher now.

But what really blows my mind is that there are all these people who can do that WITH GREAT FEEL AND MAKE IT SOUND GOOD, like you can no longer make "chops monster" into a derisive thing because these drummers literally have it all.

Yeah, that too.

Lately I have been into this guy
https://www.instagram.com/p/CIn_F8-BL8w/?utm_source=ig_web_copy_link

Also have been really into this woman's drumming for a while
https://www.instagram.com/maddenklassdrums/

every 5 months or so i have a complete meltdown and then speculate about how impossible it is to be a working artist these days, more than ever. because yeah, there are a thousand mozarts running around now, for real, at this moment. and in order for it to make sense for them, financially, they have to compete globally. there are still local scenes and it's possible to make things and sell them locally and to friends and family. but for the most part, you're competing against the internet. part of the promise of the internet was that it would open up the audience, that you'd be able to find some dude across the world, or he would find you, and that wasn't possible until now, etc etc. and that's technically true. but they forgot to throw in the co-efficient of 0.0000001. 0.0000001% of dudes across the world will find you, maybe more like 0.000000001 if we're being real. and you have to be in the top 0.000000001% if you want to make more than $15 off your youtube streams (paintings, sick beats, choreography, whatever). eh, whatever. i'm sure this will be interpreted as a eugenics argument, and/or the point will be made that no artist has ever been successful, there is a long history of artists working for absolutely nothing and hoping that they can break into the 0.000001% of the world that has enough money and cares enough about art to give it to the people who make it and that the internet has actually made things better.

but imagine living in a cave with 200 of your smelly friends, and you are the drummer. or the painter. or the choreographer. there isn't some genius in another time zone who has mastered everything you haven't even learned about yet. it's just you, and since no one else can provide the sick post (pre?) apocalypse beats, the one rich guy in the cave who has access to velvet blankets decides to swaddle you up in one, and encourages you to make more sick beats. because in this cave, there is no internet

edit: not a cave. let's call it a little pond

Excellent post, KM.

it's also true that all the other unknown mozarts were always there, we just didn't know about them because of no-internet. it's cool that we know about them now. it's just, in a way we are also _competing_

i guess all of the above doesn't matter to people who just want to learn a craft and occasionally show off things to their family, or people who do it purely for themselves (if that's really possible - i'm not sure). i guess i'm just in a lifelong battle to be asked to drum on a steely dan album, and it bugs me that the competition is stiff

oh, thanks james. it probably has a million logical holes in it, too. but before i let my pesky critical thinking capability get in the way, that is my honest and persistent "feeling" about it

Karl Malone's allegory of the cave.

and that hits on a funny thing about the way social media works, but especially sites like instagram and youtube that are a weird cross between a "friends" platform and a "public" platform. Like I use my instagram page as a minor creative outlet when I have little micro guitar ideas I want to post, and 95% of the views (if not more) are from people I already know. And I legit think the clips are "good" to the point that someone who didn't know me well might be like "oh yeah, that guy is good at guitar." But they wind up floating in the same sea with ultra-polished, extremely talented and skilled musicians who also post clips where the music is more perfected, the technique is more perfected, even the visual is more perfected, and I feel like, in spite of just mostly wanting to share my music with my friends, I also can't help but want to compete with the pros who are on the same platform, and then I just despair, because I don't have the kind of time to devote to it that it would take to achieve those kinds of clips. And yet there's this illusion that those people are "just like us," just some dude with a guitar in his bedroom, as though that dude didn't attend Berklee College of Music, doesn't practice 7 hours a day, and doesn't regularly get hired for session work. Because what you see is just him in front of a cheap wall tapestry, only it's better lit and shot than your video in front of a wall tapestry, but in a subtle way you almost wouldn't notice.

It's almost like you have a show at a little club that has multiple rooms, and your friends all come out to see you, and maybe a few strangers wander in too, but in the next room over, which is the same size and quality as your room, is Led Zeppelin, only it's a Led Zeppelin that isn't outright famous.

https://i.imgur.com/hQqTfrT.gif

It's almost like you have a show at a little club that has multiple rooms, and your friends all come out to see you, and maybe a few strangers wander in too, but in the next room over, which is the same size and quality as your room, is Led Zeppelin, only it's a Led Zeppelin that isn't outright famous.

whoa that sounds awesome

(as a listener) <-- part of the problem

Because what you see is just him in front of a cheap wall tapestry, only it's better lit and shot than your video in front of a wall tapestry, but in a subtle way you almost wouldn't notice.

to me this is highly related with Google Image Search results. i swear, there was a time when i RELIED on GIS as part of my creative flow. like, i could just search for "old couch" or "christmas 1985 living room" and there would be gold everywhere. realistic, real images, weird things, neverending flows of cool shit that was just there. somewhere along the line, google rejiggered the thing a million times, and now when you search for...anything at all?... you mainly get products, many of them digital (ie., watermarked images for sale), some of them a irl product, and then beneath that, a link to an image that's behind a firewalled site you have to sign up to a mailing list in order to temporarily visit to download the image, or, most often of all, you just end up with an image of a bright, tastefully polite decorated living room, clearly worth north of $5000 for the furniture alone, not to mention the appliances.

i mention this all the time and people just kind of nod, but i think that's BAD! it's bad because google's idea of what a living room should look like starts to get mixed in with my real life idea of what a living room is. to me, first, a living room tells you a lot about the people who live there. they're all unique. they're all interesting. i love living rooms. i do not love 2020 GIS living rooms - but they're starting to become my default mental image of "living room", replacing the cool idea of them that used to dominate.

what does this have to with drumming or making music or instagram? i think there's a similar GIS-gone-to-hell dynamic to the sharing of music performances and productions and "practices" and "riffs" or whatever. the baseline idea of what a drummer is and sounds like starts to hone in on...something?...that is both real (the real accumulation of user-submitted sick beats) and synthetic (the algorithm and what characteristics it rewards, which is something everyone is aware of on some level (i hope) and which we have a kind of shared understanding of, but also something that is inherently hidden and always changing)))))

it's sort of humbling about one's sense of aesthetic/stylistic opinions too. Like I used to have thoughts like "too many guitarists approach things like x, I'm going to differentiate myself by doing y" -- but with the internet you realize there are 1000 other guitarists who agree with you about x and differentiate themselves by doing y, and they do y much better than you ever could, and maybe z too which you didn't even think of.

shoot, forgot to finish the thought, sorry. what happens is that the more grounded, real idea of what a drummer sounds like when they practice, starts to get mixed in with the synthetic/99th percentile-master idea of it. and if you get too connected to that, or if you don't recognize that it's blending in and getting supplanted with something else, then "real life" seems a little shabby when you return to it - the not-sick beats that must be played thousands of times before they can become sick; the living room furniture that has the little fuzzy couch cushion balls all over it, even though the online review said it wouldn't do that.

it's bad! online bad!