Drum geek sick chops youtube thread

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!

also great posts KM

*begins to feel like someone had the same ideas as him about great posts but executed them much better, wonders if he actually attended Berklee School of Posting and practices posting 7 hours a day*

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!

― Karl Malone, Thursday, December 10, 2020 1:51 PM (nine seconds ago) bookmarkflaglink

And yes, this! Like I will record some grungey, grimey little lick and be like "that sounded really cool." But then after I post it to instagram I inevitably hear some other guitarist do a grungey, grimey lick, but with far more perfect control of the grunginess and grimeyness of it, and also no mistakes whatsoever whereas I have an accidental string mute or hit in there somewhere.

sorry for typos and incoherent thoughts, rambling. i'm typing this while listening to the worst conference call ever of the week and my worldview is getting negative

xp

I approve of this thread direction, good posts KM.

Thinking about it in terms of drumming, it's definitely a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's great that there's so much information that's available, and not gatekept behind lessons or a music education. It's amazing that you can see how people's hands move (instead of just your one friend in the school band who's decent at drums), get the sticking behind the lick, slow it down to .25 speed, etc.

On the other hand, it really does feel like things are getting homogenized. 'Chops' (fka 'gospel chops' aka crazy linear fills & beats meant to sound like a time-altering flurry of notes) have been broken down & assimilated into everyone's playing, same for the post-Dilla thing. It really feels like these things are so popular because they make for impressive short video content. And whereas the video thing maybe used to be an advertisement for someone to get gigs, it increasingly feels like the goal unto itself? I.e. the endpoint is to make videos and collaborate with other musicians who make videos, and it's a whole enterprise detached from the idea of making music that gets released and listened to as audio. And as much as I don't like the idea of it, maybe that's just what it is.

oh man, i accidentally lost a really, really long post. like i just wrote my senior essay there. i hit back and tried to retrieve it, and saw it, but then accidentally refreshed and lost it again. d'oh.

welp, this will be a VERY rare second draft post, which is good for anyone reading because now instead of 8 paragraphs it's 2.

- related to the whole algorithm/polished/GIS/living room thing above, it ends up influencing the "content" that people make. most of the influence goes toward the more pro/polished/edited "content", as humanity and computers collectively try to figure out the template for "successful content", in the same way that they've already figured it out with superhero films. human behavior is part of the equation, with people seeing more polished content being correlated with success/views/likes, so there's naturally a desire to emulate that. but i think the larger part of the equation, and still growing, is the platform itself. think of "instagram creators", which is one of the saddest bios that you will ever see, especially when it's on a platform outside of instagram. they're instagram creators using instagram's platform and tools, playing within their rules, using their templates, resizing to their dimensions, length, and compression requirements, and reliant on the black box algorithm, which resembles a panopticon to the degree that it runs the show and everyone is aware of it, but its inner workings are proprietary and secretive, perceived by all but always changing. if you're on instagram, you adapt to the platform whether you want to or not. there's no choice. it's like being "not political". in doing that, you make a political decision. i only mention instagram because it's most familiar to me, but of course a similar dynamic is in play across twitter and all the rest.

- but on a more hopeful note, i think all of this momentum toward bland, corporate homogeneity creates more space for more punk, diy, raw, non-platform, however you want to think of it, creative people. open source, in a way. there's a big NEED for that right now, for people to just ditch this bullshit proprietary "creator platform" stuff and set up camp way the fuck to the left of that

xposts thank you jordan and man alive and james for your kind words. i am in high/rambling mode so i appreciate your patience

also, as far as platforms/companies go, bandcamp seems to be cooler than the rest.

i mention that because i'm quitting my job this month and i've been thinking about changing things up, "career-wise". i've been dreaming about trying to start a small music label that is also a radical co-op/non-profit/something else model. would be trying to achieve four things:

a) all revenue beyond basic living wage expenses (see c and d) go toward antifa local mutual aid efforts
b) release physical/digital releases of do-gooder bands, with a brilliant (and tbd) structure that guarantees that the band will at least break even, and could potentially even _make a little bit of money_ from their music.
c) pay myself a living wage, and enough to pay my rent, bills, and student loans. and not a cent more.
d) anyone who gets paid as part of the organization/label gets paid the same amount, no matter who they are. that can either be a salary or a per hour basis.

i mention that because i'm obviously going through my second pre-40s mid-life crisis i anticipate that no matter how non-platform/diy i try to be, i'll probably need something like bandcamp too.

That sounds amazing except for the part where you need to get people to pay money for music, in a sufficient amount to even make back the costs of mastering etc :/

(please don't go into music with any hope of making money!)

definitely. the "brilliant (and tbd) structure" mentioned in part b) definitely goes a long way there, lol

i want to see if i can do it, though. like...what if the person who did the mastering was part of the collective/co-op? and what if pressings/releases only happened once a minimum amount of people indicated that they would like to purchase it? that would lessen the risk. my thought is that most people want to make a bunch of money and grow, but i don't. i just want to pay my bills and set up something that is sustainable and helpful to other people. so maybe the profit-taking part of the equation goes away. (and perhaps there's even a way to somehow make it a non-profit, but i know that complicates things even more). and local bands, generally, just want to release their shit on a label and have a physical release to show their loved ones, but also not lose a bunch of money in the process. maybe there are a few do-gooder bands who would be interested in releasing something for a label that is just trying to raise money for mutual aid.

also, i'm not coming up with this out of nowhere, i've seen that there are do-gooder bands and music people who already support this kind of thing. i started thinking about it after a friend of mine helped put this together: https://chicagocommunityjailsupport.bandcamp.com/album/warm-violet-a-compilation-for-chicago-community-jail-support. it raised $9000 on the first day of release, and people are still buying it.

i'm also thinking about how it would be so cool if the "buy" button was actually the "donate" button, and it tells you exactly how much is going to the mutual aid fund vs how much is going to the artist and the label.

that would be something i would like to be involved with if you decide to push it forward. feel free to email me.

another thought: what if there was a way to purchase music (physical releases, even, most likely in small diy quantities) that also qualified as a charitable act of giving? why does all music have to be locked up inside profitable streaming giants (and again...platforms exerting a growing influence on the content itself)?

xp

thanks NA! and depending on how it goes, i will! it could be a big life move, but i definitely want to make sure that it can actually work before proceeding.

it could also take a very different form. like, i was thinking of how cool it would be release music from incarcerated people, and then for all the proceeds to go back to the prisoners + mutual aid/jail support. it sounds a little wild, but another person on the same team that put together the bandcamp comp is ALSO highly connected with the incarceration/activist world. i haven't talked with her yet but multiple people have mentioned that she would be "VERY, VERY" into the idea, so...yeah.

or...it would probably be something very different than that, or nothing at all.

Ok godspeed then. As I'm sure you know, it's all too easy to only look at the successes (on Bandcamp or elsewhere) and think 'oh, I can do that as well' without knowing all of the irl scene/networks/pr/invisible factors that are behind it. I've seen some great charity comps with amazing musicians that tank on Bandcamp too.

These are cool ideas though, don't let me get you down.

this turned into a really interesting discussion fwiw. Jordan I think what you think sometimes too which is that it seems maybe a bit sad if this is all just self-contained 'content creation,' and it's notable that the video you posted at the start of it was a joke about getting fired from gigs for trying all that stuff on stage. And I can't think of any of these people who are also in really great bands that I like, whereas the drummers in really great bands I like tend to keep things a lot simpler (and really how often during the course of a show or album would you want to hear those kinds of insane fractal fills?). Of course maybe that's just a nice story I tell myself to not feel inadequate.

Also KM, I applaud your idea, but I think if you do something like that you should do it more for spiritual, humane and awareness-raising reasons, because music is about the worst possible way to raise money for anything unless you have big names and a marketing budget off the bat.

Yeah, I would of course prefer to be able to play all that stuff and then choose not to. :)

To bring it back around, this is a youtube drum thing that has been sticking in my mind lately, a simple reminder to play like you give a shit and imbue every backbeat with confidence & intention: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vi-1vs2xbH8

luckily, i have an in on the upcoming sonic youth reunion album

i appreciate the feedback! i'm still working through it - calling it a "music label" is probably a really misleading way to put it. it would be more like a co-op service for creative people, designed to replace the most expensive/privatized parts of the process with diy/co-op/in-house. if there is just one do-gooder with mastering skills and equipment, that could be their contribution to the co-op service. sure, that contribution would be much more important than most other people could provide, but that's part of a normal community. it's normal for people who have lucked out in life to subsidize those who haven't (yet). i think there must be someone out there who, miraculously, is financially secure but also still wants to be in a community with people who are not. or, probably much more likely, there is someone out there with those mastering skills/equipment who is NOT financially secure, but is a do-gooder and therefore is going to sacrifice some of their own personal wellbeing in order to help out a bunch of other people, anyway. in my experience, creative people are a) almost always broke and also b) generous with their time and energy. the trick is to find these people, and i already know some of them so that makes me optimistic

a simple reminder to play like you give a shit and imbue every backbeat with confidence & intention:

Yeah I have very strong feelings about this -- that more broadly you should really enjoy and feel emotion about everything you play, and if what you're playing is very simple and "boring" then you should try to vibe with what you're accompanying and just enjoy the way your simple beat supports it. I think a lot about the way someone like Nick Mason plays - no matter how simple he's playing, it always sounds like he's really listening to and vibing with the rest of the band, and it's hard to say how I know he's doing that, it's just in the feel of the drumming, even in between the fills (which he typically only puts at the end of phrases, keeping the rest of the beat simple). Or even simpler, Ralph Molina. I also think a lot about the drums on Don't Let It Bring You Down, almost minimalist, yet there's a lot of feel and emotion in them.

what the crap is going on in here?

Thinking about it in terms of drumming, it's definitely a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it's great that there's so much information that's available, and not gatekept behind lessons or a music education. It's amazing that you can see how people's hands move (instead of just your one friend in the school band who's decent at drums), get the sticking behind the lick, slow it down to .25 speed, etc.

NOT GATEKEPT is a key phrase here
maybe it's because i have had to maintain delusion-levels of belief in myself to progress as a drummer, or some other reason, but comparing yourself to others is a superhighway to feeling like shit. play like you feel it/be a conduit for the spirit and you may not ever be recognized but at least you are playing music in a way that is enjoyable and i think that is the point. ralph molina otm, he was one of my early role models. in case you wondered, i started playing 7 years ago this June. yes that much time has passed.

Had some actual lols at this:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UzLg6aM3c7U

not a drummer: what is that loofa thing on his snare?