I have been writing drum exercises and transcriptions for years, but only perhaps in the last six years have I started composing digitally. In that time, I’ve done barely more than a dozen song transcriptions. The wonderful quality of being able to access the plethora of free or inexpensive drum kit sheet music that exists on the internet is a lot easier than doing the work oneself. The hours it takes to properly transcribe a song, make sure it’s completely correct, battle yourself over the little idiosyncrasies that are hard to transcribe, and then format it to look good are easy to trade in for three or four bucks.

But hey, what kind of a teacher would I be if I didn’t transcribe a few tunes here and there? Besides, sometimes I can’t find the tunes I wanna teach, or the transcription I find is terrible. In any case, selling PDF transcriptions on the internet is a new leg of the journey for me, and we’ll see how it pans out.

Although I’ve known The Ronettes’ “Be My Baby” just from hearing it on the oldies station as a kid, I got hip to the song’s producer Phil Spector at the time I was digging into John Lennon’s solo post-Beatles stuff (Spector recorded the Plastic Ono Band album- one of my favorites). His “Wall of Sound” production style, combined with Blaine’s powerful personality on the kit make the drum take on this tune absolutely breathtaking.

The beat was a real innovation by Blaine, with the beat being on the ‘4’, and occasionally filling out around the upbeats. It’s absolutely huge sounding. In an old Modern Drummer article (June ‘06) he claimed that he was playing a tom and a floor tom, not kick and snare, even! When you get to the outro chorus of the song, the fills are completely unchained, but masterfully under control. It’s really a study in how to cut loose.

From the drummer's chair, it can be challenging to wrangle together a group of people who don't pay attention well to meter. It is possible to be pulled in more than one direction or have a musician constantly interpreting behind- or ahead of the beat feels as indications to slow or speed up. Mistakes like this often force attentive drummers into awkward places where we are sacrificing feel for a unified band. With behind the beat grooves, the guitarist has to know that they are playing a little ahead of the backbeat. If they pull back, the drums aren't really behind the beat anymore. So the drummer either gives up or the song slows down. Conversely, if the band is playing a tight syncopated groove and someone is asleep at the time wheel, things get flammy and all those super groovy Tower of Power hits and pops you are trying to nail become the sound of a kitchen appliance tumbling down a flight of stairs.

On the other hand, a band that is tight and together on time is like a tactical assault groove team. Everyone watches each others' backs. My favorite bass players that I've worked with over the years have held me accountable when my groove was getting distracted and slipping. Great songwriters that really know the feel of their tunes can dial back the whole band with a nod of their headstock. My favorite live instrument hip-hop groups have instruments in three different time-positions and stay in line through the whole tune, which sounds freaking amazing.

I think it's also important to point out that in this day and age if you're recording in the studio, it's almost guaranteedly going to be multitrack. If you can't play to a metronome and feel good, you're probably going to lay down a sub-par take. Metronomes can be a bore, and they can be intimidating, but if you want to be a pro you've gotta be able to keep time in every scenario. Conversely, you can't be too reliant on digital timekeeping. Many musical groups this day are wired to Ableton or are running tracks and start to use external time as a crutch. It's actually not that different from using the drummer as a crutch, but for the fact that the drummer can also become overly reliant in the same way.

So regardless of what role in a band you are fulfilling, part of your personal practice routine should be the study of time and feel. Play with a metronome. Pay attention to your feel. Turn it off. Does your feel change? It probably does. Try and learn to play with a metronome without changing your feel, and play without a metronome and have steady time. Both are a challenge.
In band rehearsals, you should regularly find yourself aware of how and where your instrument is fitting in time with the other instruments. Are you ahead, right on, or behind the beat? Do you push tempo on choruses or slow down when you go from a complicated pattern to something open and simple? Do you move your body to the beat? How do you breathe? These are all questions that the attentive drummer asks themselves, and hopefully so too does the rest of the band.

Suggested listening:

I decided to write this after listening for the gazillionth time to D'Angelo's album Brown Sugar. Here's a link to the title track, but I recommend the whole album, and basically everything he's put out.

So while I may be working with my students on how to be better drummers, there is a much deeper process that we engage in on a one-on-one level, which is finding the student's individual blocks to cultivating self-discipline and finding ways to approach and overcome these blocks. If we cannot succeed at doing this, then we will have a hard time attacking our weaknesses as drummers and will always find our practice to be inconsistent at best and completely dissolve in times where the stresses of life are increased.
This process becomes a life skill, which can be applied to all things. Discovering the willingness to face our weaknesses, transform problems into solutions, enact these solutions, and maintain a consistent approach to addressing such weaknesses until we grow beyond them- this is how I define self-discipline. That is what I aim to teach. Drums just happen to be the vehicle.

For the sake of drawing a clear line, I somewhat arbitrarily cap the term vintage at roughly the early '80s, the reason there being that I find it annoying that vintage drum nuts who love the Ludwig "Blue and Olive" from the '70s always ignore the fact that those drums were manufactured that way up until 1984. Sorry, I'm the anti-geek geek, I guess.

Anyway, there are two prime elements that I'm looking at when considering which kit I'm going to play. One is the obvious- how does its sound fit with the music I'm a part of? The other one, and less apparent to those who have not done a lot of traveling with the kit is how durable or sturdy the kit is.
First, on the latter of those two points, what I'm driving at is how well the kit sets up, holds tuning, and how worried I am about it getting banged up. Obviously, with a vintage kit, the more damage it takes, whether you're talking about shell integrity or just cosmetic, the less valuable it will be. That tends to matter a lot for kits in really good shape- I feel it's essentially a drummer's responsibility to keep a really excellent condition vintage kit in that condition. You are playing a piece of history and should behave accordingly. I took a vintage Rogers kit on the road for years and it got beat pretty good. But the key there was I selected a kit that cosmetically was already beat to hell. The shells were great, but cosmetically it would be very poorly valued to a vintage collector. 
Vintage kits suffer from several hardware challenges that modern kits do not. They typically have fewer lugs so are harder to keep in tune. They also may be more subject to sharp environmental changes than modern drums. Tom mounts and bass drum anchors tend to really suck on those old kits. Of course, this is relevant to how you play- if you're a punk rocker or old-school metal drummer... I don't know why you'd be playing on a vintage kit in the first place, but if you were you'd discover they were not really built for the physical intensity of that type of playing. Your bass drum will end up several feet away from you after the first song without some hardware reinforcement.
In any case, modern drums have to one degree or another succeeded at addressing these issues. Modern drums have more lugs to improve tuning, more reliable mounts, and bass drum anchors are far more functional in keeping the drum in one place. Especially on the road, it is clear that modern hardware is functionally preferable to deal with.

Now about sound. To me the conversation about what to play is a simple one: what style music are you playing? That's it. My kit preference is based on the decade and genre of what I'm playing. For instance, I'm currently very immersed in '60s and '70s soul music, so that Rogers kit works perfectly for it. I can get that very open Motown sound when I add in a sixties Leedy snare that I keep around. If I want that tighter Al Jackson Jr. STAX kinda sound, I get a brass snare and put some dampening on all the drums. How I play the music is really what matters, but it feels great for me as a player to be sitting behind a kit that suits the style I'm going for.

Most contemporary pop music is going to be well suited with a modern kit of some kind. If we zoom in too tight then we get into a conversation about heads, tunings, and all other things. Speaking strictly about kit, I see no reason to push for a vintage kit with modern music other than simply having a preference to play one. Music that is heavily influenced by electronic sounds and samples rarely requires an actual vintage drum. However, it's perfectly fine to make those choices if the drum fits the job.

I find it helpful to further divide the consideration of sound into studio and live playing. As an audio engineer I've spent a fair amount of time considering the sound of drums from the other side of the throne. In a live setting, I've mostly arrived at the opinion that it really doesn't matter at all whether or not you're playing a vintage kit. When you consider what a drumset sounds like by the time it gets from the stage, through the assortment of dynamic mics, out into the PA system, it just doesn't sound like a vintage kit. It sounds like DRUMS and that's kind of it. If you're playing the unmiked or low volume jazz club gig, sure fine. But any venue where by necessity you need a mic on every drum and probably have overheads, I am truly convinced that whether or not your kit is vintage is wholly irrelevant. Cymbal, head type/tuning, and snare sound are really the most significant things at that point. 
Conversely, in the studio, everything can matter. That's what's fun and sometimes difficult about the studio. All the little things can add up to really create the magic that make a great feeling track, and I think that choosing all the right details about your kit are very meaningful in a studio setting. I feel it's really important to state for the record that in the end, the only thing that actually matters is the take, but building up to that, preparing the sound and mood of what you're going to track is both a ritual and an art. This is where diving into the vintage sound can be extremely fun and rewarding.
For a brief digression from straight drum talk, one of my favorite things was really digging into the Glyn Johns drum mic technique with my '60s Rogers kit. It's important to point out that if you're tracking vintage drums and really want that 'vintage sound,' there are undoubtedly countless things working against you, from using Logic or Pro Tools instead of recording to 2" tape, not using mics from the same era, and not being Uriel Jones or Buddy Harman. So it's important to get as close as we can get when we're going for the sound, and how we mike the kit in the studio is as big a part as the kit itself.

In summary, I feel like playing a vintage kit is purely a flavor thing that only plays a part of defining a drummer's sound. In the proper setting, and especially in the studio, I think the right vintage kit can really help evoke the right mood and attitude for a drummer aiming to capture a vintage playing style or approach. A large aspect of what I think is at play here is psychological- the way we feel about our playing is the feel of the take! We should do whatever it takes to tap into that place where we feel exhilarated to play, yet can enter our personal musical trance, free from distractions about the nitty gritty things like, "oh, the ring on the snare is a little weird right now," or "hmm the rack tom is wobbling on the mount a bit and I don't like it."
Don't buy or play vintage drums just because someone makes you think you should, or that it makes you more pro, or whatever. At the end of the day, they're just drums, and they are only the tool of the drummer. A good drummer can make any kit sound good, the right kit is just icing on the cake. Research the music you love, get into who played on what tracks or in what bands, and learn about how and what drums they played. If you feel like you really identify with a style or player, consider curating a gear setup similar to that vibe, but don't make the mistake of ever thinking that the gear makes the musician. You are the music and that is all that will ever matter. 

I think that one of the most valuable things a drummer can do to think and play more in this way is to pay attention to studio drummers and listen to what they play on big albums, whether you like the music or not. For instance, I gained a lot of perspective listening to Vinnie Colaiuta play on Sting's "Ten Summoner's Tales", or listening to the various session players do their thing on Steely Dan's Aja. In Steve Jordan's DVD "The Groove is Here", he samples a lot of beats he played on various albums as a session drummer, and I think there is some great perspective to be had there.

One of the hardest things to balance as a teacher of young beginner students is bringing the inspiration and enthusiasm of the instrument to the student, but keeping them on task to practice the things that actually make you a competent player.

The truth is, some people just don't want to do the work, and that's okay. I've had students that, once they realized that drums are hard to be good at decided that they just didn't want to do it. It's not as easy as it looks in the music video. But the reason professionals make it look easy is because they put the practice in.

But the grand majority of students I find just need a teacher to help them find the fun and the beauty in practicing. A practice pad with a metronome beeping in your ear is the rhythmic equivalent to eating your vegetables. You've gotta do it if you want to be a well-rounded player but it's rarely the most savory part of the process. I think the key lies in the perspective we help our students cultivate, and the way we show them how to use the tools.

Stick Control is one of the first books my students lay their eyes on. In a sense, the first page contains pretty much 90% of the patterns you will ever use as a drummer. This is typically the first challenge point I meet with my beginner students in getting or keeping them motivated to practice. So one of the tricks I've learned is really simple. I take the paradiddles (exercises 5-8) and show them how you can turn them into drumbeats. Maybe I show them the STP song Vasoline (which is pretty much a giant paradiddle between the kick and snare). The moment they see that, all of a sudden the bland exercise turns into something that gives them an incentive to learn. The key point here is that there's always gotta be a carrot on the stick. We can't throw exercises at most students without some kind of tangible goal in reach. Especially students with attention deficits- they are the ones that will lose their patience the most quickly (I know because I was diagnosed ADHD at seven and still have to actively maintain self discipline to stay on task with everything in life).

I think one of the unique challenges for beginning drummers also is that it's hard to really play 'songs' initially. We have to develop time before we can play to a song in headphones, and easy songs for beginners often lose their meaning when being played without a melodic guide. My teacher started me on playing complex and interesting beats as soon as he could, because in reality, this is essentially the practical course to take a student. This works for some students for awhile, and I can often develop a student along this trajectory until they have enough time and facility to learn an entire song. But for students that lack that patience and focus, I find that I often have to give them 'bite sized' clips of songs. There are so many songs that can be torn down into a 2- or 4-measure pattern that is easy to play in an endless loop, and sure they're not playing the whole song, but if there's an easy melody to hum or lyric to sing (think "We will we will rock you"), it really helps give some purpose and fun to something that can otherwise seem to be an endless string of dull eighth or sixteenth note kick/snare/hat patterns.

Anyway, just thinking while blogging, here. I could go on, I have a challenging student this evening that it's about time to prepare for. He's six years old, doesn't want to eat his vegetables, and my job is to help him find an appreciation for their flavor. It's a trick, and sometimes it can be frustrating, but I find that if I refuse to allow myself to blame the student and put myself to task, I have no choice but to find a way to encourage and motivate my student to do the thing that I know will serve them the best.

Niko Bolas is my godfather. Before I ever thought about playing drums or even thought about music, I knew him as the fun guy that came to visit my mom, dad and I when I was a kid. It wasn't often because we lived far away, but I always looked forward to seeing him.
As I grew older and lost my relationship with my father, Niko became more present in my life. He checked in with me more regularly, and as I began to play drums he encouraged me a lot. As I fell into drugs and began to develop drug problems, he was loving and supportive of me as very few of my family members were.

I didn't really understand it back then. He was a serious cat in the music industry and he was at that point, probably fifteen years or so into his sobriety. I was unaware of it in my youth, but I suppose I'd kind of set my life trajectory straight towards him, and my parents couldn't have chosen a better man to be in my life in that capacity.

So, fast-forward to my young twenties. I've decided to take the dive and pursue a career in music in Los Angeles. Niko's there and ropes me in from time to time and gets me to hang with him at whatever studio he's cutting a record in. In a different life I would've followed his footsteps as an engineer/producer, but I chose not to follow that path for the sake of drumming. Now, as a drummer, this ended up being a big deal. He gave me a chance to hang with, watch studio performances by, and in some cases become friends with guys like Vinnie Colaiuta, Jim Keltner, Steve Jordan, Billy Ward, Charley Drayton and several other great drummers. These guys are literally the best of the best, and being in the studio with them to watch them work has been a priceless benefit to my life as a musician. But this is really just a surface thing, and not comparatively important to who he is to me.

The real unpayable debt I hold to Niko started in '06, when my father died. I was cutting a record with a band I was with at the time, called The Atma. Niko was producing it. We were recording at a great studio in Van Nuys called Stagg St. Studios. He and I were talking about my dad, who neither of us had talked to in a long time, so he decided to call him. Coincidentally, my mother-in-law picked up this call just after she found my father dead, from a self-inflicted gunshot wound to the head. It was devastating, and I'm just grateful that I was surrounded by great friends and had Niko to help me through it. I was already an alcoholic at this time, but I really fell into it hard after that. And Niko was there every step of the way. He was non-judgemental when I was fucking up and making a mess of things. He helped get me in counseling. He introduced me to a lot of great people in the program when I got sober. All the years since then, he's helped me in every way he could when I needed it. He's been a light in my life when things were dark, and a foundation of support for me in the hard journey of being a working musician.
As I've grown older and spent more time around Niko, I've learned that I'm not special in this respect. Niko is this person for so many people. He has played a mentorship in many young musicians' and engineers' lives and is as deep a friend as you can get. Last year when my son came into this world, we decided to name him Niko. He's seven months old now. I'll be ten years sober next month. I live a thousand miles away from my godfather now, but he's still one of the most important people in my life.

Whether you're an audio engineer or not, even if you're not a musician, listening to this podcast is worthwhile. Sure, I have a bias. But Niko is a rare human being that has such a profound wisdom that is grounded in self-effacing humor. It's always illuminating listening to him talk, and it's also rare to catch him doing interviews.

So, back in the day when I was playing with Races, we got to do a very cool show at The Echo with a band called Candy Claws. In a period of time in my life where all the shows and bands kind of bleed together in my memory, they were one of the few bands that stood out as being both very cool musically, and also really enjoyable people off the stage.

Anyway, fast-forward a few years to last week when I discovered that I was still on their mailing list, they are now Sound of Ceres, and one of the first shows of their current tour is here in Boise ID at Neurolux, on the 28th of this month. I noted that Jacob Graham is in the band, who is formerly (or currently but on hiatus?) of The Drums. Races was on the Frenchkiss Records label at the same time as them and Portamento was one of my favorite albums of 2011, so I considered it an auspicious sign that I'll probably like the new project.

I think their new single is pretty rad, and I'm definitely going to check out their live performance when they come through town.

So there's this thing I do whenever I notice a band I'm familiar with is coming through town on tour. I invite them to stay at my house. We give them the whole basement to themselves, let them do laundry, cook them breakfast in the morning, etc. The only thing in exchange I really ask is to get Lindsey and I on the guestlist for the show (assuming we can make it, because sometimes we can't).

There's a reason I do this. It's because a lot of the bands out there are touring on shoe-string budgets. Especially if they are the opening act, which most of my touring experience often was. Now, for the moment I'm brushing larger budget tours where everyone is making good money aside, because a very huge part of the touring world is filled by bands barely scraping by, and it can be really tough. So, say you just released your first or second album, you've got some fans and some press, but not enough to fill 300 cap. venues in twenty cities across the US. You're pushing for it, though. You wanna get on the road, because that's one of the best ways to make it happen. Well, so you probably hop on a larger band's tour as their opener. And you know, maybe it's decent pay. But a lot of the time, opening bands are getting anywhere from $100-250 per show. Once you add up the totals for gas, food, and lodging, that money disappears almost instantaneously. So you're left with merch money. If your record label is taking half of the cut from your album sales, and your booking agent is taking 15% of your guarantee at the end of the tour, you've got those expenses, too. It's not uncommon to actually end up in the hole if you don't sell a shit-ton of merch or find some creative way to make money in addition to shows.

My band realized the struggle. We lost money on several tours. We had to figure out how to reduce costs in any way possible. And the easiest of those was finding places to stay on the road. We really relied on couchsurfing.org (check out my profile here and you can see a lot of the reviews/interactions we had with people we stayed with on the road- ALL positive!) as well as friends and family while we traveled from city to city. On some tours it made the difference between losing money and not. It also gave us something a little more special in each city- a person who called it home, to become friends with, and share stories with. I feel a lot more connected to some places because of the people we stayed with while we were there. Sometimes it was a little rougher and dirtier, but other times we literally walked into a miniature mansion and were treated with surreal hospitality by our hosts.

So this is what I do now that I'm not really touring. I look for the opportunities when our family can host a band and help them save a little dough. In a sense it's paying back the good deeds of all the wonderful people that helped my bands not lose their asses touring, but it's also because I know the struggle is real and I think that every city needs a community that helps out touring bands.

If I ran a venue, I would make a significant effort to set up a community of band hosting volunteers. People whom I would vet- no creepers trying to get with girls in bands (because there were two girls in Races and that was a thing we had to watch out for), no party-whores (It's horrible when your host thinks that bands like to party until the sun comes up, when all you want to do is fucking sleep because you just drove for ten hours straight, just to barely make it to load-in and you have to wake up in six hours to do it again tomorrow) and make sure they had suitable accommodations for the band (it can actually be pretty demoralizing to find that your lodging for the night is a rollout on a dirty carpet). All the opening bands, who you know are basically making squat for their guarantee, could always be taken care of at least on lodging, if there was a solid rotation of people willing to host bands as they toured through the city.

I think little things like this would mean a lot for many of the touring bands struggling to make ends meet on the road. Of course, we all aim to get to the point where decent hotels are just part of the expenses and are no sweat, but it can sometimes be a long and hard road to get there, and getting a break on hotels can really make a difference.