Pearl Drums and Forks Drum Closet hosted an exclusive drummer’s even last night, which I had the unique privilege of attending. It was held at Rocketown in downtown Nashville and featured some of the most impressive drumming I’ve ever heard.

The evening featured performances by the Father Ryan Drum-line, Lalo Davila and his Latin ensemble, drum virtuoso Grant Collins, and Mike Mangini of Dream Theater.

The FR high school drum-line was as fun to watch as they were to listen to. These guys have chops, groove and style and play in perfect synch with one another.

Lalo , who is one of my all time favorite player/educators (and a big DrumFun fan ), led his fiery Salsa band through some saucy, infectious grooves and featured my dear friend Glen Caruba on congas. Needless to say the whole place was dancing.

Grant Collins is a remarkable drummer. Check him out on YouTube. He composed some crazy complex drumming pieces and had a very cool moment where he gave the drummers in the crowd a close up look at his incredible foot technique playing snare drum rudimental etudes with his feet. He also played along with some drum backing tracks with a very similar sound to our own Prog Metal X drum play along.

Mike Mangini of Dream Theater absolutely floored me! This guy had me standing in one place for 30 minutes wearing the same silly grin I wore when I was 17 watching Buddy play at My Fathers Place in Roslyn NY over 30 years ago.

He has it all. Deep groove, insane speed, ridiculous endurance… He’s musical, tasteful, dynamic – just think of every cool thing you can say about your favorite player and top it of with humble, funny, gracious and accessible. To make matters worse, not only can he can play it all….. but he can play it all lefty OR righty ….. Jeeez.

First thing he says to the crowd when he gets finished is, “Hey, thanks for letting me play. I haven’t done a solo for more than 5 minutes in as long as I can remember.”

Mike is a true master. He played non stop for at least 30 minutes, and it was never boring — I mean NEVER! Check him out in clinic if you get the chance, and he’s currently on tour with Dream Theater. Just go see him!

I’m still replaying it in my head and thinking about how lucky I am to be so passionate about drumming. I still love it as much as I did when I was a kid.

I couldn’t let this go without sharing it. A fellow drum instructor and long-time customer, Jeff Salem, recently published an article about  us on “Canadian Musician” describing how DrumFun has helped him with his drum lessons. It means a lot when important people in our industry take the time to give a shout out like this one!

Thanks, Jeff! If you’re reading this, I’m glad DrumFun has made such a difference for you and your students.

Following is  the original article:

When I started teaching drum lessons over 20 years ago I promised that I would make it fun and educational for my students. Fun was the key word.

Whether it was teaching them rudiments, a cool drum lick, stick tricks or a groove to a certain tune, I was on a mission to keep the lesson exciting and cater to their requests but follow a curriculum that I designed.

Basically I would always try to give them their dessert once they finished their vegetables with me.

During one drum lesson I used a beginner instructional book that was sent to me by a publishing company from Australia to try out with one of my beginner students. This book included a cassette tape with many short and simple play-a-long songs that had the drums removed from the recording. I thought for this one lesson I would give one tune a try.

My student and I made up some grooves that worked for the song during the lesson and I decided to record him playing along to it.

Now this was back in 1990.

Basically in my teaching room we had two drum kits and a boom box blasting the tune plus I had my little tape recorder with a blank cassette recording us drumming to the track.

When we listened back to the recording, the look I saw on my students face was a smile as big as “Guy Smiley’s” from Sesame Street.
I had never seen anyone this excited. This student ran out of the room to call his parents to listen to his performance.

He said to all of us “that’s me on that tape, no other drummer but just me with the band”.
I will never forget that moment, it was magical.

From that day forward I started to research and build a library of drum play-a-longs for students.
One of my favourite drumming instructional play-a-longs is the
“Turn It Up & Lay It Down“ series available through Drum Fun.

The creator Spence Strand is an innovator and also an inventor of many great percussion instruments that he created for Rhythm Tech.

Also a professional gigging drummer from New York now residing in Nashville, he has put together a versatile library of drum play-a-longs for drummers of all levels.

You want funk, you got it.

Jazz, you got it.

Bass guitar lines, rock, odd time tunes, metal, Latin and much more…. you got it.
Check out this link to his site and explore the many great CD’s available as downloads from Drum Fun.

DrumFun.com

Have fun with them and as the title states…
“Turn it Up & Lay it Down”

Jeff Salem (A.K.A. Noise Organizer)

www.salemdrum.com

www.jsmusicstudio.com

www.drumsinu.com

– Jeff Salem lives and teaches drum lessons in Canada in the Toronto area, as well as providing training worldwide via custom created DVD lessons. He also has his own line of kickin’ HOT SAUCES! –

Remembering 9-11

I was living in NY when it all went down.

Making coffee and watching a 13″ TV when I heard the announcement and I watched in shock. Shock gave way to fear, fear to sadness, sadness to anger.

My wife was on her way into the city and by the grace of God was detained and and remained at work in Tarrytown. My neighbor was in the street, in a blind panic because her son-in-law was at work on the 98th floor of Tower 2. As I tried to reassure her that everything was going to be OK the second plane hit…

Shit. This is gonna be bad… really really bad.

That was 10 years ago.

Don’t forget.

My friend Mike Coffey, a retired NYC cop, wrote this song and I’d like to share it with you. It was played on Fox news this morning, Supported by Steven Baldwin and Hannity.com.

Here’s the video from Fox News.

So my homework assignment from Marissa (my trusty web-mistress) is to write a BLOG about drum practice.

This is essentially my first blog ever. Now, she did give me  some parameters, some guidelines, rules, if you will.

First and foremost , write naturally and just riff. Next, if at all possible talk about drum practice.

Marissa you see, has a son who is an aspiring drummer. He’s a very cool 12 year old kid, primarily self taught, and he has a school band performance coming up. His band will be playing a couple of cool songs. One is Holiday by Green Day and next up is Nirvana’s Smells Like teen spirit.

I volunteered to help get him ready for the gig. After all I’ve been playing for 100 years, who better than me?

Well, welcome to the show… yeah, I’ve been playing a long time but I have not taught a drum lesson in a few years or practiced, and I mean really practiced in ages.

OK, yes, I play a lot of gigs, I warm up, I play-along w/ tracks (of

course) but I remember practicing for hours and hours every day when I first started playing and every hour , every day I learned that much more and got that much better. It was never a chore, no one ever had to say “hey… go practice”. I’d just sit there and play until I couldn’t play anymore. It was completely and totally awesome!!!

So now I have the chance to pass that enthusiasm on. To sit with a young drummer and tear apart a song and try to instill good habits and break bad ones. To try to inspire passion and make it fun. To explain the how’s, what’s, why’s, & where’s without getting complicated or melodramatic. To be a good teacher.

The kid shows up and is at least as nervous as I am. After all this was his first drum lesson.

I soon found out that he can play a beat.. he’s got a pretty good sense of time.. he’s a good listener and we started slowly digging into “Holiday”

Listening, and then listening some more… this is fun!

Ya gotta love Tre Cool man, he’s playing some nice stuff …. wait an minute… great guitar riffs!… cool bass line, smart lyrics, really good band… great song!

Cool. Let’s think about the feel…a very cool rockin shuffle thing…

Let’s work on the intro…. Let’s count the number of measures…

Let’s figure out when the drums come in…. Let’s count the bars until the first verse starts.

Let’s dig into the drum part…. pick up notes….How hard is he playing i.e. how intense? Hi hats? open or closed. Ride or Crash? Bass drum pattern, Floor tom pattern… Snare? 2 & 4 .. hum what else?

Grace notes, Dynamics i.e. how loud or soft do we get ?

What ‘s the form or the arrangement?  How many verses until the chorus? Any solos? Bridge ? Breakdowns?

Whoa… Confused? OK, let’s write a chart or lead sheet or road map, crib notes, score, it doesn’t matter what you call it as long as it helps you memorize the song.. this is all part of drum practice.

So we moved on to the kit for a first stab at playing along. You know what, he played.

What I learned was there are a few things to try to correct. Posture, Seating position, and Grip were the first obvious fixes.

We got the seat happening, both feet on the pedals nice and even and balanced. (adjusted a few times during the course of the lesson) Next, grip, here I am knowing a little about Matched and Traditional and French and American and the Moeller technique… and unsure of what to say.

We worked on matched.. we worked on the fulcrum, we worked on down , stroke, tap we talked about bounce and then he played again. Better.

He played again and we talked about fills and groove and accents. He played again. Better still.

We side stepped the song a few times to work on getting to know the kit… coordination… left hand lead… metronome drum practice…

He hung in there and I tried to stay concise.

Yadda yadda yadda, three hours later, he had played through the song a bunch of times and was sweating and smiling and ready for the next lesson.

Me, I learned a bunch & had a blast, and I love to teach.

Have fun and play well.

-Spence