House of Drumming.com

Hey, people! I just started something I've had in mind for a while. The All American Drummer has always been one of my favourite books and a must for teaching, so I'll be recording all solos on a daily basis. It's gonna take 150 days, so some of them will definitely catch me on the road and some might be hard to record under certain ciscumstances.
Also, I want them to be played hard enough and up to a decent speed. It's not really a teaching effort, just a tribute for the fun of it. I'll be sharing the whole experience. Starting today, here's #1 at home:




PS: Still getting used to the rebound of the new pads. Realistic, but way different from the VF one I've used for the past 12 years.

NICE! Go Go Go!

There are a lot of solos in that book with very cool ideas. Excellent book, I went through it front to back a while back, he was very inventive!

Great idea - one of my favorite books! Look forward to hearing more...

Cool.

I tried to play along, but it's a bit too fast for me with the flamadiddles.

Yeah, I'm just going for it. Could have done it with a metronome or even put both slow and fast versions together, but I want to keep it simple and real. Just set up the pad and iPhone, have a few runs at it, push it hard and get the best take. I did get faster than that back in the day through endless hours of cleaning all my stickings, but there's really no point in getting there again right now.
For instance, with #2 I did a faster take right after the one I finally uploaded and it was actually pretty good, but this one sounded cleaner and more accurate.
Speaking of which, my stroke accuracy seems to have gone out the window at some point, whenever I do multi-stroke stuff, notes go all over the pad. Might be due to having relaxed my grip a bit more lately. Gotta work on that.



PS: Yeah, I know, I should clean up the rehearsal room

You should keep a dated notebook with note-taking for every solo along with the video. You will find some great combinations for the kit to ponder, and you can see what struck you in each solo.

It is a cerebral book IMO. Not sure how he came up with some of these things they are so different. Could be me, of course!

The funny thing is, the language is already second nature. Sometimes it sounds like I'm channeling Virgil but it's the Wilcoxon stuff coming through. I mean, I can play most of the first four pages by memory.
What I'm doing, actually, is keeping a record of the critical spots I find on each solo this time around. Like bar 8 of solo #2 with the 7 stroke roll or the importance of stick height through the flam tap runs. A colleague asked me to put that together for his blog so he can publish every 4 solos or something like that. Me being someone who hasn't paid too much attention to the multimedia side of things until recently, it's a blast
But yeah, thanks a lot for the input!

Very cool, share the link!

You motivated me to go through the book again. I think this time, I'll work each solo with on the kit rather than just snare.

I don't want to play this stuff fast, but slow with confidence. 62 bpm. It'll take longer...

Getting closer...