Finding myself with nothing interesting to say tonight about the passing scene (I’m beginning to worry that, after almost five thousand posts, I may well have said it all already), I’ll take a moment to plug a YouTube channel I’m keen on.
This will be of interest only to a small subset of readers: drummers and aspiring drummers. If that isn’t you, check back again soon, by which time the Muse may have returned my calls, and I will have found something new to say about the usual topics.
But if you are still here, then I will recommend to you the instructional channel of one Rob “Beatdown” Brown, which is here.
I’ve played drums since sixth grade or so, and was pretty serious about it until my early twenties, at which point I started working at Power Station Studios in New York City. From that point on drumming had to take a back seat, for a variety of reasons: no free time to be in bands or even to practice, no place to keep a kit in my tiny apartment, a single-minded focus on becoming the best engineer I could be, etc. So from that point on it was always a hobby (although I did play the odd part here and there in the studio, including replacing a drum track on a live Rolling Stones album in which a technical problem had made the original track unusable).
Last year, though, I came away from my annual musical gathering on Star Island feeling pretty shabby about my playing — I’d really neglected to practice enough, and it showed. So I resolved to do something about it.
Enter Rob Brown. I knew that YouTube was a rich resource for musical coaching, and when I found Rob’s channel I knew I’d struck gold. He is an outstanding player himself, and has a teaching style that approaches even the driest of exercises — rudiment drills, for example — from an intuitive, feel-based angle. Given that I’ve been playing for about fifty years, I’m no beginner, and there are somethings I do very well already — and his channel has something for every level of drummer. In just the few months I’ve been working through his videos, every aspect of my playing has improved.
So if you are a drummer, and if you aren’t Peter Erskine or Jack DeJohnette, etc. (if so, hi guys), you should go and have a look.