Beyond Two-Four

After watching a few of this guy’s videos on Youtube, I decided to order his book. I received it last week and immediately began working out of it. I mainly got it to hopefully move past my long-standing problem of playing fills only with my hands and needing to get more of my feet in the game.

If you have the problem of needing a good set of exercises to incorporate your feet into fills in a tasteful way, this book may just do the trick. It’s laid out in a fairly simple format, and I found the exercises easy to follow, and with enough repetition, fairly easy to progress through moving through at least 2-4 progressions in one practice session (and I’m a VERY slow learner).

My ONLY complaint, at least for the parts I have completed so far (the first 10 or so pages), is that the exercises only modulate to a certain point — ending with one hand on the floor tom and the other on the snare. Simply moving these hands around to different drums/cymbals takes the exercises even further (maybe the rest of the book goes into this). Heck, I even got some crazy ostinato patterns going just by moving my hands and feet around the kit on the first few pages of exercises. In other words, I took the patterns even further, beyond what was written, and a whole new world of possibilities opened up. But the patterns themselves are a fantastic starting point and begin rather simply to progress into using all limbs.

In short: a very cool book. I began throwing the kick into fills at a show on Saturday, although very simply, in ways I hadn’t experimented with before, so a little bit of practice with the book has paid off.

Here’s a quick vid of me doing one of the exercises around the kit.

My instructor, Alan Schechner, has new videos popping up on Youtube now, and even though I’m biased, they are awesome. Allen has a tremendous way of making the most complex patterns accessible and easy to understand. Here are his two latest.