REVIEW: Linear Drumming by Mike Johnston
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.
