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.

As mentioned here, this is my first attempt at creating my own beat transformation. Thanks to Alan Schechner for the ideas and inspiration. Please let me know what you think.

Two days ago I returned from my second lesson with Alan Schechner. I hope that anyone who has seen his DVD,  Coordination and Groove, was as inspired as I was. It would make me feel better if I knew that they they struggled as much as I did to get my head around what he was talking about in this amazing DVD. Being a perpetual newb drummer, I seek rhythmic concepts that do NOT delve into the obvious: jazz mastery, odd-time wizardry, double-bass speed demons and the like.

Schechner’s DVD present a remarkably simple idea about how to tranform common beats into mind-bending independence puzzlers. Alan explains his transformations thoroughly. The problem is that those who translate explanations will literally and quickly deduce Alan’s rhythmic transformations as, “You must do it exactly like I do.”  Not so. This is actually what Alan does NOT recommend. He explicity says, for example, if you don’t have a cowbell for your left heel (your other half of your foot plays your hi-hat pedal), then don’t play the cowbell.

In my lesson, he boiled down the transformations concept even further: Simply, think of your limbs as creators of rhythms and melodies. To start, he had me play my two favorite beats back to back . Alan then transcribed and combined the beats to put one beat’s kick on the right foot as we would normally play; the other beat’s kick was moved to the left foot. Modifications were made for musicality–delete a sixteenth, or eighth, note here or there.

The end result: Back home, my right foot is playing a Roland pedal dialed in as a tabla, my left foot is on my kick drum’s left-foot double pedal. Or vice versa: My left foot is playing a cowbell, my right foot is on the kick. The beats individually are not complex. Together they create a radical transformation and a whole new level of musicality for the drumset. Alan further suggests playing my hand rhythms with varying patterns (think: The New Breed).

In short, Schechner’s DVD is a critical component for the evolution of drumming on the drumset. While many will focus on foot techniques as the next step in double-bass drumming (i.e., moving your feet around pedals assigned to different instruments), Alan presents a means for taking interdependence to the next level. For this, “Coordination and Groove” is a revolutionary, and mandatory, DVD for drummers serious about approaching playing with a truly new view.