Tag Archives: Stick Control

A drummer’s high

Posted on by
7

You may have heard the term “runner’s high.”

One of the pleasures of playing music is finally getting something right, often through practice. Practicing music may not send endorphins coursing through the body, like those giving a feeling of euphoria to a long-distance runner, but it does forge new connections in a musician’s brain. And those can trigger joy in his or her soul.

As I sat down at the Rogers drum kit I had dusted off during the lockdown, I recalled my afternoon practices as a teen in my parents’ basement in Don Mills. I have to give credit to my parents Douglas and Sheila, and my siblings Louise and Andrew, for putting up with the percussive racket coming out of our basement for an hour or so most days.

Practicing sometimes meant the agony of defeat. On one occasion, I was working on studies focusing on “independence” — the ability to separate and free up all four limbs, both on the kit and in the mind.

Despite many attempts, I could not seem to master one of the studies. In a desperate moment, I reared back, stood up, picked up my drum stool, and impaled it in the basement ceiling in frustration.

Damage control

As if waking from a bad dream, I realized what I had done and felt instantly sheepish. I pulled the stool leg out of the ceiling, sat back down on it, and continued my practice. Right after, I camouflaged the damage. Using a pencil to draw dots on a piece of white paper, I simulated the pattern of the ceiling tile. Then I cut it out with scissors and taped my crude circular patch job to the tile. I guess my arts and crafts studies in elementary school had finally paid off. The patch stayed there undetected, although slightly yellowed, until my parents sold the house years later. (Shhhhh! It may still be there today.)

Practice also means the thrill of victory. After getting my Rogers kits set up recently, I started to put together a fall practice agenda. It would be one thing to help get through the continuing covid lockdown, during the long Canadian winter.

First up was some Stick Control — from the classic 1930s book by George Stone. He focuses on control and liberation of the two hands, through patterns and variations.

Next, I went back over the 18th-century dance suite interpreted for snare drum by Anthony Cirone. I had almost mastered two of the suite’s four studies in the last few months, including a stately Spanish “Sarabande” in 3/4 featuring some lightning-fast passages. But I realized I had glossed over the other two pieces. I dug into the concluding Gigue to polish it up a bit. It would be nice to confidently play the four movements straight through one day.

A segue from snare to set

Those snare studies were actually a neat segue into practicing drum set. With the Sarabande fresh in my mind, I tried to adapt it for the full set, initially bringing in bass drum and high hat. Then, using Cirone’s 4/4 Allemande study as inspiration, I fooled around with a funk beat on the kit. My hands were feeling fluid and I let them drive the beat while my clunkier feet, on bass drum and high hat, filled in some spots with syncopation.

Next door, the neighbors had moved back in after a reno. But Nadine had assured me that when the door was closed to my makeshift practice area in Ali’s old bedroom, the racket was nicely muted.

I made a mental note to speak to the neighbors to apologize and let them know I would never practice after sundown.

Breaking down the shuffle

The thrill of victory came with the last component of this practice session. I had listened to Toto’s classic rock song Roseanna, and found some great YouTube videos breaking down drummer Jeff Porcaro’s fabulous shuffle beat.

The legendary Porcaro made the beat sound easy but it is complex when played at the song’s correct tempo. The YouTube video by Drumeo starts with two hands playing triplets — the right hand on high hat, and the left hand ghosting the second beat of each triplet on the snare. Then to get the backbeat, the left hand has to throw in a combo double backbeat/ghostbeat. For those who read sheet music, the Drumeo video also scores out Porcaro’s beat.

Before even thinking about adding the bass drum, I experimented with the Porcaro shuffle with my left and right hands. It started to click at a slower tempo, so I sped up a bit, feeling good as it started to feel more natural. I kept screwing up, but it felt like some new cerebral connections were being forged.

Not quite a drummer’s high, but I would take it.

Sticking with it

Posted on by
Reply

I was feeling cocky when I cracked open Stick Control to its first page of exercises for the snare drummer. After all, in trying to make my drumming comeback, I had already tackled several challenging snare drums solos, including an 18-century dance suite adaptation from Anthony Cirone’s Portraits in Rhythm.

My friend and fellow percussionist Ward had reminded me about Stick Control and I remembered it from my drum-lesson days in the 1970s. During my recent pilgrimage to musical instrument store Long & McQuade, I picked up a copy of the music book, along with a new pair of sticks.

Stick Control2

The first page of Stick Control’s single-beat combinations looked simple at first glance. There were 24 in total, exploring different left-right hand combinations in a consistent stream of eighth-notes. Should be easy, I thought.

The fifth combination was paradiddles. The muscle memory kicked in and the paradiddles flowed smoothly in a right-left-right-right, left-right-left-left sequence (say PA-RA-DI-DDLE, PA-RA-DI-DDLE). I was on a roll.

But number 6 through me for a loop. It consists of standard paradiddles, but staggered to start on the second or “RA” beat of the paradiddle. My brain cramped. I tried it a few times and could not get it to flow.

Breaking bad habits

I recovered a few combinations later, and started to enjoy the challenge to my brain, hands, and memory. One thing I noticed was the emphasis on ambidexterity — a challenge to my dominant right hand. The exercises alternate downbeats with both left and right hands. A good way to break drumming habits.

Ahead of me were a total of 72 single-beat combinations. And that is just the first section.

The author-composer is George Lawrence Stone, a serious-looking man with a rudimental drumming pedigree and track record of percussion performance and teaching in Boston. Stone died in 1967 but his method is still revered by modern drummers.

“It has helped me to sharpen the tools of expression,” drummer Steve Gadd wrote. You can’t question Gadd’s musical tools — he brought a crisp fusion to his drumming with Steely Dan, Weather Report and other progressive bands.

Putting in the hours

“To the uninitiated, the art of drumming appears easy,” wrote Mr. Stone in the preface to Stick Control — “so easy in fact that unless the drum student has had the advantage of expert advice, he (or she) may fail to realize the importance of the long hours of hard, painstaking practice that must be put in.”

Doing the quick math, I figured I had solo-practiced drums and percussion about 2,400 hours between Grade 6 and Grade 13, mostly in my parents Don Mills basement. (Thanks Mom, Dad, Louise and Andrew, and sorry for the racket.)

My drum teacher Glenn Price recommended at least an hour a day, and I put in the hours, with a few days off now and again. Adding in practices and performances in rock and jazz bands, stage bands, concert bands, percussion ensembles, music camp, and a brief stint in Humber College’s music program, let’s push that estimate to a total of 5,000 hours.

Author Malcolm Gladwell wrote about the 10,000-hour principle to achieve mastery in a skill — maybe this old guy still needed to get cracking.

Doing the math also reminded me that life was simpler back then. For today’s kids, with more distractions and technology, would it be tougher to practice music, or any art form or technical skill?

Delicacy and power

Stick Control, with its relentless combinations of single beats, triplets, short rolls, rudiments such as flams, and blends of the above, was definitely on my practice list back in the 1970s.

Stone promised that with regular “intelligent” practice, his collection of rhythms, “will enable one to acquire control, speed, flexibility, touch, rhythm, lightness, delicacy, power, endurance, preciseness of execution and muscular co-ordination to a degree far in excess of (one’s) present ability.”

I seconded that emotion.

Stick Control was back on my music stand.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A drummer’s pilgrimage to Long & McQuade

Posted on by
2

Long & McQuade was my music-store mecca, the site of many trips into the big city when I was a teenager. Back in the day, my friend Dave Doyle and I would don our suburban Don Mills Collegiate uniform — jean jacket, Greb work boots and t-shirt, with combed long hair parted in the middle — and meet up on a Saturday morning to catch the Lawrence or Leslie bus to Eglinton station. Then we’d take the subway downtown to Long & McQuade on Bloor Street near Brunswick Ave.

We’d arrive at the main entrance and peer at the guitars in the window. Inevitably, there was a kid playing the chords to Deep Purple’s “Smoke on the Water” in the guitar section. We ran the gauntlet of guitars towards the entrance to the drum shop downstairs.

For musicians of all stripes looking for PA gear, guitars, keyboards, drums, saxophones, brass instruments, sheet music and more, the Toronto music shop is a top destination, then and now.

Ian at Long and McQuade

Today: Forty-plus years later, on a humid August 2020 afternoon, the parking lot at its flagship Bloor Street store — now near Ossington — was packed.

I found a spot for my minivan on a side street nearby and walked down. I forgot my mask so had to run back and get it.

I was in the hunt for a drum throne that would complete the vintage Rogers kit I had purchased on a whim off mini-van dude via FB marketplace. Sitting on my daughter’s bed while playing drums was not good for my street cred.  I needed that throne.

I masked up and nodded to the doorman, an older guy with a muscular build and a black cloth mask accessorizing his dress pants and shoes. When I say “older guy,” I mean that he was my age, late 50s. He asked where I was headed. When I told him “drums,” he pulled out a walkie-talkie to see if the coast was clear.

“We don’t have capacity right now,” the drum staffer answered. “Ask him to wait at the top of the stairs.” The doorman pointed to a bottle of hand sanitizer. It was dispensed — appropriately for a music locale — by pressing the pedal of a Mapex hi-hat stand.

I waited at the entrance until a young woman came up the stairs and left. The doorman nodded and I descended the steps.

Then: Dave and I both had drum kits in high school. Dave had a set of Ludwigs that had once appeared on the cover of a Canadian record album. He bought the kit from the son of one of his paper route customers. It had seen action in the Toronto rock band “Everyday People.” In an act of patriotism, the band’s drummer had painted Canadian flags, with their red maple leaves, on the drum shells. The drums looked a bit hokey but sounded great.

Dave would play drums and sing along to Steve Miller’s album in his parent’s basement: “I’m a joker, I’m a smoker, I’m a midnight toker, I sure don’t want to hurt no-one…”   We would trade up playing on his kit, and his sweet Mom would always have a nice word for us afterwards despite the racket.

At home, I practiced on my beat-up but trusty Sonor kit with wobbly snare and a cracked Zildjian cymbal serving initially as both my ride and crash.

We were drum keeners. Our pilgrimage to Long & McQuade was a chance to check out new technology, upgrade our kits, talk shop with the staff, and come back with a new pair of drumsticks in our back pockets — whether we needed them or not.

We’d wander about checking out the kits and drooling over U.S.-made classics such as Ludwig, Rogers and Slingerland. We got bug-eyed over percussion instruments ranging from congas to xylophones. There was a separate, sound-insulated cymbal room where you could kick the tires on gorgeous Turkish cymbals to your heart’s content.

The shop manager would greet us from behind the counter. He was an old-style drummer with both military and jazz credentials, Lou Williamson, a friendly guy with grey-black hair combed across and back. Besides Lou, there was also a tall, gangly hippy-type staffer. He was the guy who set up the weekly payment plan for the Ludwig drum kit that I bought around the end of high school. I felt so grown up until he asked to call my Mom to guarantee the loan.

Now: Two young eager gents — also smartly dressed like the doorman — helmed the drum desk behind plexiglass, peering at their late-middle-aged masked customer, me. They were part of a company started humbly in the 1950s by a trumpet player (Long) and a drummer (McQuade) that had become Canada’s largest musical instrument retailer, with 80-plus stores.

One of the drum-desk gents pointed to a second hi-hat sanitizer dispenser and I obliged.

I told him I was looking for a comfortable mid-priced drum throne. He checked the computer then showed me a floor model with a generous seat and swivel height adjustment. It seemed solid. Like most drum accessories these days, it was made in Taiwan and marketed with an Anglo name: Gibraltar. Sold!

drum sticks

I was distracted by the wall of drumsticks and grabbed a pair of wooden-tips models made in Canada.  Hopefully they would take the edge off the “ping” effect of my Zildjian ride cymbal.  My friend Ward had recommended a classic snare drum method book, “Stick Control.” I knew I had mine somewhere in a box from my drum studies in the 1970s, but I decide to pick up a fresh copy.

I was mesmerized by a modern Sonor kit made in a vintage style with turquoise wraps.  It was a shiny new version of the beat-up, green-sparkle Sonor kit I bought at Long & McQuade in the 1970s. Back then I paid $175. Today’s retro version will set you back $4,000.

sonor kit

Then: With our new drum sticks in our back pockets and renewed inspiration from our musical pilgrimage, Dave and I would head next door to grab a greasy burger, fries and coke and gab at the lunch counter.

Then back on the subway, and the Lawrence or Leslie bus back home to suburban Don Mills. Mission accomplished. Back to school on Monday.

Now: After battling traffic in my minivan, I got home, set up my new-fangled drummer’s throne, and added it to my kit. I was sitting up higher and straighter now. Stronger. I played around a bit on the kit from my new vantage point. Was it a throne fit for a king?

But the journey had tired me out. I was no longer the skinny kid in the jean jacket who dreamed of drums and had energy to burn. My drummer’s throne could wait. I needed a nap.