Must Know Skills For The Working Drummer

This course has one goal, to make sure you have the skills necessary to get and KEEP the gig!

I've played a lot of gigs in my time. All kinds of gigs. One thing I’ve learned is If you want to play drums with other musicians and maybe even get paid to do so, you have to be comfortable with a wide variety of songs and styles. I’ve put this course together to help you gain the confidence you will need to play in any situation.

If your favorite guitar player in town calls you for a gig, don't you want to feel like you can make the gig and do it justice in a way that he or she will want to call you back? What if the gig is a wedding? Or private party with a cocktail hour before you get into all of your favorite funk tunes. 

You don’t want to miss an opportunity to play with musicians you respect because you’re not ready. You certainly don’t want to show up on the gig and get asked to play something you’re not comfortable with and have it all fall apart in front of some of your favorite musicians.

I've seen it happen time and time again in all kinds of situations… drummers are required to know a good hand full of things. I find that you'll eventually get asked to play a shuffle, a Bossa Nova, a slow 12/8, a ballad with brushes along with several other styles and genres. So why wait to learn these things?

This course will help you know what to practice! If you practice and work on the skills in this course you will have the confidence to take the gig!

I’ve been asked to play every single skill in this course on gigs, sessions or auditions… countless times. Yet, I’ve never been asked if I could make a fill “more linear” or if I could play any faster or more complicated fills. The skills in this course are a great place for you to start to make sure that you have a good foundation of the things you’ll need once you start playing with other musicians in the real world.

You will have access to carefully curated playlists of some of my favorite classic examples of each of these skills. You can listen to these while you are driving, walking, running, riding your bike, working out or doing stuff around the house. By listening to these you will be hearing some of the masters of each of these styles and you will be immersing yourself in the music, the phrasing and the nuances of each genre you are trying to improve upon.

You will also get a full check list you can go down until every box is checked. Once you start playing music with people in real life situations, you will get asked to play these things. 

TRUST ME! I've seen it time and time again. So let’s get to work!

In this course, we will cover….

•  Improving Your Shuffle

•  Embellishing Your Shuffle

•  Heavy Shuffle

•  Triplet Shuffle

•  The Half-time Shuffle

•  Cold Sweat

•  Soul Power

•  Funky Drummer

•  Syncopated Funk: Big Chief, Chameleon

•  Cissy Strut

•  Mozambique

•  Five Meters Tunes based off the Ratcliff Beat

•  Traditional Syncopated New Orleans Second Line:

•  Playing In Between The Cracks

•  Improving Your Ride Cymbal Playing and your Quarter Note

•  Train Beats

•  Bossa Nova

•  12/8

•  Ballad With Brushes

•  One handed 16th Note Funk Played 3 different ways

•  Classic One Hand Sixteenth Note Funk