Hi Mr. Harrison,
I'll number my question topics, if you don't mind. I do have a loooong list, I hope you don't mind.
Many questions on improvisation, however.
1. Quoting you:
there have been times where I REALLY didn't feel like playing - and that usually happens at some point during a long tour when I don't feel well (heavy cold/flu or food poisoning).
I have several questions about this. If you do feel unwell during a long tour, is there much chance for you to reschedule the gig? And how do you prevent from getting sick on a long tour? Needless to say, Vitamin C helps a lot, but I've heard that on tours you rarely get enough time to eat and sleep properly, and I presume that since you'll be crossing a few borders you're definitely not immune to all local sicknesses even with a bucket load of vitamin C in your stash somewhere. So how do you usually deal with these circumstances? And what do you do to avoid food poisoning? (Like, avoid fast-foods or something?)
2. In your early gigging days, I'm sure you wouldn't have had the luxury to have the perfect drum setup for you all the time. Say if the drum set is a 4-piece and you have practised your parts on a 5-piece, or worse, you've practised on a 4-piece but the set you're provided has no floor tom (3-piece), how do you go about that change? That is, assuming you weren't using your drum set and didn't know about this until you arrived at the gig. I have a similar problem as I'm currently a music student, every time I attend my performance workshop I end up using a crap old 4-piece yet my drum notations may have 5-6 toms notated. If your answer is "improvise" (or not), then it leads into question 3.
3. I struggle with improvisations, but thankfully I've experimented and learned a few successful methods helping that, like practising short phrasings and limb independence. I used to think, "What drum should I play?", but that was frying my brains so now I tend to think, "What sound am I after?".
The problem is, most of the time I'm not using my own drums... I used a friend's drum set once for a workshop. I never got to play on it properly until my performance, which I found out in my drum solo section that the drums did not sound at all like how I wanted them to, and it pretty much killed my solo. Is my perception on how to improvise flawed? Either yes or no, is there a way to go about these situations where you may have to improvise on a badly-tuned drum set? (Minus the snare drum since I always bring my own.)
4. I have a huge issue with drum setup, and it's not just a 4-piece or 5-piece issue, it is my traditional grip which is what I use 99% of the time these days. I main that grip for personal reasons; being born left-handed, my biased culture has forced me to use my right hand for just about anything I do everyday since I was a kid. Trad grip is my current solution to establishing left-right coordination. Before my trad grip days I almost gave up playing drums because I could instinctively play a tom fill leading with the left hand, and stop short at tom 1 super confused because I then realised all too late the leading hand changed (I play the crossed-hand method on a right-handed set).
Being a trad gripper now, I run into the big problem of "why are the drums so out of reach?!", as I'm physically smaller than everyone else in my class, and the trad grip utilises an odd angle on anything. I don't mind the current in-class issues but I'm really afraid of this happening in a gigging situation. Are there any pro advice you can give me on how to tackle this dilemma?
I also practise the matched grip a lot recently due to Latin cross-stick/tom combinations. I'm also planning to buy another drum set someday with a 20" bass drum just so that the rack toms don't have to be above my shoulders. Besides I like the 20" sound more.
5. I struggle to add ghost notes in-between my accents while improvising. I've been reflecting on this and have come up with a reason; I try to think musically as if I'm soloing on bass or piano, and on melodic instruments you just need to play the first note and let it ring if it is not a staccato. On drums though, long sustains are impossible... So I assume ghosted snare notes act as the sustain one way or another.
Is there a way to mentally hear those strings of ghosted notes as say, a minim with tremolos? I keep getting lost by the sheer number of notes, and this is only for double and single strokes... Once I get to paradiddles it gets exponentially harder!
6. How do you do spontaneous improvisations with paradiddles without tangling your arms? I have learned a few ideas but they can only go so far. (I need a method to simplify all the information coursing through the neuron cells in my brain.) This is also a how-to-visualise/hear-it-mentally sort of question.
7. In my performance exam today, my right-stick flew out of my hand halfway through a song and my left-stick hit it into my face on its way up from the snare. I pretty much stopped dead for like a whole bar and although I think I recovered well after that, it is nowhere near as well as how you recovered from dropping your stick in the David Letterman show (The Chicken solo). How do you practise that?? I must say I'm always impressed how professionals recover so quickly when they drop sticks. In the video I wouldn't have even known you dropped your stick if I relied solely on my ears.
8. Do you bury your bass drum beater into the drum head? From a sound perspective, do you think that burying the beater makes an unnatural sound? All the teachers in my region teaches the "bounce the beater off the BD head" approach, whether playing foot down or heel up. I do this most of the time but find it impossible to achieve if I'm on double kicks, or playing complex BD patterns on a single kick while clapping the hats on an 8th-note pulse, or playing 200+ BPM up-tempo jazz trying to swing the notes. (This is why I avoid double-quaver BD notes in up-tempo jazz.) Another problem is that the sound engineer sometimes doesn't like the sound. I wish we have a trigger because that would solve everything but we don't. What is your take on this?
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I think that's all for now. Sorry for the long read. I read your article in a drum mag in the library last week, and really liked what I've read. It's the article with the catch-phrase "It's all about luck." (And "practising improves your luck" is the basic message.)
Thank you, I look forward to your reply.
funkmonster