If you could only recommend three instructional books, what would they be?

[Quai34]

A lot of those systems seem to be just playing the bell part on a different sound-- which I guess emphasizes the importance of orchestrating in that kind of drumming. Luckily for jazz drummers, you can do a reasonable amount of that and work up your own thing to do with it. There aren't that many playing situations around here that require clave-correct drumming.

Glad you liked my little book-- I want to do more style guides in that format, at some point... not all of them are suited to that kind of presentation....

Are you the guy who did his own drums method with a lotmof little drawings? Like a little guy playing and so on?

 

[nicholasBR]

It got a name for itself because it was literally the only thing out there for rock music for years. And it was way more popular than other titles once they started hitting the market. I remember wanting a "rock" book in HS/college, something like Art of Bop Drumming or on that level. I looked at Realistic Rock and it was way too basic for me by that point in time.

What rock books are better choices do you think?

I ordered 'Realistic Rock' from Modern Drummer last March, but they still haven't got it for me so I'm going to cancel and I'm looking for a differnt title.

 

[Seafroggys]

Funky Primer can get a little bit whacky and some of the more advanced exercises are complicated for complicated's sake and have no useful application, but it's not bad.

Joel Rothman has tons of offerings in the rock world. I'm working out of his Rock Hand/Foot fill book right now, lot of fun. No bullshit, just music to play.

 

[pgm554]

Funky Primer

I found it and it's follow up Funky Thesaurus excellent.

 

[Bo Eder]

After settling in with your books, I do hope you have Steve Jordan’s DVD “The groove is here” to see what will be expected of you when you play music with other musicians. Maybe get the Jeff Porcaro and Steve Gadd DVDs as well.

and just for kicks get the Jenns Hannemann DVD, “Complicated Drumming Techniques” to round out the collection.

 

[toddbishop]

Funky Primer can get a little bit whacky and some of the more advanced exercises are complicated for complicated's sake and have no useful application, but it's not bad.

I still use it, mainly because there aren't many good basic rock/funk books. A lot of it's pretty dated as playing vocabulary-- increasingly I just treat it as Stick Control for funk-type playing-- conditioning exercises....