#bobnutt

[adiwooddrummer]

Looking back over the last, I don’t know, 40 years of playing drums, how do I view Bob Nutt’s lessons? The answer is as highly as possible. He demonstrated the grooves he taught with great feel and he taught them clearly and concisely. His choices of grooves was second to none, they are the perfect, indispensable grooves that you will use every single day. The shuffle, rock, 16 note, disco, swing. The only grooves that are missing are the 12/8 slow blues and quarter notes on the ride. But taking any of the rhythms he had taught and changing the ride pattern for quarter notes is very simple and I could do that myself (there’s an example above along with the slow blues rhythm). Hand on my heart, if I’d only had these lessons and nothing else I would still have everything I needed to play drums for the rest of my life. I think that was the biggest accolade I can pay anybody. I soon realised that it would simply be a matter of mixing the rhythms up to come up with different ideas. #drumlessons #bobnutt #drumlessonswithbobnutt #rudiments #drumkits #drumsets #code #codedrumhead #codedrumheads #codedrumheadendorsee #artofthedrummer #artofthedrummerjohnsavage #johnsavage (at Leicester, United Kingdom) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7-lOlDAl7u/?igshid=jt825bjmz09q

[adiwooddrummer]

Books like Progressive Steps to Syncopation or Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer or Stick Control Are considered classics amongst of the drum community. I can see why. They feature a very flexible set of exercises for playing the snare drum and building reading and coordination. However having had six months of drum lessons with an accomplished, if idiosyncratic, teacher I was looking for a book from which I would be able to build on past lessons and learn new techniques. The Art of the Drummer by John Savage was an excellent choice. I was impressed by the look of this book when I found it on the shelf of the music shop where I had my lessons. I bought a copy and straightaway began to work through it. Sat at my new drum set which my mother had bought for me. I was immediately impressed because the book built on all my lessons with by adding snare drum exercises based on the standard subdivisions that make up each groove - eight notes, sixteen notes, triplets, et cetera. It also had a large section on rudiments. Initially, as I went through the book, I left the section on rudiments until later and concentrated on all the drum set grooves and fills that I could learn after going through the entire book. I then returned to the section rudiments and began to look at each one and to work on each. I soon discovered various Grace note rudiments such as the Flams and Drags which I began to incorporate into my fills - they have they sounded great. #drumlessons #bobnutt #drumlessonswithbobnutt #rudiments #drumkits #drumsets #code #codedrumhead #codedrumheads #codedrumheadendorsee #artofthedrummer #artofthedrummerjohnsavage #johnsavage (at Leicester, United Kingdom) https://www.instagram.com/p/B70DivGA8g_/?igshid=13656zawwiwhd

[adiwooddrummer]

Bob was an excellent teacher. For all his idiosyncrasies - he prized technical progress above anything else and could overplay with the best of them - he taught the basics well and with the right feel. He even taught me a great technique if I ever got frustrated or couldn’t get a drumbeat to work during practice. And that is to simply take a break for five minutes, after which the mind would have time to process what is happening. Then suddenly I could come back to the drums and play everything fine. I look back to when I was 17, and can say that Bob taught me everything I needed to know to play drums in bands. If I’d only ever had these lessons, and nothing else, I would’ve been fine. I had already started to mix together the beats he’d taught me to create new ones. The picture shows sixteen note rhythms with a mix of eights and sixteens on the bass drum. I am sure he could have taught me more stuff but my dear Mum had already promised to buy me a set of drums - she was convinced I was serious now. She was also happy for me not to continue having lessons with Bob and travelling over to Leicester every week. As I’ve already said, I had other ideas of how I would continue to learn drums, namely from the book called the “Art of the Drummer” by John Savage. #drumlessons #bobnutt #drumlessonswithbobnutt #rudiments #drumkits #drumsets #code #codedrumhead #codedrumheads #codedrumheadendorsee (at Leicester, United Kingdom) https://www.instagram.com/p/B7vG9CNnWL1/?igshid=rjq97im149z1

[adiwooddrummer]

We had one final lesson before Bob moved to Leicester and he used that as a bit of an opportunity to take some questions and answers. I asked him if he would demonstrate some reggae and he then proceeded to play the least reggae drum beat I’d ever heard in my life. It was funny really because, having heard a lot of reggae up to that point, I knew straight away that what he was playing wasn’t authentic. It did have the bass drum played on the third beat, that was right but everything else just sounded completely wrong. 
This was when I started to realise that I had to expand my studies by checking out more music. And different styles. It would be years before I could understand some of them, even just a little, but active listening turned out to be one of my ultimate teachers.

[adiwooddrummer]

Before I go on to talk about today’s story about my first drum lessons I have included notation showing how I started to take Bob’s lessons and adapt them. This is the syncopated sixteen note beat that I liked to also play using eight note and quarter note ride. On with the tale. Still things were going really well when Bob hit us with some awkward news. He was moving his drumming practice to Leicester. And he kind of expected everybody “who was serious” to go with him. I however had other ideas. I didn’t fancy travelling all the way over to Leicester every week and I had spotted amongst the shelves amongst the bookshelves in the book in the music shop a particular book that I thought would serve just as well as the teacher would. Bob‘s comment about only serious drummers going over to Leicester to carry on having lessons with him jarred with me somewhat. This was because a few months earlier he had made a quip in a lesson about there only being one guy amongst his students he considered good enough to “make it”. I didn’t like that very much - in fact if anything spurred me on to work hard in bands and prove him wrong. But I would do that without his continued lessons.

[adiwooddrummer]

The last set of lessons I had with Bob Nutt involved playing jazz and swing music. Swing drumming had a completely different feel to anything I had done before - the cymbals were loud and the drums were quiet. With all the other styles of drumming we’d played so far the cymbals had been quiet and the drums loud. In particular the bass drum was “feathered” - feathering is a term for lightly tapping the bass drum so that it is felt and not heard. And this feathering is played four on the floor. The hi hat has played the foot on the two and four.

The jazz ride cymbal rhythm was pretty easy to play, having mastered the shuffle at the very start of our lessons. Then we moved on to the snare drum, beginning with tapping the snare on the two and four initially and then moving it on to the off beats which is more in the style of what you’d expect from bebop style jazz drumming.

My older friend - if memory serves me correctly, his name is Eddie? I really can’t remember but Eddie sounds right - he thrived in this environment. In fact at one point Bob played a solo on the trumpet and Eddie played some swing drumming behind it, and played really nicely I thought. Bob thought he overplayed slightly which is ironic considering that Bob was one of the biggest over players I’ve ever heard in drumming! Hah.

[adiwooddrummer]

The next set of lessons featured the open hi-hat and disco rhythms. Once again some of the patterns with syncopated, with bass drum notes on the offbeat and the downbeats not being played. They were very cool to play, a lot cooler than the most disco beats that you heard on records.

The biggest thing I had to change about playing the open hi hat sound was to do with how the sound was made. I had seen other drummers on Top of the Pops and live footage playing the open hi-hats and thought I knew how you got the sound. I thought you opened the hi-hat cymbals wide, struck the top cymbal and then closed it again. Not at all! You hit the top cymbal and then instantly open it - strike it open and then close it. Like I said, not what I expected but once I got the hang of it, it was okay but I had to change my thinking completely.

An aside. One thing I noticed about Bob was that he didn’t ride the hi hat cymbals open like I first heard Ringo do. In fact when I asked him about it he didn’t understand what I meant at all. Strange. However I’d heard people like Alan White and Ian Paice use this sound and remember seeing Alan White at a concert playing the “sizzle” hi-hats as I came to call it. I guess it was Bob’s big band background. He liked a clean hi-hat sound.

[adiwooddrummer]

Back in the early eighties sixteen note hi-hat rhythms were very much En Vogue (both hands playing the sixteens as a single stroke roll). One of the most interesting things about playing 16 note rhythms was the bass drum patterns. I found them quite nice to play underneath eight rhythms - I just left out the extra sixteen notes on the hi-hat.

The other noteworthy thing about this group of rhythms was that they gave us our first taste of syncopation. It took a while to build up to this final pattern but it was well worth it. Bob would demo the rhythm and play cool variations, one of which included just playing the hi-hats on the 16 note upbeats without anything else - it sounded fantastic. I remember my older drum friend in the class would struggle with these 16 note rhythms. He spent hours practising them, trying to get them right. I don’t think he ever quite got the hang of them. But, as we discovered later, he could swing like crazy.