Groove Essentials~
Man man man man.... I just finished watching Groove Essentials by this guy called Tommy Igoe. Here's a picture of the DVD:
I started watching it after i got home around bout 5 plus in the evening and for the next straight 4 hours or so.. i was just watching groove after groove~ This stuff is inspiring! I recommend this to anyone who wants to expand their drum vocabulary and why do i say so? Cos this DVD includes almost all the basic grooves of beats and rhythms found all over the world which are the heart beat, the bed rock and foundation of wat music is all about. And these are the genres covered in the DVD: Rock, Funk, R&B/Hip Hop, Jazz, and World/Ethnic grooves, coming from afro-cuban nations, the carribean and South America; stuff like reggae, calypso, bossa-nova, samba, batucada, merengue, nanigo, salsa, songo etc etc. Basically, almost all genres of music from around major parts of the world!
My mouth was wide open gaping and all and yeah, you get a very mixed feeling like, hey i'm gonna do all these grooves and also like shucks.. will i ever be able to play such difficult groovy stuff?
So anyway, yeah after watching all the crazy stuff, he closed with some words of inspiration which i thought was almost prophetic! Really, when he said those words, those words just seemed to leap right out of the screen and bombard me!
He was saying to go to all these places, the carribean, brazil, cuba, dominican republic etc etc to study the origins of these grooves and there is so much you can learn from there~ and he said something like this: don't just stop at wat I have shown you, go and explore where these grooves came from! Go, go, go, go!
And the word 'Go' just seemed to pop rite out at me! It was like my own personal great commandment of the great commission of drumming haha! For me, it was like telling me to throw my net out into the far deep end of the drumming ocean and hull it back up to see wat i can catch!
This year, one of my primary goals is to vastly increase my knowledge and my vocabulary of drum techniques, grooves and such. In short, to improve in every aspect of my drumming. After watching the DVD, i was truly inspired by wat i had just seen and i know dat it's not impossible to play such stuff! This just reaffirms wat i've been thinking about for such a long time now. And instead of just sitting around waiting for things to happen, i gotta get up and pick up my sticks and start doing these things!
I'm gonna have to draft out a plan on how i can master these things and put it into action. i reckon dat if i focus solely on one new groove per day and just keep working at it for a number of days to perfect it. I reckon dat it wun be long before i can expand my vocabulary. After dat, it'll boil down to even more nitty gritty details about each groove. There's just so much you can learn about drums dat you'll probably never learn them all in this lifetime! But i can learn as much as i can :D And dat's wat i'll do~
Hmm, so wat do i wanna do with my drumming? Dats a gd question which i seem to be asking myself more these days. It's a talent God has given me which i have consecreted on the altar and offered up to Him. So, my greatest desire is to be able to serve in the mission field with this talent, to teach, to perform, and more importantly, to touch the lives of people through music and to show them dat there is One who lives in me who's greater than he who is in the world. Yeap, dat is my calling :D
I started watching it after i got home around bout 5 plus in the evening and for the next straight 4 hours or so.. i was just watching groove after groove~ This stuff is inspiring! I recommend this to anyone who wants to expand their drum vocabulary and why do i say so? Cos this DVD includes almost all the basic grooves of beats and rhythms found all over the world which are the heart beat, the bed rock and foundation of wat music is all about. And these are the genres covered in the DVD: Rock, Funk, R&B/Hip Hop, Jazz, and World/Ethnic grooves, coming from afro-cuban nations, the carribean and South America; stuff like reggae, calypso, bossa-nova, samba, batucada, merengue, nanigo, salsa, songo etc etc. Basically, almost all genres of music from around major parts of the world!
My mouth was wide open gaping and all and yeah, you get a very mixed feeling like, hey i'm gonna do all these grooves and also like shucks.. will i ever be able to play such difficult groovy stuff?
So anyway, yeah after watching all the crazy stuff, he closed with some words of inspiration which i thought was almost prophetic! Really, when he said those words, those words just seemed to leap right out of the screen and bombard me!
He was saying to go to all these places, the carribean, brazil, cuba, dominican republic etc etc to study the origins of these grooves and there is so much you can learn from there~ and he said something like this: don't just stop at wat I have shown you, go and explore where these grooves came from! Go, go, go, go!
And the word 'Go' just seemed to pop rite out at me! It was like my own personal great commandment of the great commission of drumming haha! For me, it was like telling me to throw my net out into the far deep end of the drumming ocean and hull it back up to see wat i can catch!
This year, one of my primary goals is to vastly increase my knowledge and my vocabulary of drum techniques, grooves and such. In short, to improve in every aspect of my drumming. After watching the DVD, i was truly inspired by wat i had just seen and i know dat it's not impossible to play such stuff! This just reaffirms wat i've been thinking about for such a long time now. And instead of just sitting around waiting for things to happen, i gotta get up and pick up my sticks and start doing these things!
I'm gonna have to draft out a plan on how i can master these things and put it into action. i reckon dat if i focus solely on one new groove per day and just keep working at it for a number of days to perfect it. I reckon dat it wun be long before i can expand my vocabulary. After dat, it'll boil down to even more nitty gritty details about each groove. There's just so much you can learn about drums dat you'll probably never learn them all in this lifetime! But i can learn as much as i can :D And dat's wat i'll do~
Hmm, so wat do i wanna do with my drumming? Dats a gd question which i seem to be asking myself more these days. It's a talent God has given me which i have consecreted on the altar and offered up to Him. So, my greatest desire is to be able to serve in the mission field with this talent, to teach, to perform, and more importantly, to touch the lives of people through music and to show them dat there is One who lives in me who's greater than he who is in the world. Yeap, dat is my calling :D
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