Paul Shaffer, Steve Jordan, Anton Fig

Finished reading Paul Shaffer's "We'll Be Here for the Rest of Our Lives". I recommend it. A couple of the drummer's that Paul talks about are the drummers he had at Saturday Night Live, and on The Late Show with David Letterman... Steve Jordan and Anton Fig. Fig took over for Jordan on the Letterman show in 1986. He says the Letterman show never feels like it's "just a job" because it's a different show, with different guests (and different songs) all the time. The band rehearses from 2:50 to 3:10 pm to learn all the cues and comedy bits, then they rehearse with the feature act from 3:15 to 4. At 4:20 they warm up the audience for an hour and then it's show time!

Kenny Aronoff

A nice interview in "Drumhead" magazine this month with Kenny Aronoff. Kenny is one of the busiest touring/recording drummers in the business. Kenny first came to people's attention as the drummer for John Cougar Mellencamp, with his 'fill of a lifetime' in the song "Jack and Diane". Kenny shares some wisdom about things he's learned about success... 1) The first key to success is hard work. Kenny points out that through hard work, people who are more talented will go further, but people with less talent will still go somewhere. They'll go further than they would if they didn't work at it. 2) The second key to success is passion. It's one thing to work hard when you're into it, but the passion shows and the passion gets you through, when you're willing to work hard even when things get rough and tough. 3) The third key to success is education. Constantly learning, educating and re-educating yourself. Keep growing.

"Adventures of Power" - Air Drumming!

So there's a new movie, "Adventures of Power", which has drumming as a central theme. The writer/director is Ari Gold. Ari started playing drums as a teenager. The idea for the movie was born when he once entered an Air Guitar Competition and, as a goof, did an Air Drum performance to Rush's "Tom Sawyer". The crowd loved it! As luck would have it, Ari was able to get Rush's drummer Neil Peart to perform a cameo in his new movie. The movie was an official selection at the Sundance Film Festival. Looking forward to seeing this one...

Pitch Tuning the Drums

"Pitch-tuning", tuning the drums in your drum set to a certain pitch, is a technique used by drum tech, Jim Vincent, the drum tech for Matt Cameron (Soundgarden, Pearl Jam). Jim tunes Matt's toms, from floor tom to high tom, C, F and A#. He tunes the snare to F#. My question is, what if F# isn't in the key of the song being played? Every snare hit is going to be a note that's out of key, and there tends to be a lot of snare hits in any given song. I'm going to try to contact Jim and see if I can get an answer... I'll be sure to provide his explanation if/when I get one. If anyone has any suggestions on how I can reach Jim, let me know...

Russ Miller's "Arrival: Behind the Glass"

Russ Miller has a new DVD out called, "Arrival: Behind the Glass". I don't actually have it at the shop yet, but it sounds like it's really cool. Russ hadn't planned on making a DVD, he was actually just recording an album with a bunch of guest drummers. He was filming, but it was solely for historical purposes. He quickly realized that the footage would be great for other drummers, so they could see how these masters of their craft approach the recording process. Drummers on this DVD/CD set include: Steve Gadd, Steve Smith, Pete Lockett, Akira Jimbo, John "JR" Robinson, Wolfgang Haffner, Jeff Hamilton, Johnny Rabb, Zoro and Rick Marotta. Looking forward to it!