I was working through some exercises from Stanton Moore’s “Take It To The Street” book last night. One of them was the initial groove from Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks” off IV. As with any organic groove like this, there are subtle nuances that are very much overlooked by most of the drumming community. In this case, John Bonham was accenting certain hi-hat beats during most of the song. The hat trickery would have gone unnoticed had Stanton not been such a perceptive lad. Even the drum tab that I picked off the Internet for my example missed them. These beats are tough to accent because they occur in a quite unnatural position between syncopated and not. Don’t mistake this for drumming erudition either as these accents punch through the extreme reverb that was applied to his kit to make the groove feel so tight. Here is the ASCII-art drum tab with the accented hi-hats beats highlighted for all the world to see.

Ideals with BJ back at MusicLab.

I’m back in the acoustic game again. It felt weird playing a set of Al Foster Jr. Hip Gig drums for three solid hours tonight, but I finally got into some tasty grooves by the end of the night. This video is actually the first real song that I played on them. The christening so to speak. Enjoy.

This was Minor Spark’s first (and only) gig. The inauspicious thunder of VDrums and AM noise was heard at the first stop on the “Hell Bent for Naugahide” tour. BJ arrived on his trademark Vespa wearing a Shriners hat with some kind of animal in tow that was somewhere between a goat and a moose. We rocked out for a good hour. Then, we did a second set of old Appalachian favorites with overdubbed slam poetry. The footage of the second set was immediately locked away in the Minor Spark 3DES vault in Des Moines lest our reputation be tarnished by the heedless decision for the rest of our days.