thealarmis, I don’t know if this is the page you found, but this might help you in terms of figuring out linking: http://tinyurl.com/o4y5. I’m not so sure I like the title of that site, but you can’t beat illustrated examples. Hope your grandpa is doing better!

cliff – i used to play in NYC quite regularly, but haven’t gigged up there in 5 years now. too long a drought…

i’ll tell ya what – one of my dearest friends is a teacher at the collective. we’re trying to coordinate hangin’ out one of these times i’m home. but he’s crazy busy and i’ve gotta be w/ my fam a whole lot. i’ll see if he thinks it’s cool for us to hang in a practice room for a little bit. if not, i’m all about meeting up in the City for a meal/drink and talkin’ drums, baseball, etc. i can easily bring stix, but i don’t know if i’ll have a drumpad on me. barstools suffice! i’ll be in touch…

steve smith – my favorite drummer – will be giving a drum clinic on Monday, Nov. 17th at 5-Towns College. it’s way out on the Island – Dix Hills (whereever the hell that is!) – but i’m definitely going. i even booked my return flight to Atl around it : ) this clinic is not to be missed

i know you live in jersey though. the city is easy for me to get into. i betchya i might be able to set something up for us at drummer’s collective on 6th Ave to hang out, play some drums and talk baseball! ah, probably a long shot… hell, sittin’ at a bar w/ a pair of sticks, a drum pad and some notation paper is fun, too!

i hope to see my first 2 drum teachers on long island during these visits. i’m still in regular contact with both from when i was like 10 years old… : )

of course, there are guitar shredders like that, as well…

with music and art, a lot of this is subjective, but it is pretty obvious when one doesn’t have feel. yes, i have always strived for both – chops & feel. if you are born with it, as you say, perhaps i got lucky. my pop is a folk musician, who basically relies completely on feel. to this day, when i go home, i furtively peer around the corner to watch him in the living room, acoustic guitar in hand with his eyes closed belting out some old tune with so much intention and soul it can scare you into tears. he’s like this everyday and i’ll be home a bunch next month to witness it.

i LOVE music sooo much that i wanna know everything about it. it consumes every fiber of my being and i think there is feel in that, but it isn’t for me to say whether i have either chops or feel. the first guy who hired me and brought me to atlanta is an older guru type guy. he’s like a miles davis when it comes to putting bands together. he likes to find guys like me who studied music, know a lot and can read and then teach us to forget everything when you get on the bandstand and just play from your “butt.” he taught me a lot about intention and the music business…

i think my feel is sacrificed a lot on my upcoming solo percussion cd. the 7 tracks that have drumkit are all pieces for drums/mallets. i really had to cater the drum parts to what was happening on the mallets. i’m okay with it, because, to me, in this instance, the composition is the most important thing, not the performance. i’d play with a better, more improvised feel if i were backing up other instrumentalists and not myself playing mallets.

there are solo marimba pieces on the record that i do believe have good feel. so often w/ classical virtuosos, they’re just spewing out tons of notes at blazing tempos and there’s not a lot of feel, esp since they didn’t compose the piece. i am by no means saying i am a virtuoso at anything. but i studied the composer and compositions and romanticized baroque pieces, simply ‘coz that’s how i felt it.

i like my feel represented on a number of albums and not so much on others. the music/song/composition/artist, etc. really dictates it. i’ve done sooo many records where i simply have to transcribe a drum machine part and make it a bit more “human.” then again, steve gadd is the perfect example of having everything. that guy just RULES!

vic firth – boston symphony tympanist/drum stick mogul – once said: “it’s amazing how much innate talent a student can have when one practices 11 hours a day!” he’s kinda right and so are you in regards to being born with “it” or practicing a lot. there’s an art to practicing and there’s a lot of musical applications for rudiments (see: gadd, steve). it’s all a matter of how you go about it.

when i was younger, my mom would have to come to the baseball field and threaten to take away my drum lessons if i didn’t come home and practice! eventually, she begged me to get outta the basement and take the train into the Shitty (NYC), ‘coz i was practicing 12-16 hours a day!!! by that time, i learned how to practice and there was so much to get done. now, it’s all about quality over quantity. i can get done what i need to now in 2-4 hours what may have taken me 10-12 hours a dozen years ago.

all this said, i need to go practice marimba before my jazz drums gig this evening!!!

rhythmically…

http://www.bronxbanterblog.com/?p=3500&cp=1#comment-80464

As for the HTML tips, those were part of the template for the old nesting system and they went away when we switched out of the nesting. I’ll post the FAQ soon and that should provide people with a source for copying and pasting if they so desire (though I find that to take much longer than just typing it out, but then I’ve been doing this for a while now).

Typically, to link to a specific spot in a page, called an anchor, there is a pound sign (#) in the link. What am I missing/doing wrong.

Also, you used to have text at the bottom of the page that were HTML tips. This was good as people could copy/paste them, and not have to remember the syntax.

I’ll tell you quickly I am one of those ‘uneducated, feel’ drummers. It was the bane of my musical existance that I never had the discipline or patience to stay with drum lessons (tried 3 different times). So frustrating that my hands could not adequately express what I felt. I wanteded speed, and rudiments, and syncopations, and different timings. But that stuff takes work, and I never did the work. I would listen to guys with great hands who obviously took traditional lessons (and actually practiced their rudiments) and would get depressed.

Obviously, the great ones have both ‘hands’ and ‘feel’. On a non-professional level, not much is really expected of drummers, and so lots of feel only drummers could get by (like me). But when I listened to Cobham and others, it just reminded me how little I could do.

But…. their are many great ‘technical musicians’ who just don’t have the right ‘feel’ for music. ‘Feel’ is something your are born with and can’t be taught. I had a friend in HS who was like this. He had an Italian mother who was going to make sure her children overachieved. She would not feed Mike unless he did a solid hour, every day, practicing. He had teachers since he was 6, and at least 7 hrs/wk of practicing, EVERYDAY, until I met him at 16. The dude would show me a high speed paradiddle, then a double paradiddle, then a triple, then a flamadiddle, then an accented double… both left and right hand accents, and on and on. I was in awe.

But while he killed with precision everywhere he played… I don’t know… he just didn’t add anything to to music. I’m not even sure the guy was talented. He didn’t really listen to music that much. He didn’t talk about music. He was just a drum machine.

I saw Buddy Rich 3 times. I felt the same way about him. He was a super charged, high voltage drum machine on steroids. Everything he did, technically, blew me away. Yet I really didn’t like what he played. Everytime I heard him , I would think…. if he only did this.. and this…. and threw this in….

There are guys with great feel, real soul, who just don’t have the hands and feet (like me).
There are guys who did the work, schooled and practiced, but just weren’t lucky enough to be born with ‘It’.
And there are guys who have both… probably like you.

drums

rule

big words

let’s see how i did…

holy crap! i did it! wahoo! and the preview feature let me see it w/out having to post twice. rock on! thanks for prompting me, cliff! i googled ‘standard html tags’ like you said.

it’s definitely more of a pain in the ass with the greater/less than signs and stuff. (i think of them as crescendo, diminuendo!), but i’m glad we can italicize and strike through here…

now, can we link numbers? i think on a recent thread, the bracketed # turned red and went to the referenced number. on today’s thread, you referenced my name, it turned red, and went to that post. i know comment features here are being tweaked and updated constantly right now in the early stages, is everything set in that regard?

here, i’ll try to link a number and preview it:

[18] thanks again!

nope, it didn’t turn red. well, at least i got the bold/italics/strike bit down…