Tommy Igoe - Groove Essentials 2.0

The Play-along...

In mine and Trevor's most recent excursion, we pulled out Tommy Igoe's book "Groove Essentials 2.0" (the sequel). As an unsolicited plug, this book really is one of the greatest resources for any aspiring professional drummer. This first book goes through rock, funk, jazz, and ethnic grooves and has nearly a hundred charts with fantastic play-along tracks. The second book expands with more grooves and charts, and my personal favorite is a section on odd-meter drumming. I'm hoping to put some of that up later. Not only is the book as thorough as it is educational and hilarious, but the recordings are outstanding! I recommend it to every student I have. 

On this occasion, I told Trevor about my little endeavor to upload different playing experiences and more methodically map out my progress as a musician. I told him that I was determined to make public the very first recording that I played that night, and this was the result! 

No. 1

Comments: You'll notice that it took me a little while to settle into this one. Trevor had set up his kit a little bit differently than before and it threw me off. For one, he had added his double bass pedal (which consequently put the hi-hat a little farther out), and he added his first rack tom mounted off to the left of the snare. It all felt a little strange and you'll notice that I nearly miss the drums now and again and at one point even drop my stick. To make it worse, my headphones kept falling out making it hard to hear the track. You'll notice at the end that I don't have nearly the double bass chops that Trevor does, but I decided to go for it anyways. Why not? Right?!

This track was deceptively hard to keep up with. I found myself getting behind and had to make a conscious effort to keep up. The hits in themselves weren't very complicated, but at that tempo a couple of them threw me for a loop. At any rate, it was a good effort and I was happy with the fact that I nailed most of it. I even like a few licks towards the end.

No. 2!




Comments: I know that it says number 3 on the video, but that's because Trevor's is number 1 and I wanted to save it for last. A lot of the same comments apply to this run through. I was clearly more comfortable with the set up, but still made some stupid mistakes. I miscounted the first 8 bars (counting in 2 instead of 4), and couldn't settle in on a texture sometimes (hi-hat vs. ride). This groove I found to be one that I'm not particularly familiar with either. This is what drummers refer to as "four on the snare" because we're playing all four beats on the snare drum instead of just 2 and 4. I kept leaving out beat one because I wanted to play backbeats instead of every beat. Therein lies one of the beauties of the Tommy Igoe book is that it forces you to cover all your bases.

No. 3! (or number 1, depending on how you're counting)




Comments: Trevor might not let me keep this up here for long, but I wanted to put it up so that he could share in some of the glory. He's really a fantastic drummer, but shares with me the fear of having our mistakes out in the open. I've learned so much from the endeavor that I'm hoping he'll be willing to partake of its goodness as well.

In reality, this track sounds pretty good. I love his use of triplets and his hemiola about 3 min. into it. Great job Trevor.