Carmine Appice (pronounced a piece) the man, the myth, the legend, the hair, the mustache… you get it all in Carmine Appice: Drum Master Class. Carmine Jumps straight into the teaching as soon the video begins and the topic is double bass shuffles. He demonstrates a basic double bass shuffle and then goes through some ideas about how spice up the basic shuffle anyway you want.

The cool thing about this video is that they have a transcription that pops up on the screen when Carmine is going to play something. The transcription is written in white which is usually dumb because it’s usually hard to see against most backgrounds. It’s very easy to see in this vid, so thumbs up there. He then demonstrates a cool lick between the hands and feet that you can throw in about anywhere to give it a semi-boogalooish feel. Good stuff so far.

He then moves on into drags and how he applies them in some of his rhythms. He demonstrates drags on both his hands and feet. Alot of this stuff is in his realistic rock book and DVDs so bear that in mind if you already own some of his other stuff. however the stuff he covers in here is the stuff that modern rock drumming is made of.

His next section is stick tricks and I imagine that most stick twirlers today took notes from this guy at some point in time.

I haven’t seen Chip Ritter’s DVD on stick twirling, but it looks like a potential contender to knock Thomas Lang’s Creative Control from the top spot. This DVD isn’t a contender but it’s in the hall of fame for historical purposes. One thing that Carmine mentions that no one else does is that you should make sure you twirl with the back of your hand facing the audience/camera. If you don’t it doesn’t look like a stick twirl, it looks ridiculous.

He then talks about substitutions though he calls them replacements. It’s where you take a note that’s played by one instrument and switch it with another instrument. This leads into him describing some of his favorite licks that involve substitution.

Then there’s a very short section on syncopation and then an ending drum solo.

Time for the break down.

For content I give it 2 mics. Though dated there is a lot of original stuff in here. Like Carmine’s section on playing rudiments stick on stick.

For presentation I give it a full mic. Carmine’s a good host and production was good.

For extras I give it half a mic. There are some slomotion features but that’s it.

three and a half mics is the total. a very respectable score.

It’s worth a slot on your netflix queue, though netflix might be the only place you can find it.