I’m gonna be totally honest and say I had never heard of Randy Van Patten before I rented this DVD and I have a feeling you might not know who he is either. He’s a working drummer with a lots of years under his belt and has drummed for lots of people in his time. In other words he’s the kind of drummer we aspire to be like but didn’t realize it when we started. When people say they want to be a studio or a session drummer they often have guys like Steve Gadd in mind, but not everyone can achieve Steve’s level of standing in the music industry. Most studio and session drummers are more like Randy. One of many working drummers who’ve landed some big gigs but never achieved the notoriety of the drum gods. Not glamorous but if they went missing it would put the music industry into cardiac arrest. You can get the specifics on everything Randy at www.vanzdrumming.com.

Side-note before we get started. vanzdrumming.com isn’t affiliated with Vans skateboard shoe company. I thought they might have been sponsoring him because I saw VZD and vanzdrumming all over his DVD and skateboarding shoes do make great drumming shoes. I figured maybe Vans was expanding their consumer base… nope. Vanzdrumming is just the name of his website. On to the Review!

Content

Techniques is a bit of dangerous word to use in the drum instructional world because usually when you hear the word technique in a drumming context you think of the physical motions and bodily mechanics used by the drummer to play their instrument. In this case, like so many others, there is very very little actual physical technique taught in this video. There is a small section on hand technique, just enough so that you won’t hurt yourself. If you own or have seen Secret Weapons then you can just skip this section all together. The rest of the video is mostly different licks and patterns to use on the drum-set. I kinda like to think of it as a guide to crazy stuff you can do to get attention at a Guitar Center.  So yes there is gold to be mined here, just use it to create something tasteful not gaudy.

Presentation

For a Non-Hudson music DVD this is actually very good, the camera work is on par and Randy is a pretty good host. He does tend to get carried away with his examples though. One of the brilliant things I must say is that this DVD can be downloaded or you can purchase the DVD. Big points for outside the box thinking there. I couldn’t figure out where that would fall in the scheme of things but i felt it needed to be included for good measure so I put it here. The download can be found here. The cool thing is if you don’t want the whole thing you can just download the chunks you want… pretty sweet.

Extras

There ain’t any! Well not on the DVD anyway and because the DVD is what I reviewed I can’t tell you what the download extras are. You’ll just have to find that out for yourself.

So there you go. A lick oriented DVD for drummers.  A straight ahead review for a straight ahead DVD.