DVD Review – Randy Van Patten: Extreme Drum Set Techniques
September 11, 2009 in Music/DVDs, Opinion, Reviews by JABB
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. Read the rest of this entry →
It has been a while but I’m back from my vacation and I’m brining the reviews son! If you own the DVD set for the 2005 Modern Drummer Festival then don’t bother with this one because you already own it. This DVD is merely the two clinics that these two drummers gave during the modern drummer festival so it’s kind of like a HMMS (Hudson Music Master Series) double feature. There’s not much else to say about it beyond that so let’s just get into it. 
Russ Miller, studio drummer, inventor of drumming gadgets, and former drummer-talk interviewee has entered the world of instructional DVDs with his offering Arrival: Behind the Glass. Arrival is the name of the album that he recently released and Arrival: Behind the Glass is a tour of what it was like recording with tons and tons of famous and well respected drummers. Oh, right. I didn’t mention the all star cast, did I? This is definitely an album for drummers incase you hadn’t guessed. Every other track on the album is a rhythmic conversation (a.k.a drum duet) with some incredible drummer. Among those included in the project were: Steve Smith, Jeff Hamilton, Zoro, Akira Jimbo, and Johnny Rabb. 
I should note that for this review that I have neither Advanced Funk Studies nor the Contemporary Drum-Set Techniques books themselves but given the information in this DVD I will soon. Rick Latham wrote those two books over twenty-five years ago and they’ve become favorites of the drumming community over that time. At some point along the way Rick decided to supplement the books with a video for each book respectively. Fast forward to today, for the 25th anniversary of Advanced Funk Studies Rick rereleased both of the DVDs together in a single disk with a bunch of extras and it made its way to my house via Netflix… and that’s the story so far.
Benny Greb’s new DVD is somewhere between Big Time and the Thomas Lang DVDs. To me this makes sense because I tend to think of Benny Greb’s drumming style as a blend of those two drummers. Thomas Langesq chops with a Billy Ward like sense of creativity. In this DVD Benny Greb teaches you how to “speak drum” There isn’t anything revolutionary in terms of what he’s teaching, it’s how he’s teaching it that is the real selling point. This isn’t one huge system it’s actually 3 or 4 smaller ones that he’s teaching you by relating them to something very intuitive to humans, language.
Latin music is something that isn’t often covered in depth in most drum instructional videos. There are a lot of books on the subject but for some reason they don’t seem to have attempted to seriously cover this topic in a video. Well, Phil Maturano has filled that gap with this DVD. Like with pretty much every other DVD I’ve reviewed, depending on which description you read (there’s a million of them) you’ll come away with very different ideas of what this DVD is supposed to offer. I’ve seen descriptions pretty much saying that not only will you be able to play latin music like a pro, you’ll also be able to speak fluent Spanish and make a mean Paella.
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