Darrell Grey

Sometimes when I’m jamming, my groove ends up in an odd time feel . I think when composing music it can be useful to just let the song flow in whatever feel that is natural, which may result in an odd time other than 4/4 . I think this funk groove I’m playing sometimes is in a 7/4 feel. I can imagine adding a Bass line and some Keys on top . It could develop into a cool song.

I started filming my practices with the band just so I could evaluate how my drumming was serving the music, which in my opinion is the most important job of a drummer. In this video it was just me and James the lead vocalist/lead guitarist and me playing one of our songs. I like to see if my parts and some of my fill choices work with the song. After viewing this I think I may add some changes in the feel and some of my fill choices. Sometimes it’s hard to tell until you review yourself from a video or audio playback. I think it’s a useful tool in improving as a player and a band

My drum teacher Jungle Jim wrote out a cool solo using triplets and polyrhythms. I took some of the patterns and altered them to come up with this cool Latin groove.

What a treat it was to see Micheal Shreive in action with his band Spellbinder at The White Rabbit in Seattle. One of my favorite drum solos, is the solo Micheal Shrieves played at Woodstock back when he was only 20 years old playing drums for Santana. It was cool to get to see Micheal play up close at The White Rabbit. He has such a great feel for Latin Music and also he adds in some very cool jazz licks in between. Micheal and his band of top notch Seattle musicians, which includes Farko Dosumov (Bass),Danny Godiez (guitar) Joe Doria ( Keys) John Fricke ( Trumpet) Had people dancing all night. Such great grooves and amazing improvisation. All the guys in the band performed stunning solos. The band is a regular act at The White Rabbit in Seattle. I highly recommend checking them out!

Playing around with a polyrhythm my teacher showed me that uses quarter notes on the kick and on top of that a triplet feel paradiddle on snare and accenting with toms and cymbals

Jamming on the congas in the garage. I love the freedom I have when playing the conga drums. I feel like I can’t make a mistake and anything I play on them sounds good to me. There are a lot of different techniques you can learn that add different tones and textures to the drums. A lot of my playing I just improvise and find cool tones on the drum and add different rhythms. Another thing great about conga drums, it’s only two drums without tons of hardware and gear to carry around, which makes it ideal for a street musician situation, or cafe gig