4 NON BLONDES REUNION SHOW
Hey and what’s going on? Well, something I thought might never ever happen – a reunion of 4 Non Blondes! Yep – we did get back together for one show in LA this past May and it was quite an adventure. It was really great to see everyone again and to play some music for a good cause. We played An Evening with Women, which is a fundraising event for the LA LGBT Center. Linda Perry has been involved with the event for years and asked us all if we would be up for it – Roger, Christa and I said sure thing…and in May we all met up in LA.
The show was a success and raised a record amount of money for the Center’s services for girls and women. I am glad to have been a part of that and it was good playing with Christa, Linda and Roger – all of whom are stellar musicians and still out there playing music and being the amazingly interesting and talented people they all are. We made some great music together and had some life-changing experiences many years ago and I really didn’t think we would ever play together again – so it was cool (and maybe a little surreal) to throw that unexpected bit of excitement into my life this year.
Linda Perry (lead singer of 4 Non Blondes) is now known as a songwriter/producer and is getting ready to launch her new TV series on VH1 mid-July. We were all interviewed for Linda’s VH1 Behind the Music episode, which will also begin airing this July. Christa is still playing the bass and now geographically based in the live music capital of the world, Austin Texas. Roger and I are still in San Francisco making noise, he sings and plays guitar in his band The Goldenhearts and various other bands around town.
The song examples show you the type of fill, in context first. I do that by giving you the transcription of fills from songs you have most likely heard. And then you can listen to them in their natural habitat on the REAL recording (not included – hey, these are big songs! I can’t get the copyright clearances for that stuff. Since they are hits, they are also easy to find – so go check ‘em out for yourself in your preferred musical locale! You can handle that…)
The Coordination Building Section is designed to help you develop the skills necessary to play and create the fills. This section has a progressive set of exercises created to help you with whatever type of fill that chapter is about. You might want to start in this section and then return to play the song examples later – either way works.
The final section, Composition, gives you a place to create and use the skills you have developed from the previous two parts of the chapter. The templates give you some guidance to help get you started.
If you’re currently working with a private drum instructor or have the reading skills to tackle the book on your own – awesome! If you don’t have a teacher or live in musical tutor or a personal drum guru, I have also created a video portion of this course where I demonstrate every single example and exercise in the book – check that for some help in seeing and hearing the whole dang book played. Now that took me some time, creating the videos…and I’ll admit I am no Spielberg, but you get the gist of the examples and fills and I think it’s pretty helpful if you don’t have someone close by to learn from. Plus I put a lot of nice photos of San Francisco in there, too, to look at between all that drumming…nice, right?!?!
The cool thing about this course is that depending on your learning situation; there are many ways to go about working with Chart-Topping Drum Fills. I really am proud of this book and video course and hope that it will be helpful for many drummers, for many years to come. Ba-da-dat…that’s all for now, folks!
