Adam Silverman : Nashville Session and Touring Drummer

This is a little clip of us goofing off before one of our shows in Montrose, CO. We are really a goofy bunch. Hope you guys enjoy!

This is one of the very few times a year when 33Miles actually plays in Nashville, and this is for an amazing cause, so if you’re around please come out and join us as we raise money for a very important cause, and for one my best friends!! The concert information is as follows:

When : Tuesday August 31st at 6:30 PM, doors open at 6.
Where: Rolling Hills Community Church Warehouse (view map)
Cost: $10 pre-sale, and $12 at the Door
Get your tickets online right now – visit the Courage to Conquer Blog for more information on ticket sales!!

The Groove vs The Chops is a battle that just about every drummer I’ve ever met on the road deals with. It’s the battle of pride vs power, or cool vs phat, flashy vs necessity. I’ll admit that lately I’ve been in a very chops-heavy mode, working on single hand and foot technique, hand / foot triplets, speedy moves around the kit, bass drum substitutions, heel-toe bass drum stuff… etc. I’ve been pounding my studio for 5 hours a day recently spending much time on these so called “chops”. Last night I was out on the road again with 33Miles, and realized how little I’ve spent working on the groove. Now I wonder why that is?

Every drummer hangs out watching all of these chops monsters and I think that’s really awesome. I self-admitedly sit at home or on the bus, watching and writing out what Aaron Spears, Teddy Campbell, Gerald Hayward and other favorites play, spend hours practicing to add some new stuff into my chops vocabulary, and once in a while I rip one off on stage and guitar monster Chris Lockwood will look over and laugh. But in the crowd, you know what the people want to hear? In the studio you know what producers want to hear? A big, huge, phat, gigantic pocket known as “The Groove”.

I think that I need a good alternation between working on all the crazy chops stuff and working hard on the groove. Now I do a lot of session work where it’s just all about the groove, so I can’t say I don’t work on it, but I know for me and I would say most other players, we’re always so focused on the flashy stuff that we forget what gets us hired… a solid groove. So all that to say, I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again. Build chops so you have headroom for what you’re playing, because it’s awesome to wow an audience, and be able to solo and rip when you need to. But make sure you spend equal or more time developing that solid pocket with a click track so you have a chance of actually getting hired. Because one thing all the chops monsters have in common, they can also just plain lay it down when they need to.

Happy Drumming Friends!

Well it’s been about a month or so now since I received the news that Emmett Stallings, one of my best friends, has esophageal cancer. Emmett is a 30 year old husband, father, friend, and an awesome drummer / percussionist.

The story of the beginning of his battle with cancer is absolutely amazing. Please take a few moments to support him by checking out the Team Emmett Blog. When I read his blogs I pray, cry, and smile because of the hope that I can see in both Emmett and his wife Wendy. In the past few months I’ve found myself learning lesson after lesson reading their posts, and being there as a friend for them during this crazy time in their lives. It’s so humbling to be around people with such love and faith, and it’s definitely caused me to approach the way I live my life differently.

Please take the time to check out the blog. We’ll be selling wristbands, tee-shirts, cds, and who knows what else on that site in the very near future. As a musician, music lover, husband, wife, father, mother, friend, human… whatever you are in your life I promise this will change the way that you look at things, and I for one believe that we can all use some more perspective in our small little worlds. God is bigger than all of us, bigger than this world, He’s already conquered all of this, and so Emmett is a shining example of how to keep your faith through even the most troubled times.

Bless you all.
AD

For the past two months I’ve been working with LA producer Anthony Mazza on some songwriter demos. I will be posting a few of these tunes on my website in the “Sounds” section. But here is a little preview of one of my favorite tunes so far. This project has been cool because I’ve been doing my drumming based on scratch drum tracks so I copy and re-create within a given box. So I’ve really had to create parts and make choices on my own, and run my own Pro Tools with some help from Emmett Stallings, so it’s been a great learning experience.

Hopefully soon I’ll be able to actually get out to LA to work with Anthony on a project in person, but we’ll just have to see how things go. It’s funny, I move to Nashville, I get session work out of LA. Who would have thunk it :)

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(Drums were recorded at “The Vault” thanks to Emmett Stallings)

A few weeks ago I was out on the “One Life” Tour with 33Miles and a kid at one of the shows we were at asked me if I knew how to do a Ghost Flam. He was a marching band drummer in High School and I had no clue what he was talking about. I’ve never really been into the marching band chops world being strictly a drum kit player, but I thought I’d check them out. I spent about a week or two working them up and this video is a little demonstration of what you can do with them. This may just be the entry way into all of these cool little stick trick ideas, and it’s a really cool thing to learn if you’ve got time to kill on the road :)