The Founder and owner of StephensDrumShed.com, an online drum school, as well as the creator of the Drum Better Daily system, Stephen Taylor fell in love with the drums in eight grade and began playing professionally at the age of 16, playing nightly in clubs on Bourbon Street, in New Orleans, LA. After three years, he relocated to Mississippi to pursue his education, and the rest is history. In this episode, Stephen sits down with Rich Redmond to talk about his journey to pursue a drumming career and his passion to bring online drum education to drummers around the world.

Listen to the podcast here:

Stephen Taylor: A Drumming Career Built On YouTube

Jim, what do we talk about on the show? We talk about music, motivation, and success. Who are the folks? Comedians, authors, thought leaders, lots of drummers, lots of musicians. I’m excited because I never have gotten to sit down and have more of an extended conversation with our guest. Dolly Parton Dolly Parton wants to pose for Playboy. At this age? Yes. She’s kept her figure. She’s got the whole imagination library. She says she wants to be on the cover of Playboy for her 75th birthday. They might do it tastefully, like the Burlesque style. It’s interesting. She wanted to take one last hurrah, I guess. I know that you and Cameron had gotten together with Make-A-Wish Foundation. Yeah, Cameron Shannon, great kid. I can’t believe it’s been years. He’s a young drummer and lives in East Tennessee. Super supportive parents but the central focus of the story is the sense that he survived over 50 different types of surgeries. They didn’t think he was going to make it past his first year and now he’s over fourteen years old. He’s grown into a young man. He’s a self-taught drummer. He plays drums eight hours a day. Practices along with all these Jason Aldean records and live DVDs. When I got to meet him, he knows every lick, every hi-hat opening, every crash, and every stick spin. It’s flattering. We invited him out and he got to rock to 20,000 people in this arena. He got up there and I said, “Are you nervous?” He goes, “No.” I then got offstage and I said, “Do you want to do that again?” He goes, “Yeah.” He crushed it, and no one else has played with our band for years. You bring it to the management and everything and get him up on the stage. Is that part of the Make-A-Wish or was that separate? It’s a separate thing. How did that come about? There’s a whole backstory that we can’t talk about because there are some interesting things happening. The main thing is that he got up on stage and crushed it. There were laughter and tears, and that’s why I play drums. We talk a lot about music education on this show. School of Rock is one of our sponsors. I want to talk to our guest about that. Our guest is forward-thinking. He’s pushing the needle forward on music education, making it globally available for everyone. He’s a drummer. He’s an educator. His name is Stephen Taylor . How are you? Thanks for having me. I’m great. Do you live by Jim? I do. Spring Hill. South of town. It seems like the further I live here, the further South I go. You were telling me you got some commercial real estate to expand your business? We do. At the end of 2019, we bought an old 1930 storefront. We’re restoring it as original as we can. It was in much disrepair. We’ve spent a couple of months doing foundational stuff and the framing is done. AC and plumbing are roughed in, and electrical comes next. You’re building it from the ground up. Yeah. It’s no joke. If folks aren’t in the know, your hub on the internet is StephensDrumShed.com . How long have you had this business? I started filming stuff for YouTube in 2009. In 2011, I opened my doors. It took me three months to make costs. Back then, live streaming was a little bit more expensive. Once I did that, I slowly grew it. A couple of years ago, I decided I needed to be a businessman that happened to be a drummer instead of a drummer that happened to have a business. Once I made that switch, things started to go. I took it full-time in 2015. That’s when I said, “I’m going to devote all my time to this.” Did you move to Nashville in 2009? I moved to Nashville in 2006 right after I finished up college. The month after I finished college, we left and came here. We’ve been here ever since. What’s the backstory? Where are you from and how old were you when you got the bug? My dad was a pastor. My mom was a worship leader. I remember going to sleep on Saturday nights listening to her play through the set. For all intents and purposes, she would stumble through. I remember hearing the mistakes and her going over and over and getting it right for the next day. She was trying to figure this stuff out. For Sunday? Yeah. At fourteen, I started playing. I was in eighth grade, but I was homeschooled at the time. I then went into public school. In eighth grade, I said, “I want to play.” They said, “You don’t know anything. Go to the sixth-grade band.” I was the big eighth-grader in the back of the sixth-grade band trying to learn how to play drums. That same week, the guy at our church that was the drummer, he left. A chair opened up. The minister of music came and he said, “I hear you play drums.” I said, “Nope, that isn’t correct. I have a drum set.” He said, “I need somebody.” I played three times. The first week I had my drum set, I played three times that weekend. He said, “Just watch my hands,” and he became my mentor. He introduced me to Henrique De Almeida, who was at Berklee College of Music. He got me in with him at fourteen. By fifteen, he had handed off the first gig to me. My first gig, my wife saw me for the first time. I joke that my wife and my career found me in the first gig. I got paid $50. Did you meet your wife-to-be at thirteen years old? At fifteen. I was playing percussion in a Christmas stage show. They needed someone to stand up with Rudolph antlers and a big red nose. They said, “You need to dance around while you’re playing the sleigh bells.” I told them, “I don’t know. I’m not feeling this.” They said, “It’s going to get good big laughs,” so I did it sheepishly and it turns out, she saw me that night. She went home and asked her brother. She said, “Who’s that guy that was Rudolph?” By sixteen, we were dating and we’ve been married for years. We’ve been together since I was sixteen so we’ve been together over two decades. You guys made humans? Yeah, we’ve made three great humans. Congratulations. Are they homeschooled? My wife was an elementary school teacher. Jackson went to school all the way up to first grade. All that time, we were seeing some holes there. They were missing some things. She decided, “I can do this better than they can.” She was staying home at that time and so she said, “Bring him home.” She’s way more rigid. Some days they wish they went to school because she’s so regimented with what they’re doing. They’re going to come out with a great education. We love it. People gave their life for jazz. They slept in boxes. Share on X I was a K-3 substitute teacher in 1997, 1998, and 1999. For drummers back then, we didn’t have Uber and Lyft and there were fewer coffee houses. When you moved to Nashville, you either waited tables or you’re a substitute teacher. When I moved to Nashville, I broke the rule, which is to get a job when you move to town. Move to Nashville and get a job when you get here and take care of the four walls. We blew through $10,000 that we had saved up while I was in college for a down payment on our house in three months. I went and got a job at UPS and worked delivering sandwiches while I started getting my feet into the music business here. I had already played for McAllister’s. I was working at the sandwich shop at the time. I would go to the gig, play from 8:00 or 9:00 until 2:00 in the morning, and then I would go and clock in at 4:00 in the morning at UPS and work until 9:00 or 9:30, then I would go home and shower, be at the sandwich shop by 10:30, work until 2:00 or 3:00, then go home and sleep, and I do that again. Where is McAllister’s? It’s right up the road, the one here in Brentwood. That’s the one I was at. Where’s that, Jim? I know one in Cool Springs. It’s over the Maryland Farms area. Everyone needs to wait tables at some point in their life. They need to be in the service industry. I was a cook in high school so I prefer the back of the house. That was what I did because I got my first full-time gig at nineteen on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. I became the house drummer there. I was playing 5, 6 nights a week from 19 until about 22. A lot of times, doubles so ten-hour days. It’s a long day. It’s where I cut my teeth. I learned quickly how to be a musician, how to make a living as a musician. When I went back to school, I was decisive and pointed in what I wanted to learn. Take us back a little bit. You fell in love with the drums at eighth grade, you’re around 12, 13 years old? You get some mentoring from the guy from Berklee and then you decide to go to college in Mississippi. Up until the end of high school, I was gigging from 16 to 18. Spending money. All your friends were like, “Can I borrow some money?” It’s exactly what happened, and then for three semesters, I got into school for Jazz Studies. The way I decided on my degree was when I went in and I said, “How can I not be in marching band?” She said, “Jazz Studies.” I was like, “I’m a Jazz Studies major.” You did not want to be in the marching band? No, I didn’t. Later, I discovered a love for jazz but when I first started out, I didn’t have that love. Your teacher was John Wooton? The director of Jazz Studies was Larry Panella. Dr. John Wooton was on the percussion side. One of them was also a North Texas guy, played with Woody Herman Orchestra and Vince Gill. You did three semesters. You then went and worked in New Orleans and played and played? I got an audition. My drum teacher sent me an email and he said, “I’m playing in a night band.” He had taken Raymond Weber’s place. Raymond Weber who played with Harry Connick Jr on Star Turtle and She albums. I still get chills, the guy is great. I used to stand out on the street, I wasn’t old enough to go in. If I was on a break, we’d come and I would watch him play. He had taken the band from him while he went and did other gigs. He said, “They’re opening up an afternoon band in this dance club and I think you could do it if you’ll come down here.” He said, “This will get you to play with the big dogs.” I answered him back in the email. I’m like, “Okay.” I went down there and did the audition. I sat there for five hours while they were sorting out a new sound system. By the time they came in, I didn’t have any nerves and I was like, “I want to go home.” I auditioned and they said, “We’ll pay you $550 a week plus tips.” They might as well have said, “We’re going to give you $8 million.” I was like, “Sold. I’m here.” That’s $2,000 a month. Yeah, plus tips. We were pulling in $60 to $150 in tips a day, so spending money. For nineteen, it was good. Did you get to hang out with Stanton or Johnny Vidacovich, or any of those guys? I used to go see them play a lot. I used to go see Johnny play at the Maple Leaf and Snug Harbor a lot. I loved those places. There’s Bourbon Street and there’s that area. I was on Bourbon Street top 40 end of things, which was where I needed to be. I needed to understand and cut my teeth on what it meant to be a drummer and how to run a band. We were running a clique. The band had seven people turning around and saying, “The tempo is wrong.” We said, “We’ll fix that.” It is a top 40 Club so there was a lot of talk about turning the room, the drummers called it the set. They would come in and if the manager gave the thumbs down, that meant to dump the club because it’s a moving street. They knew they could get another crowd. If they stopped buying, then you dump the club. If you saw that there weren’t enough people buying drinks, then there was a set of songs you could call. My Girl would get the couples to the floor. It would get the drinkers to go buy drinks and then you hit them hard with something like Brick House or Funky Music and they’ll come back out. It’s like a whole science. If you want to dump the house, play something and they’re running. They’re clawing each other to get out of the club. They don’t want to hear that. You could dump the club and then you could refill it back up by calling a certain set of songs. You could dump the club if they were bad tippers or weren’t ordering drinks? Yeah, once the club stopped generating profits, they would see that and they would come in and give you the thumbs down. You were thinking like an Uber businessman from the get-go. They were teaching me a lot about tempos and what the energy of the groove is, learning a lot about that type of thing. If they’re not dancing, there’s a reason they’re not dancing. It was a big education at nineteen. I was in a lot of top 40 bands where we just wanted to keep those dancers on the floor for one hour straight. It’s good for the band. The band is feeling the energy but the bars are going, “We need to make money.” We need a break every once in a while. Down there you could do that because it’s like the honky-tonks. Yeah, it’s a moving street and they treated the musicians, in pay, much better than some of the nowadays, the honky-tonks here do. The pay scale is better in Nashville now from lower Broadway than it was when Jim, Riley, and I moved here in 1997. You can go home with $8. You go home now with $800. That is a good night. It was a good education. I enjoyed the whole thing but I quit. The longer I was down there, the more habits I started seeing guys would develop. Habits like crack, heroin, cocaine, and those types of things. The street was rough. We kept our guitarist’s kids so that his wife could go find him cracked out behind a dumpster. I’m looking at Kelly and I’m like, “Maybe I got all the experience I need to get. I should go get my education.” The pay was good enough that you could settle in and make a living. It was just good enough work. I remember Dr. Vidacovich. To the readers, Johnny Vidacovich is a staple of the NOLA music scene. He’s out there working seven nights a week with different bands and stuff. He told me, “Rich, you can work your brains out in New Orleans and not crack $30,000.” I was like, “Whoa.” It’s good enough that you get comfortable. The guys I was playing with had gotten comfortable. They were at the prime of their career and that was what they had done. I said, “Maybe this is what I should do,” but I quit my gig and I said, “I’m going to get back in school.” I moved back, kept gigging, and went to school and finished that up. A Bachelor’s degree in Jazz Studies.
RRS 71 | Drumming Career

Drumming Career: “A couple of years ago, I decided I needed to be a businessman that happen to be a drummer instead of a drummer that happen to have a business.”

That’s when I got the love for jazz. That’s when I got the bug. People gave their lives for this music form. They slept in boxes. The least I could do is learn to like it. For a year, I said, “I’m not going to listen to anything but jazz.” After that year, I didn’t want to listen to anything but jazz. I got the bug. You’re a product of music education. Jim, the sponsor of our show is School of Rock. We’re big believers. I’m a product of music education. If I hadn’t moved to Texas when I was eleven years old and joined the band in the fifth grade, who knows if I would have been on the same path. I discovered Martha Quinn. I fell in love with Martha Quinn on MTV and then The Police came out with Synchronicity. That would have happened, but I feel like music education is responsible for so much. I know you probably agree with me. One hundred percent. That’s your line of work. If we got some parents out there that are interested in getting their kids into a program, the two best locations out of the 250 School of Rock locations in the world are Franklin and Nashville. The email addresses are [email protected] . [email protected] . Tell them that Rich and Jim sent you. Go talk to my friends, Angie and Kelly McCray. They’ve had the program for nearly a decade and they’re doing great things. Thank you for sponsoring our show. Music education rocks. You finished your degree and then you moved to Nashville right away? Right away we moved to Nashville and got into working here. I fell in with a couple of session players. Bill Haley was one of them. Old School guitar player. They started referring to me some things and I started doing that but it was inconsistent in how much work I was getting, when the work was, how the work was, if I could be home and work, or did I have to travel 250 days a year? My dad traveled a lot and as you start having a family, you start going, “Is this the experience that I need my nine-year-old to have?” I was meeting a lot of guys that had been on the road a long time and then neglected some other areas of their life. They had this great career but at home, it wasn’t as great. I started stepping back and going, “I don’t know.” After one particular gig, I came home. We went out with Danielle Peck and a couple of others and I came home and told her, “I need to get a 9:00 to 5:00 with insurance and figure this out.” She said, “Are you feeling okay?” I’m like, “I’m feeling fine.” That’s incredibly responsible. There are a lot of musicians out there that have some resentful children. Wouldn’t you think, Jim? I like that he laughs. Not because you’re home all the time. You work like a crazy person because you have 17, 18 different revenue streams. I’m working during the show. You were adjusting the camera. You sleep on your own bed at night. I slept in my own bed but it’s a little weird because I’ve been seeing my girlfriend in Los Angeles so I’m sharing her bed and then I’m on a moving bed called a tour bus for 23 years. Do you feel like you need to get a bunk bed for home that’s why you feel like you’re in your natural environment? You get your sea legs after all these years. We don’t even think about it. If you were to film us coexisting on this moving bus, you dodge and weave. The design of the bus might not be the greatest. One door opens and it blocks the pantry. When someone’s trying to get out of the bathroom, someone’s at the sink brushing their teeth. Another guy’s pouring his milk in cereal. The other guy is trying to make coffee. People are trying to sleep in the bed. It is a whole thing. You just get used to it. How many are you on your bus? It’s me, Kurt, Tully, and Jay. We had a security guy and road manager. Seven guys. That’s a lot of guys. Usually, most buses are twelve people. We have these condo bunks where we can sit up if we wanted to. I never do that. I’m either on the edge of my bunk or I’m in it laying down with my AirPods. By the way, I bought these Apple AirPods. Do you have these things? I don’t have them. How do you like them? They’re one of the greatest things Apple has put out in the last ten years. Why do you like them? Do you like them because of the sound quality or you like them because you don’t have to plug them in? I like that you put them in this little case. It’s a magnet. It sucks it and it stays there and then you charge the case. The user experience and they don’t fall out. I have weird ears that every other manufacturer, their product falls out of my ears. When you’re on an airplane, you can easily switch between taking a call or listening to music. They’re incredible. I look at the guys in my band and I’m like, “I got them.” They’re like, “How much are they?” They’re $320 with the Apple Care. They’re like, “What?” It’s one of those things you don’t want to try because you don’t want to stick something in your ear that’s been in somebody else’s ear. Coronavirus of the year. This is a beautiful thing. I look at your business model and I’m inspired. You’re not traveling, you’re staying home. You have all the time in the world to craft this thing, to lead the users through and create an experience. How many hours a day are you working to create videos then you got the graphics you got to put on? For me, it took me a long time to get a workflow and everything. Back whenever I first started, we were talking earlier about the group I was in. We were on Universal Records. They signed us and a year later they dropped us. I took a buyout from the group and used that to invest in this. Whenever I was doing it then, there was a big learning curve. At this point, it’s manageable. There’s a lot of things automated. I have guys that work for me and work with me. It’s a regular workday. If I have stuff to create, I was looking at creating a lesson track. My Drum Better Daily Campus has eight lessons. I was looking at re-filming four of those. I’ll segment 2 or 3 days, and I’ll go in and do the creation. I’ll transfer the files and then I have somebody else that edits and mixes them. I focus on content creation. That’s Jim for me. I set you up on this mic and then you create thumbnails, do videos, and make it all happen. I don’t create the thumbnails. Someone from my team does. We already have one guy, a 1099 guy that’s helping us out already. I’m sure that’ll grow but the idea of embracing your strengths and getting a team of people that are worth every penny for their time and talent because it allows you the freedom to have a social life and family life. As much as I can batch, I batch. I try not to film one-offs. When I buckle in and suit up to film, we’re in there filming, and we’re getting the content done. I then have other days that are focusing on the business side of things. This day was a little bit of marketing so I’m doing some training and all that stuff. I try to educate myself as much as I can on running a good solid business. Knowing what my path is and what my purpose is, which is to provide focus goal-oriented drum lessons for as many people as I can. You call the competition or the thing that happens when you try to learn drums on YouTube, the fire hose method of drumming. A fire hose is a great way to put out a fire. It’s an awful way to get something to drink. That’s a lot of what we’re presented with the internet. It’s taken me years of teaching online to realize that, “They don’t need me just to provide the lesson. You need me to close that door and say, ‘Put your phone down. We’re talking right now. You said you wanted to work on this.’” We’re going to keep working on this, and I’ll have them email me. “Should I jump ship? Four lessons into this eight-lesson series.” “No, you shouldn’t. You should keep doing that so keep practicing.” “For how long?” “Until you’re done.” “How long will that take?” “I don’t know.” That’s the vibe you’re presented with the new generation? It’s very much so. I have a whole twenty-hour course on the art of practice. Focus is the number one practice-killer these days because of this thing sitting right beside you. They’re finding most of the general population is showing signs of OCD. Watch yourself the next time, how long does it take you to self-interrupt yourself getting in line at Starbucks? Self-interruption would be, “I need to check my phone. I need to check Facebook. I need to check Instagram.” How long does that take? It takes about 3 or 4 seconds and that’s happening all the time. When that happens in your practice time, you can’t get anything done because as soon as you start practicing and as soon as your brain signifies something is hard, it goes, “It’s boring.” Your brain wants it easy. It wants the next cookie. It says, “We’ll go do something like social media. Look, they gave you like,” and that’s a cookie for your brain. You get addicted to this constant self-interruption, those types of things. Focus is the number one practice-killer when it comes to any instrument at this point. We didn’t have that growing up. When I was in the practice room at Texas Tech from ‘88 to ’92 and then North Texas from ‘92 to ’95, that was a good seven-year period where it was birds of a feather locked up in little tiny rooms next to each other. That’s the same way my college experience went. I remember the first time I got a cell phone. My wife said, “You got to get a phone.” I finally got a cell phone and then I got texting. This makes me sound ancient, I’m not that old. I get texting and I remember going in and I remember the sun was shining through this window, I sat down and I saw it buzz. I thought, “I’ll catch it later.” I get into practice, I’m a couple of hours in and I would look over there and I would see it buzz but the lizard brain wasn’t interrupting. I sat in there and I got down I had a couple of phone calls and eight missed texts from her and I thought, “What’s going on?” I called her and I said, “Is everything okay?” She said, “Yeah. Why aren’t you answering your phone?” I said, “I told you I was practicing. Is everything okay?” She said, “Yeah. What do you have for dinner?” I remember looking at the floor and the phone sitting there. It’s a red phone and I remember thinking, “That’s going to be trouble. That’s a problem for me in my practice time.” It’s a problem for any musician. Anybody trying to get any quality deep work done, it’s a problem. A woman asking me what I want for dinner which is just about as hot as a woman walking into a room wearing nothing at all. That’s a little distracting. The discussions at our house are borderline pornographic for you. Do you want this BLT with extra crispy bacon on sourdough and well toasted? I’m like, “Yeah, baby.” Your brain wants easy because it wants the next cookie. Share on X I’m going to see the sexy librarians for lunch. Can you throw an avocado on that for me? That is pretty hot. Jim is a Marvel guy. He’s going to love your Captain America story. What’s the story behind that? Casey Cooper, a friend of both ours. We both got kids and the Marvel movies were coming out and I said, “Why don’t we do something crazy and dress up as superheroes and perform?” He does drum covers on his channel. I teach on my channel. If I do drum covers, they’re thumbs down. Was that before our largest drum collaboration? That was after. My kids love Casey. They love his channel. His demographic is predominantly kids. He’s about inspiring the next generation to play. He’s about inspiring and having fun. We went there and we did it. We had fun. It went well on his channel. On my channel, it’s a question mark because I’m usually teaching and stuff but it was trying something different. I’ve been doing this since 2009 making YouTube content. Every now and then you catch wild hair and you’re like, “Let’s do something different.” I’ve been uploading YouTube content. I haven’t been making YouTube content. My channel, there’s no focus. It’s a hodgepodge of a bunch of different styles. If you’re a voyeur and you are watching me do a recording session. It’s cool because you’re the first person to do actual takes of seeing how the track was laid down for what you’re hearing on the radio which was my idea. It may have been your idea. You’re painting this symbol with Captain America. That was the whole deal. I painted the cymbal. I’d contacted Zildjian, Paul Francis is a friend of mine. He’s the cymbal smith over there. I said, “Paul, do you have any silver cymbals? I know you used to make this Travis Barker type of deal. Do you have any of those and can I get them because I want to paint them like a Captain American shield.” Paul Francis, who my fourteen-year-old self is amazed that I’m even able to talk to Paul and what he does. He said, “Yeah, I got some.” I said, “You’d be okay with me?” He said, “Yes. As long as you paint one for Sarah,” and Sarah works there. I said, “Sure.” They sent me a ride, a crash, and a pair of hats. I painted them. They look great but they do not sound good. You did a post-Endgame when that movie came out. We took all the themes from the different superheroes and we made a mash-up and then we played along to that. He was Iron Man. I’m a grown man sitting here. My kids came to the session, and they thought I was the coolest guy. They get to watch the session. I looked back and I thought, “That’s a cool thing.” Have you always wanted to be a dad? Was that always on the list like, “I want to make humans?” I don’t know if that was necessarily on the list of the punk rock sixteen-year-old. Was it a result of being so in love with a great woman? Yeah, we were married for five years. She’s four years older than me. When I was sixteen, she was twenty. It was scandalous when we started. She’s just drop dead hot. People are like, “Why did you get married so young?” I’m like, “When you’re in Vegas, it’s all about knowing like, ‘I beat the house. I’m done. I’m out.’” At sixteen I was like, “I’m done. I don’t know a lot.” It turns out that was a good choice. That was one decent decision I made. Do you know what I’m thinking about doing? Snip, snip. Are you done? What do you think? We were done. We have a 12-year-old, a 9-year-old, and a 2-year-old. She was three months pregnant when we found out. We got back from Disney, two days from closing on a house that was a perfect layout for us and the two kids. She came in and she said, “I’m pregnant.” The others I was better but I looked at her and I said, “I need a taco before we can talk about this.” There was a taco shop down the road so we walked there and I ate my tacos. There’s Taco Tuesday, I ate my tacos. It was the Taco Express. We talked about it and we went to the doctor. Ten fingers and ten toes, she was waving at us the first time. I thought, “You had been hanging out in there, we don’t even know.” That’s crazy. It’s the first time in my life I’ve ever been surprised. For six months I was surprised up until we went into the hospital to have the kid. I was like, “You’ve got to be kidding me.” It’s cool, you already got your sea legs when it comes to raising them. You know what you’re doing. We had two boys and so it was a girl and she’s been amazing. I don’t know if I always wanted to have kids. We had the discussion after five years, do we want to have kids because we’re having so much fun. I knew getting married that was one of her life goals. I told her, “I want to finish school. You’re going to have to wait to have kids, and I’m going to have a little sooner than I would have chosen to have them.” We made that deal upfront and also, “I’m not cleaning any bathrooms and you won’t take out any trash.” We made that deal, too. Those are the two important deals we made. I was always cleaning the bathroom. We live in an old farmhouse type deal. We’re not rich. It was a larger farmhouse. That was the deal. She said, “I don’t want to take on any trash.” I said, “I don’t want to clean a bathroom.” She said, “Deal.” I was like, “I can get used to this life.” Back to Casey Cooper, we all drove to Atlanta and all got in the room, all these drum influencers and me. I got invited to the party because I had the smallest online following. They’re like, “Rich, bring your sparkly gray hair.” It was really fun. Remind us who all those personalities were. Adam Tuminaro, an Orlando drummer. Cobus and Jared Falk, and David Raouf was also there. He runs a DIY YouTube channel. To make your own drums? Yeah. He’s got a great product. I drove to his place and we did a couple of videos together. One of them has got 2.6 million views. It’s like, “Can we make this kid’s drum set sound good?” We went to the music store and we took this kid’s drum set and we pimped it out. Are there that many drummers? I don’t know. Apparently, there are. I didn’t think there were that many interested in making a kid’s drum set sound good. There were other ones there, but we all got together and had a good time. When was that? It   was the end of 2019. The reason why I asked about Endgame is because that’s when Tony Stark and Cap reconcile in the movie. A lot of people don’t realize that if you follow these movies, it’s the first time they’ve seen each other since Civil War. They split up at the end of that movie. Cap leaves his iconic shield behind that Tony Stark’s father made for Cap back in the day with Iron Man after he defeats someone and walks away. They call him Cap? Captain America. He’s talking my language because I was a fat comic book nerd with a mullet. I got bit by the bug hard. When Infinity War came out, when my wife asked me a question, I’m like, “Funny you should ask. Let me go ahead and get the comic number.” I start digging in my box. Do you still have them? I still have the original Infinity War set. We had DeeJay Silver  on. He’s a huge Star Wars fanatic and he’s one of the only guys in the world that has a movie quality Darth Vader helmet like from the film. The shield we used is from one of the movies. That’s why I wore my Hoth system jacket.
RRS 71 | Drumming Career

Drumming Career: We create within music. It’s your art, and it’s all about the balance of having the good fundamentals, and being able to let go and play what comes out.

We had a real shield there. There’s a pivotal part of the Endgame where Tony opens up his trunk, and out of it, he brings an intact Captain America shield and he hands it back to Cap. It’s almost emotional because it was part of him. You can see him like go, “You’re kidding me.” He hands it to him and someone made a meme out of it and replaced the actual shield with a cymbal. That’s awesome. This band that you were in, Lovers and Liars, you did a cash out. I’ve never heard of this. You made money on your band. I did. The rest of the guys are probably like, “That jerk.” We got signed by Universal Records. We’ve been together doing some cool shows. We had a manager of the show that I had not met and I’ve been in the band for a year and a half. They said, “This is our manager.” “Funny because I’ve been the drummer for a while and I don’t know you.” We had been doing our own things, but he was the one that got us hooked up with a lawyer, with Universal Republic. It was their edgier side. We wound up getting a single steal for two of the songs. We also got a $50,000 signing to put towards that but because Stacey, our singer, did a lot of the stuff at his place. We went and retracted some stuff. We were able to bank some of the money. Whenever we got dropped because of the same manager, it was split. Two of us did not want to fire the manager and two people wanted to fire the manager. If we got signed, we said, “It’s a bad idea. If you do that, they’re going to drop us.” One of them had a majority vote and he said, “No, we’re doing it.” We fired the manager against my best opinion. Sure enough, a few months of radio silence from them, and then we got dropped. When we got dropped, I remember thinking, “I’m 29. I’m in a band. I have two kids. I go in a van on the weekends.” I started playing it forward, and I believe we could have gotten signed to another deal. I did believe that. I believed in the music, but at that point, I just thought, “I don’t think this is a good long-term fix for me to do this.” I went to other bands we liquidated assets. We sold the van that we had. It wasn’t much, a couple $1,000 at most, but it was enough to buy a camera and start the online thing that I do now. It was enough to turn around and invest in that. We had that Nashville flood in 2010 and I had a bunch of gear and shirt and I lost a lot of gear. It turned out that some of the gear I could clean up, but the insurance company had claimed it a total loss. If you remember 2010, there was fecal matter in the water and they didn’t want to have anything to do with that so I got a lot of my stuff to a guy that cleaned up Harley’s and stuff. He cleaned it all up. I still got a nice beautiful check and I used it to put in all these hardwood floors. A disaster turned into a blessing .

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I’m going through those videos here and they’re practically titled to certainly get attention. One of the ones that stand out to me is the Five Epic Avengers theme songs. That’s the one you did with the cymbals. There was a couple. We did two for his channel and two for my channel. Did you do portals? I don’t want to spoil it for Rich because he’s one day going to watch all this too. He’s thinking I want to watch 33 movies. You’re going to do that . Are you a comic book fan that doesn’t like the movies or do you like them? I   view them as a different medium so yes, I appreciate them for what they are but I do not appreciate them for a direct representation of what I know to be the truth. You’re Marvel over DC or are you embracing both? That’s like saying, “Are you Pearl Jam over Nirvana?” Get out of the room. “It’s Nirvana all the way.” Pearl Jam guys are blowing themselves. It has been forever since I listened to that track. I’ll never forget the discussions I had with that bass player. It’s nice to get you down to memory lane. That bass player and I had many discussions over that 1/8 note on the chorus. “Are we going to go goon, or are we going to go goongoon?” Was there a producer? There was but we were going round and round before we got in there with them. We worked with Mills Logan on the engineer and Mark Endert did the mixing. Stacy was taking the producer role on that. It was nice to have someone that has final power. “You’re doing this guys.” They both work great, but let’s pick one. I went into it thinking it would be the easiest recording session I ever had because we’ve been playing these on the road for a couple of years. Do you keep in touch with these guys? One of them is still good friends. We were still text. The other two live across Nashville. One of them said, “If the band doesn’t go, I’m going to travel.” Sure enough, he has done that. Stacy has his own projects now that she’s still doing. I haven’t kept in touch with them. There’s no bad blood. I love them to death, but Jason and I still play together occasionally. It was fun. One of the reasons I think that I signed was that I could tell my twelve-year-old self, “I did that. I was in a band and we got a record label.” “We took turns driving the van.” It was funny. After I did that, I thought, “Now, what?” I don’t think any band could rely on me to parallel park the van and trailer. That was not going to happen. They didn’t want me to backup. No way. You need me to get on forward in non-tight situations? Let’s do it. We have our strengths as drummers. We know what we bring to the table.

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We looked at the YouTube channel and there are tons of views. Jim was looking at the ones that have a little bit of a high view rate. I’m looking at the trends of 33,000 views 38,000, 23,000, 45,000. You’ve got one with almost 250,000. I have one that’s almost a million. If you’ll go to the channel, you can segment them by most popular and you’ll start seeing the one with 800,000 and 700,000 views. The one thing that stuck out to me is the thank you videos. They have the least amount. “I want to thank everybody. I’m feeling it from the heart.” Stewart Copeland drum solo has 875,000 views. That was one that I did. I love Stewart Copeland and that’s the one that Tim Buell, who does my editing, wants me to pull that one down because it’s not me playing. It’s the David Letterman Show when he was on there and I was like, “I love Stuart.” I recorded it and put it up there. That’s the only one that’s not my original content on the whole channel out of those 700, 800 videos. The thumbnails are colorful. There were two videos that you mentioned. 30 Fun/Easy Drum Songs   and then 1 Drum Beat 100 Songs. My big thing is getting people to understand that the learning curve for any instrument is not that bad. You learn one chord progression, you can play 70% of popular music. You learn one drum beat and you can play so much. Whenever I’m starting someone out, I want to get them the first drum beats and the first drum fills. I want you to play music. My wife talked to me about this with our kids. She said, “Aren’t you going to make them learn instruments?” I said, “No, it’s called playing music.” I said, “It’s not called working music.” I told her, “The way that I get them to love music is to expose them to great music and they’ll find that themselves.” We go to some concerts, or just listen in the car. I’ll be like, “Let me play them some of this. What are they into?” I’ll curate the setlist and sure enough, my nine-year old’s now playing bass. My twelve-year old’s playing drums. It’s a matter of letting them understand that teachers don’t have to hook the student, the music will do that. Let the music do the heavy lifting. Find out what they’re into if you’re teaching kids especially, and then teach to that. Part of the channel is educating them on the learning curve is not that big. It’s not as big as you think there are a lot of late lifers that are starting 45, 50 years old. They go, “Am I too old?” “No, you’re not too old, watch. I can have you up and playing a song in one lesson.” “Come watch one lesson and I’ll have you up and playing music.” Once you do that, they’re hooked. 1 Drum Beat 100 Songs, you talk about the money beat. You speed it up and slow it down. Focus is the number one practice killer when it comes to any instrument. Share on X I found 100 songs that use that beat and then we clip them out. We did a couple of hits upfront and then I memorized the whole 16, 17 minutes track and then do it live to show them that you can take this drum beat. Some of them had some variations in the song later, but it was all the songs you can play with this drumbeat. Another one was 30 Fun/Easy Songs to Drum To. A lot of times teachers get bogged down in the weeds of teaching anything, math, or whatever. It’s like, “What makes this fun? Geometry makes math fun, that’s awesome. Look at this cool thing you can do.” Whenever you sit there and you go, “Look at these awesome songs that you can play. Do you know that drumbeat? Watch.” You go and play it. That’s fun. They can get in and they can play that. I memorized that whole track. I paid Jason who was in Lovers and Liars with me. We sat down, mapped out the track, the segues and all that stuff. I would have read every bit of that, but you’ve memorized it. It’s awesome. I read it to a point enough to get me like, “There I am,” I tried to memorize it, because I wanted to show them having fun. It’s hard for me to do that while I’m in the music. Those are mainly to show people like, “This instrument is fun.” It’s not that hard to get up and run it. You and I both know, we can nerd out on something and I can get implied metric modulation and I can lose the bass player. We can do that all day, but the core essence of it, to play popular music and to sit down and play with friends. To do it like I did, my fifteenth birthday party, we had all these people over. I locked the door, me and a guy named Eric Jamison. We knew the whole Green Day album Dookie, and we played it. I remember at fifteen, locking my entire party out and the party was in the room where I was. He and I were playing punk rock. To me, that’s the essence of music, that energy, that emotion. I love big crowds. They’re great, but if I can get a small club with twenty people that love what we’re doing and I got positions that are on fire, I want people to experience that. I like that concept. That’s like what I did with the little FUNdamentals of Drumming for Kids  book was the idea of like, “Let’s get these kids hooked on playing these money beats. If they fall in love with it, we can go back and do all the pedagogy of single strokes, double strokes, accents, five-stroke, roll paradiddles, which is opposite of everything that we were brought up. It was. I use my teaching a lot too. I will let them fail and then I’ll say, “Come here. That’s a teachable mistake. Let me show you.” “I can’t play double stroke rolls.” “Do you know why? Your technique sucks.” “What do you mean?” “I told you earlier about technique. Do you remember that?” “Yeah.” “The reason you can’t play double stroke rolls is because of bad technique.” “Can you show me?” “Absolutely.” You need thousands of hours of practice to even it out. As soon as they hear a part that they want to play, they’re able to attach that goal. They go, “I have to do this.” It’s the cookie. It’s a reward system. It absolutely is. One of the things I do with my teaching is say, “We’re not going to get crazy here with patterns between the kick drum and snare drum. We’re going to play this basic kick drum and snare drum pattern that you’re going to be paying your mortgage with for the rest of your life. Look at all these other thousand variations that you could do on top to change the percolation, focus, subdivision, swing, and the colors.” They go, “I never thought about that.” I said, “That’s the stuff that separates the men from the boys.” It is. Getting them to engage the music for what it is and also teaching them once they get to a higher level of, “This is how we let go and create ourselves. This is how we create within music.” You create something that is left of center, but you feel it’s your art. It’s all about the balance of having good fundamentals but also being able to let go and play what comes out of you. You can’t do that until you spend all the time on the technique and get that out of the way. You have to be able to walk before you can run. What am I looking at here, Rich? You’re looking at my discombobulated website, my YouTube channel . I sort it by most popular. I have to say that of the top five videos, four are mine that I produced for you. Everything that I have done between 2010 and 2020, the majority of it produced by you. What are the titles of those videos? I’m interested in what the titles are. There are no thumbnails. The first one is Drummer Rich Redmond Performs “Crazy Town ”. You’ve got to go to the video to get the rest. Yeah, by Jason Aldean. We have a Gear Overview for 2012 , Rich Redmond Records Jason Aldean’s “My Kinda Party” , an in-studio shoot, Rich Redmond Tracks Jason Aldean’s “Flyover States”  and then Working the Dream: A Documentary About the Working Nashville Musician . Do you think thumbnails will drive numbers up or not, if they’re colorful and sexy? I do not think, I know. I spend a lot of my time looking at demographics. Do you know the Stewart Copeland video you showed me? Tim and I have a lot of discussions. We have a production call every Friday. He said, “At least let me change the thumbnail. It’s just a Screengrab and it’s awful.” I said, “Fine, change the thumbnail.” He did a little Photoshop and we instantly saw a boost in views. It’s getting higher views every day than it has over the past year and a half since it was posted. Thumbnails and titles are huge. It’s the same way with a newspaper. Would you read a newspaper with a thumbnail of that light? No, it’s headlines. I don’t do things by chance anymore on my YouTube channel. We experiment all the time but I know for a fact that thumbnails and titles are a huge thing. I can show you exactly where we change certain thumbnails on certain videos that made them skyrocket. I’ll tell you about one. I put out 20 Greatest Jazz Drummers of All Time. It turns out that no one wanted to see that video. What they did want to see was a thumbnail that was better and then 20 Jazz Drummers You’re Wrong for Not Knowing We changed that and within the same hour, boom. “What am I wrong about, Rich? I’m not wrong about anything. Let me click on this video.” As soon as we did that, it went from getting a couple of hundred views every 48 hours to getting 7,000 to 8,000 views. It continued on up. It was great for channel velocity and all that stuff. It came from me sitting down with Tim. I told him, “We made a great video but the thumbnail and title suck. Let’s fix it.” We did and within the hour, it changed. A lot of times your content can be fantastic but it’s all of the framing. It’s the same thing that we’re talking about with the students. It’s how you frame the lesson. If I have a six-year-old come in and I’m like, “We’re going to work on this drum beat and you’re going to get it right,” he’s zero enthused. If I say, “We’re going to work on this drum beat. If you get it at the end, I have a Tootsie Pop,” he’s like, “I’m in.” If I give him a Tootsie Roll for every beat he learns, you’ll be amazed at how fast a six-year-old can learn. I think a good motivation for a teenager would be like, “Do you want to get laid? Learn these beats.” “The Five Beats That Will Get You Laid.” There you go. I guarantee, if you put that out and do a decent thumbnail. We’re doing it. You’ll be sure to bury that bass drum beater and play that rim shot. We should experiment with that. I know world-class drummers with amazing content that have recorded hit records that have videos on YouTube. It’s crickets because they don’t do the thumbnail and don’t do the titling. A lot of people think that content is the video itself. Content is four different things on YouTube. Content is the video. That’s got to be good. That’s a given. It’s got to be the description. That’s the least important of the content. That’s for keywords and all that stuff for the back end of YouTube. Your content is your video, thumbnail, title, description, and the pinned comment as well. If you get any of those first three wrong, your video is not going to go. We have videos that have Trello cards and work boards that we go on. We’ll put those titles up and then we’ll delete them. We’ll talk about them. We’ll stress over one word and we’ll flip the meaning. “What if we did this?” “How many characters is that?” We spend as much time on that. A lot of times, I will not record a video until I have a title in mind. I’ll start with, “That would be a cool title. What can I do about that? How can I spend that?” We do our content a disservice. It’s all marketing. Marketing is ethical. People look at marketing as a bad thing. When I was a kid, my mom bought a table. I remember her going down there and talking to the guy. He made the table for her. I remember thinking, “Could we get the stupid table at the house?” We get that table there. For all the years growing up, my family ate around that table. Now, my sister has that table and her family eats at that table. Fast forward, we get a table. We go there and the guy is like, “This is a great table.” A year after we have the table, the chairs start falling apart. Every time I sit down at that table, I’m like, “This guy sold me this table. It’s a piece of crap. I hate this table.” I think about how long it took that guy to spin the money that he made off that table that he made my family and how many years of enjoyment did we get. That’s marketing. If he wouldn’t have done a good job marketing and selling that product, I wouldn’t have all those memories of those family meals around that. That’s how I view my drum lessons. If I can’t get into their psyche and convince them of, “This is fun. This is awesome. You want to play the drums, you want to play music. This is amazing.” If I can’t get in there and tell them that and I don’t learn how to do that, then I failed my job. It doesn’t matter how good my lessons are. It doesn’t matter how good of a teacher I am. If I don’t hook them, then that’s all for naught. I’m exhausted. I’m glad that you exist in this world and you’re taking care of this because I don’t think I could sweat over, “How am I going to title this video?” “How to Make the Bass Player Hate You.” That was a fun one. I view it as part of my creative outlet. Instead of thinking about it as, “I have to come up with a title,” I get in my creative space. I’m like, “What if I did that? I could do this or I could do that.” The thumbnail is the same thing. Tim, Joshua, and I try to stress that, “You’re not just a drummer, you’re creative.” When you’re creative, I can take this and I can have fun with it. What sounds could come up? You could start hitting it. As a creative, you would figure out 50 different sounds for that one thing. You could come up with all these sounds but you have to view yourself as a creative, not just a drummer. There are many different ways to be creative. My thing is I’m wearing too many hats. You have focused on this thing and it is killing it. It’s awesome. How real drum practice sounds in the thumbnail that says, “Not good.” I did one where I played the same beat for five hours in the practice room to emphasize that they don’t need to do this. I live-streamed it, took that, and put it on the channel. Obviously, I wouldn’t do this for five hours. I would lose my focus. I said, “This is how you work through a pattern.” I showed myself learning it from the front and slowly starting to take it around the kit and using a basic drum fill. That took hours of evolving. The point was that this takes time. This is what you don’t see from your favorite Instagram drummers. Those that are the elite in any of their field, you don’t see them posting a bunch of fifteen-second clips of the slick licks they can do. That’s counterproductive. When you find something that doesn’t work and you’re an elite in your field, you don’t want to try to make it sound cool. You want to fix the problem. You don’t see a bunch of surfers that are big wave surfers showing tricks. It’s over and over and it’s not fun to watch, them falling down and going, “I’ve got to readjust this.” That failing is not fun to watch. Them winning championships off is awesome. That’s why you don’t see these big players on social media showing you all their hip tricks. It’s because it’s not part of the elite process. I don’t want anybody watching. I sound bad when I practice. As a matter of fact, I sounded so bad that I got concerned because Jackson’s learning the drums. I thought, “He’s going to think. He knows.” The gig is up. Do you have a funny random question? I’m looking at his videos.
RRS 71 | Drumming Career

Drumming Career: A lot of times your content can be fantastic. It’s all about how you frame the lesson.

You’re going down the hole. I’m intrigued. What are the two drum movies that every drummer must-see? Birdman, for the score. Isn’t it the first movie where a drummer did the complete soundtrack? It couldn’t get a Grammy or an Oscar. He used too many pre-recorded clips or something. It has an amazing soundtrack. Listen to that for the soundtrack, Antonio Sanchez on that. Whiplash. People say it’s an unrealistic view and they should have done better with the technique. We can get to the core of the story. In college, I had a graduate assistant from Russia. We called him Cold War. I remember sitting in big band and he would say over and over, “Do it again for Steve. Let’s do it again for Steve.” I remember wearing three shirts to those rehearsals because I would sweat so much I couldn’t read. He was calling me out on not reading. Do you know what made me get my act together? It was him saying, “Do it again for Steve.” No amount of them saying, “You shouldn’t learn to read.” It was, “If I go in there and I can’t read this, they’re going to have to do it again for Steve.” While I don’t approve of abusing students, it’s that relationship that can be overbearing. I could relate. I thought that as a story, he’s triumphant in the end. Did I think the drum solo was trashed? Yes. It was not good. You would have been laughed off the stage at the Jazz Fest. Marvel movies versus DC or comic books versus movies, do I think it’s a good representation? I think it’s a great look into the world of being a musician and how much work goes into that. You sat there for five hours. I did. You must have had the worst case of swamp ass by the time you finished. It was not good. Even when you’re playing live, you at least get up and have a break. I did take short bathroom breaks. I would run out, go to the restroom, and come back. I did that maybe 2 or 3 times. I got some comments. “Next time, lick the drum for five hours straight.” That’s one comment. I love these comments. The thing is all these folks could be practicing right now. That’s one of the things. How do you balance making that content and then getting them to practice? It’s a constant push and pull. Here’s a story that I’ve never told anybody in public. I’ve told it to friends. It’s somewhat of an embarrassing story. I get married. When I’m getting married, I’m playing on Bourbon Street. I’m paying for living on my own so I needed some extra work. My neighbor had a landscaping company. I said, “I’ll work during the days for you and at night, I’ll play the drums.” I did that. The problem is that nobody tells you about the sweating that goes on when you play for that long in those regions. Things start itching. It’s months of itching. Months go by. I’m a newlywed. This is not a good problem to have when you’re newlywed. After 6 or 7 months, I finally booked an appointment with a specialist. I’m like, “I’ve got some issues.” He says, “Actually, you don’t have anything. What you have is a nerve issue.” The nerve endings on the top of my skin had become so sensitive that if they brushed against them, it fired them up like there was something wrong. They started freaking out. It simulated jock itch. I didn’t have a jock itch but I had the symptoms of it. He said, “Unfortunately, it’s going to take you as long to get rid of this since you had it.” For a year and a half, I had a jock itch. Here’s my PSA. Take a shower after the gig, always. Talk about a disorder you don’t want in the first year of your marriage. I’m still reading comments. “When you realize after five hours of drumming, you never hit record.” Can you imagine that? That’s bad . You’re a practical drum lesson type of guru out there amongst all the other ones that show flashy fills and all that. Yes, I am. You get in, decide where we’re going, and we stay on that. I like practical stuff. I like the fact that you’re local. You’re a guy I can hang with and have a beer with that. These are pre-recorded things. You can’t do one-on-one. There’s a whole library of them and you decide the topics we need to work on. We have an onboarding process. Past that, it’s a matter of you staying the course and doing that. We did live streaming lessons but that didn’t go to the business model. If you’re working on whatever you’re working on and then I live stream a random lesson on Afro 6/8 with the backbeat, why are you watching that? We do student live Q&As where I take submitted questions and then I answer them live in the chat. Other than that, they’re going through the courses. They’re hanging out in the forums. They’re asking me questions in the comments, emailing in videos for student reviews where I give them feedback on what they’re playing. That’s part of what they get for their monthly course. Absolutely. What did you learn, Jim? I learned a lot. It reaffirmed everything I’ve been saying to different people that getting the attention that you’re getting on the internet on YouTube, number one, takes time and consistency. I’m sure that you started putting out videos and wasn’t an overnight success, right? It took me eight years to get to 100,000 followers and then we doubled that in one year. We were at 233,000 by mid-2020. Did you get the big old YouTube award? I got the Play Button. I was finally cool with my kids. It takes consistency. I have to walk that line of not uploading clickbait type. There’s a lick you can do. I don’t believe that that promotes good, solid players. I don’t want to be the teacher that just taught you licks. I want to be the teacher that taught. I may name something that way and then I’m going to spin it. We’re definitely going to do “Five Beats That Will Get You Laid.” What I learned is that if I ever want to have those numbers, I have to put in the time. I don’t know if I’m going to do that. I like the idea that I could get more colorful thumbnails. Let’s do the top ten. You’ve got to come up with a headline. Get better titles, better thumbnails, and upload consistently so that your audience knows. You can be like a TV show. Look at your top videos and figure out what is the common theme among them, and then deliver the buckets. Those buckets would be 2, 3, or 4 categories that you know will get consistent views. If you do that, you don’t have to think about your content so much. You just think about the creation of it. You can do that on the road. You can create the content as you’re going. It doesn’t change anything you just change the framing, What I’ve been telling you to do is to do more behind the scenes stuff. Are you getting a lot of responses? I have. People love it but it goes away. It does but you’re at least engaging and showing. People love it. Instead of uploading all in one timeframe, you space those out and be consistent. One a week for however long. You can upload them all and then set them to publish on different days. One day uploading but you have six months of content that’ll leak out. You can forget about it. No, I can’t handle that for you. That was insightful. I’m impressed. I’m glad to hear from someone who can walk the walk and is educating the future musicians and drummers of America and the world. You’re doing it in a super positive way. I love it. Keep it up. We enjoyed meeting you. A crazy disaster can turn into a blessing. Share on X Jim, thanks for your time and talent. You’re welcome. We appreciate you reading. Be sure to subscribe, share, rate, and review. Leave us a five-star rating. Tell a friend. If you’ve got questions and concerns, we have an email address at [email protected] . Thank you to the School of Rock for sponsoring this show. Keep coming back to the good stuff. See you next time. Follow us at richredmond.com/listen .

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About Stephen Taylor

RRS 71 | Drumming CareerStephen Taylor is the founder and owner of StephensDrumShed.com as well as the creator of the Drum Better Daily system. The website is membership based and offers a way to learn the drums online in an organized and goal oriented fashion. He has a passionate focus to bring online drum education to drummers around the world. Stephen has written three drum method books and also offers downloadable video drum lesson packs and individual lessons on his site. Stephen began playing professionally at the age of 16. During his formative years, he studied under drumming phenom Henrique De Almeida (Current Associate Professor of Percussion at Berklee College of Music). In his late teens and early twenties, he cut his teeth playing nightly in clubs on Bourbon Street, in New Orleans, LA. After three years of gigging up to ten hour days, he relocated to pursue his education. While obtaining his degree in Jazz Studies from the University of Southern Mississippi, he studied under Dr. John Wooton (Author of “The Drummers Rudimental Reference Book” and “Dr. Throwdown’s Rudimental Remedies”, and head of percussion at The University of Southern Mississippi) and Harrell Bosarge, a former percussion instructor at the University of North Texas who has played with artists such as Vince Gill, Delbert McClinton, Freddy Hubbard, and the Woody Herman Big Band. Stephen currently maintains a busy teaching and playing schedule in Nashville, TN. He has played and toured with independent and major label artists including Danielle Peck (Big Machine Records), Jason Jones (Warner Music), Meshach Jackson, and many others. In late 2008, Stephen began playing with an original project, Lovers and Liars. They signed with Universal Republic Records between 2010 and 2011, had several songs featured on MTV, and had the opportunity to share the stage with Hoobastank, Finger Eleven, Civil Twilight, Candlebox, Hurt, Cavo, Hinder, Fuel, Eve 6, Hawthorne Heights, Red, Thriving Ivory, Theory of a Deadman, Saving Abel, Framing Hanley, 10 Years, Seether, Shinedown, and many others. Stephen also has a passion for teaching with current and past students having achieved or been featured on MTV, NBC, The Grammies, VH1, The Real World, the Dove Awards, and various college scholarships. In addition, Stephen was part of a feature article in the October 2013 issue of DRUM! Magazine entitled “The Drum Stars of You Tube”. He currently lives in Nashville, TN with his wife, two sons, and daughter. Love the show? Subscribe, rate, review, and share! Join the RICH REDMOND SHOW Community today:

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