Title: Groove Control
Author: Steve Bowman
Heft factor: 150 pages with CD
Publisher: Oakland House Press
Dough: $24.95

Where to purchase: email the author

Almost any drummer can play a basic rock beat and make it sound pretty good. Shift that beat over by one eighth note. Does it sound as smooth? Does it groove the same way? Probably not. The purpose of this book is to place different hand stickings (single strokes, double strokes and paradiddles) against any number of different right and left foot combinations to attain equal facility, feel and groove no matter where the notes are placed. You practice each exercise to a metronome at three different tempos – slow, medium and fast – so that you also become comfortable grooving outside the usual mid-tempo range. The book works as advertised - you WILL groove better after working through it.

Groove Control has a stark, Spartan look with black lettering on a white glossy cover. It may not be the most beautiful looking book, but it is an accurate representation of what you can find within - a meat and potatoes workbook for any intermediate to advanced drummer who is interested in improving her sound and feel. The book starts out with simple eighth note stickings against simple quarter note foot patterns and quickly progresses through the various combinations until you are sixteenth note hands against sixteenth note foot patterns. All the hand patterns are familiar – single strokes, double strokes and paradiddles. The point is to keep them steady, with equal stick height between hands and equal note spacing between hits over any variety of foot patterns. Use a metronome to keep yourself honest.

After you’ve mastered the first section, you progress into eighth and sixteenth note accents kind of similar to Stone’s Stick Control. Then you move into making your rolls sound killer and even.

My favorite part of the book is the Beat Builders. A Beat Builder is eight exercises where each exercise adds an element to the previous exercise. The idea is that it would be difficult to jump right in and perform the final exercise flawlessly but after working up to it, you can execute it without frustration. It works, and you get a great feeling of accomplishment.

The CD complements the book but is not a necessary component of the learning process. The most useful part of the CD is the four drum solos executed in their entirety. The other 91 tracks are a representative sample of the various exercises – nowhere near all of them. My biggest complaint about the CD is I prefer an audio announcement of what page and what exercise the track is exemplifying so that I don’t have to look in the CD track index to figure it out. I usually listen to these drum book CDs in the car (am I crazy?) straight through, and I like to know approximately where in the book the CD track is coming from.

I wanted to say a few things about the author Steve Bowman because the book has no “About the Author” page. Steve insists the book is not a vanity project, and that’s all well and good; however, I feel it’s important for drummers to know from whom they are learning. Steve was the original Counting Crows drummer from when they were nominated for a Grammy for Best New Artist in 1995. During that time he appeared as a musical guest on Saturday Night Live and on David Letterman among others. Besides Counting Crows, Steve has played with numerous other bands including Luce and the Bittersweets. Steve lives in northern California with his wife and two beautiful kids. Learn more about Steve at www.stevethedrummer.com