Walden’s New York School of Music hosted a drum clinic with the No. 1 drum clinicioner in the world tonight and it was, for lack of better words, awesome.

Famularo has been playing drums for 40 years and has 700 students from 20 countries travel to his Long Island home for lessons. He also takes about 200 flights a year, traveling all over the world, but, before he leaves for China in 10 days, stopped to speak and play for local drummers.

The event opened with The New York School of Music’s own Junkyard Jammers. They played on garbage cans with drum sticks, hit their sticks together, used plastic  tubes to play on chairs, played plastic containers, metal buckets and, of course a cowbell. It was sort of like ”Stomp” and was pretty amazing to see what these kids could do with unconventional instruments.

After they played three songs, Famularo came to the stage and spoke about music and how passionate his students are.  He said drums are probably one of the oldest instruments in the world and it still amazes him how you have organize noise to make music. He also spoke passionately about how people need to support community music events and the local music scene and how important self-discipline is when it comes to playing any instrument.

He said there’s two rules 1- There are no rules and 2- Follow rule No.1. He spoke about his drum kit and how he learned to think outside of the box, which led to him arranging his toms differently than other drummers. He also touched upon proper technique, playing loose and how he used to practice between 6-8 hours a day.

Then he played.

The man is a monster. A machine. You can’t look away from him when he plays because what he’s doing demands your attention. The best way to describe it is this. When a fan spins really fast, all of its blades blur so can’t make out a single blade. That’s what it was like watching him for pretty much 20 minutes. I couldn’t do anything but stare. People sitting close to him had their mouths open and the expression on his face while he played was pricless. He just jammed and was making things up as he went along and it was just mesmerizing watching a master work.

Then, as a special treat for the crowd, Donna Hall, the owner of the New York School of Music, invited Jeff Haynes, drummer for Pat Metheny and Al Jarreau, onto the stage. He played conga and bongo drums while Famularo played and they just improved. Dave Mieli, a drum instructor at the school, was invited up on-stage and while he and Haynes played drums, Famularo played the cowbell and instructed half the room to clap one way and the other half another. This went on for 10 minutes and the crowd absolutely ate it up.

Famularo ended the clinic with a Q&A session and he’ll be hosting a master class tomorrow at the school.

The school provides private and class instruction on all major instruments, so if you’re interetsed in taking lessons, visit www.nyschoolofmusiconline.com. They also run Rock Camp USA and there’s a few spots open for drummers. If you wanna learn more about that, go to www.rockcampnewyork.com or call the school at 778-7594.

This entry was posted on Friday, May 16th, 2008 at 8:52 pm and is filed under Music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.