Virgil Donati Impossible Independence | Study The Greats 

I love your channel man! Thanks for this KILLER lesson I've been waiting for your deep Donati dive!! Now I've got something to work on this next decade...

How did you transcribe this? Just by ear?

I'm a post-prog drummer and I've gotta say the future of drumming is a crazy cat named SUNOCO YONO (!) who plays in a bunch of stoner prog bands in New England, especially "avant bubblegum" band UNICORN HOLOCAUST. This dude takes drums farther than any other drummer I've found on the planet, and is far beyond a Virgil or Thomas Lang IMO. Yono is like an alien, who has little interest in the cliches of jazz / rock / classical drumming. It's like he doesn't even understand it. I personally think a Virgil or Lang or Mangini lack musicality. They feel like technicians. by contrast, Yono, is reportedly a half-ass fuckup who just goofs off on the drums and is a stoner who plays from the heart (but he was raised on billy cobham as a little boy!) as he does what he calls "1/1" time signature! (dude told me he imagines every beat is its own measure (!), so all the musicians are in the same tempo, but the accents are all over the place for each instrument; i can attest this sounds wild and crazy, yet is still organized.) he also does a lot of drumparts you can HUM, which is really unusual. IMO, Virgil lacks compositional chops (if you have those, you can improvise and it's tasty AF), as do most drummers, even your Buddy Riches or Langs or Weckls. (Benny Greb is one of the only drummers I've found who are truly musical.) Yono does all kinds of wild shit and even Physical Comedy behind the drums! For instance, I saw him do a few shows where he had so many scarves tied to his arms that it was a tornado of color as he did super-sick drumming! I like Gavin Harrison, but he's too "polite" for me, if you know what i mean. Same problem I have with Bruford. Too polite. Drums need some "violent maniac" in them, i think. Yono is sloppier than a Lang or Virgil though, but i like that about him. he's pushing himself PAST his skill level, which Mahavishnu did, and that made for terribly exciting music. I want a bit of messy insanity. that's what rock should be. i can't listen to a mike portnoy because he's lifeless and BLOODLESS. i'm drunk. pardon sloppy typing. but Unicorn Holocaust and his other bands have nothing online that I can find. wtf!!! my second fave drummer now is a french dude from Montreal, in a noise casio-drum duo called LAZOR BLADE. they've got some stuff online that blows me away. his drumming is very athletic, and fresh. most drummers to my ears sound like they're trying their hardest to NOT be original. I don't get that.

IMO, i think it's not healthy to use your BRAIN when drumming. i try to use 110% HEART and instinct. virgil feels stiff and academic, ala Lang.

Are you implying that this Yono takes things musically further than anyone? Because that I can see, but some of the technical things Virgil has done can't be played by anyone else that I'm aware of.

Probably not that hard tbh. Once you realise the left hand/foot combination is just a repeated ostinato and you can isolate it, it just becomes about listening to a right foot right hand single strokes drum solo. Also there are plenty of apps which allow you slow down audio these days.

It just an app.. No big deal..

@@flickdrumming2851 how does he separates left side from right side with video & audio?!

One limb at a time. :)

Pretty crazy huh

@@abbdrums Of course I read it with your voice.

I believe Dave also said Virgil was born to drum. Well, duh. :-P

He actually said that in an in store appearance I went to 20 years ago, he was like “Virgil’s amazing, I’m not prepared to practice that much, I have a life.”

Is it true?

Those are the only 2 i could think of to.

Lang just isn't in the same ballpark I'm afriad

@@percusski Lang is the only one of these three who can solo for long periods of time and you never have the feeling he's run out of ideas. Can't say the same for Marco or Donati.

@@BrunodeSouzaLino When I studied with Mangini years ago, he told me that no drummer on the planet practices as much as Virgil. It's all starting to make sense.

Matt Garstka will probably have a piece.

That would have been 'Taste'. First time I saw and heard him was when he was with Peter Cupples. Played a Sonor kit. He was phenomenal. I thought Steve Smith had a great traditional grip technique, but Virgil's was bewildering.

It takes years of practice to just follow stuff like this. I can only follow it and play a little bit like this . I can do my left hand pretty good all you do is get a grove an break it up like keeping a roll going. Then free form with the right. So what I do is do straight just do 16th on the hats with both hands than start to bounce every left, now keep the left going and play a ride or tom anything you like but I keep going back to the snare on 2 and 4.

@@nista67 Good pick-up. It was Taste. Coming from Canberra with its' limited music scene, I saw Virgil and thought that was the standard for Sydney and Melbourne. Fortunately it wasn't otherwise I would never have got a gig. I'm now 65 and play in 3 bands so I'm glad I didn't retire at 18.lol

@@philoconnor5234 Three bands? I dips me lid, sir. 👏👍✌

dude, you can conquer the world with single stroke rolls. Don't need to be Virgil to cut it in the music biz. Thank god.

Wouldn't want someone to feel like they picked up the wrong one if they ended up with a copy of Moonbabies..lol

@@Ledgeview A great album, but with no Alan. I'd love to see Donati, MacAlpine and Sherinian get it together next year. Alas Virgil says he's too busy to reform the best band ever this year.

@@Ledgeview Moonbabies is the best PX record by far. Even though Desert Girl has one of my all time favourite Guitar solos

@@hazardeur I'm soon releasing a transcription vid for Allan's solo on Desert Girl

@@reubennb2859 well I'll be damned!!!! thanks man. glad to see i'm not the only one that knows about this gem

Roque Castaneda yep same

Death metal is awesome

As crazy as it sounds Pete Zeldman is more advanced. Very sad about Peart it's like loosing an old friend.

Agree about Neil: Will miss him so much. And of course Virgil is absolutely brilliant. I’ll have to check out Peter. Embarrassed to say I’m not familiar with him. But I soon will be. Thanks!

@@killboybands1 MMMMM.. no he's not. I've seen Pete, Seriously speaking Virgil Donati is WAY more advanced, like way way way more...

@@vladeguignimusic Virgils got more monster chops and speed but he's not playing the kind of polyrhythms that Zeldman is playing. Virgil is doing things implying a 4/4 groove within quintuplets, or playing 4 against 5 ( Like in the just jamming on a riff video) but all his limbs are still working with in the same subdivision. When he does something like a 7 against 5 he can subdivide the bar into 35 parts but it's not even close to what Zeldman is doing conceptually: In Zelman's '9 Volt Polyrhythmic breakdown' video: He plays a 4/4 8th note groove in the time of 9/8, playing the 4/4 in his hands and the 9/8 groove in his feet split into 16ths with 6 different pedals. This requires the ability to subdivide the measure of 9 into 72 parts. In the same video, a 12 against 18 (with the 12 being swung) he plays 16 in the time of 9, 16 against 27, 13 against 18, 19 against 18, and 37 against 36????. Zeldman is a freak. In the example above (as hard as it is) Virgil still doesn't breach 6 note triplets. It's super hard because it's odd note groupings of 7 but there are no nested tuplets and everything stays within 24 notes per bar (16th note triplets). On the other hand 19 in the time of 18 requires Zeldman to subdivide 342 parts per bar. 37 against 36 requires 1332 parts all in a multi orchestrated pedal set up? (There's even an animated visualizer on youtube that shows how insane that poly-rhythm is). Even Virgil's seven-diddle explained in the above video is a pretty standard sticking for playing 7 note groupings (playing it between your left hand and left foot is not) split between only two instruments, hi-hat and left snare. Virgil's a monster and I love his playing..but more advanced? No chance. Zeldman is like if Pierre Boulez had a kid who became a drummer..

killboybands1 Virgil Does ALL of that .. and MORE.. He’s not playing only 4/4 and creating illusions only ... Keep in mind that this example Austin share is a “short” less than a minute of his playing.. There’s a lot more in Virgils world. Plus personally the stuff I’ve seen from Pete at least for me does not sound very musical, compared to Virgil.. but you know thats just my opinion, at the end of the day music is about taste and preference! Peace!

I love this comment. I wanted to say this too but you put it better than I could. I think when people play stuff on this level it's not even something they think about in terms of "rhythm". They have an idea for a statement and then they just do it

What you hear when you play these is not each rhythm separately, but what is called "composed rhythm", which is the sound of the two patterns superimposed. The human brain is not capable of executing multiple steps in parallel, which is why this "independence" stuff is hard to conceptualize at first.

@@nigelproctor yes!! the whole point is to make everything muscle memory, so you (to borrow gavin Harrison's terminology) have enough cpu space to make surr everything is coherent and clean. That's how I figured out how to play the thing from Rosetta stoned, I dedicated the hands and left foot to muscle memory, and just focused on making sure my right foot linked up to the left. now I can play the whole thing real smooth and naturally. imagine doing this for each rhythm, with different feels and phrasing... insanity!

Alas, I'm pretty sure that even Buddy would have packed up his sticks & gone home too 😳🥺

Bro don't worry, 99% of drummers can't have his approach. It's so unique and hard. He have 2 CPU processors working at same time :) I follow him also for long time and the approach have lots of math's. But "basically" he close his left side with some pattern like Austin talked. He have an range of paradiddles worked very well. 5diddle,7diddles, doublepara,and so on. Then with right side he completely can make almost all figures, metric modulations,etc. And on this video he uses almost all note values the same, and he can use all note values. Like one of his music's, he is an "allien hip hop"

That's some awesome stories dude. Thanks for sharing! Dude's a monster.

@@IuriSigmaYes he is there is so much footage now I was only watching some clips this morning from his latest clinics in South Africa and the UK.

I bet you there are people out there who'd claim Buddy Rich could have improvised this.

i might borrow this in the future.:) While I hate the term "best" in the arts, and such thing is heavily subjective and can be argued, it's much harder to argue against Virgil being the most "advanced" drummer, provided you have a clue about drumming.

@@awmagill 😅

😂😂😂

yeah hahaha.... he was too much for Dream Theater... it's actually crazy to say

Bruno Neri Dream Theater is garbage

Come on - Jordan Rudess eats polyrhythms for breakfast. Nothing Virgil did stumped them. They’re all very high skilled musicians. Virgil is so amazing at what he does, he couldn’t be a good fit. Whole DT is a great band, they even have to limit their instrumental sections to accommodate vocals, something Virgil is not limited by in most arrangements.

No No your opinion. What bands do you like?

@@randymckinley4137 Nothing Virgil did in the audition stumped the dream theater guys ( you're correct on that). But if they actually chose him and did a live show with him, they would be stumped. Virgil's true musicality would probably come out and confuse the DT guys. The dream theater guys have never played with a drummer who likes to sub divided beats/rhythms into different tuplet variations and polyrhythmic notations. The DT guys aren't bad musicians at all, they're definitely better than me. But the guys in dream theater aren't as musically advanced as virgil is, the closest to Virgil would probably be Rudess though.

Ataraxia also has the same stuff.

Planet X - the greatest band the plebs have never heard of.

one of the greats? he's at the very top of olympus my dude and there's a loooong way down until the next drummer even comes up ni viewing distance. none of the past greats could even play the stuff he's into nowadays much less improvise in it

To Rui Silva: Well said. I am a Matt Gartska fan, as well as a Between the Buried and Me fan, as well as many other modern progressive bands. What they do today was pioneered 10, sometimes 20 years before by Virgil.

Thanks Mike 🙏🏼