Search - Cherry Lane Rush Legendary Licks for Drums DVD on DVD

Great instructional video on RUSH classics

Byron K. Guernsey | Charlestown, Indiana, USA | 04/14/2005

(4 out of 5 stars)

"Jamie Borden does a very good job of demonstrating an interpretation of the drum parts from spirit of the radio, tom sawyer, freewill, new world man, yyz, red barchetta, subdivisions, and limelight. He plays the song with a house band and then slows it down to show you the fills.

Buy this DVD if you like Neil Peart's drumming and want to learn any of those songs. It will definitely help.

Having said that, I have some criticisms that keep this video from ranking as a 5 star video:

- Jamie appears a bit stiff and nervous and hurries through much of the discussion
- The breakdown of the songs is sometimes terse and leaves out some fills or parts that would be helpful to hear slower, but you can't expect everything to be replayed
- The split screen to see the drums and bass pedal wastes a lot of screen real estate - the feet could have been inset over the video in the corner of the screen to make better use of the screen
- Jamie sometimes makes errors in his performance when compared to his how-to-play slow breakdown. His performance is an interpretation, based on his analysis of the songs as played by Neil Peart, but it appears that he may play these songs differently every time and his break down of the songs does not always correspond to the performance piece. Its usually very minor things during the fills, but enough to make you wonder which way is better - the way he performs it, or the way he plays it in the breakdown. The errors are things such as playing certain beats on different toms. I'm not a stickler for minor details, but if you're going to make a video with a slowed down version of your performance, it should really correspond to what you perform.
- Audio, while good, doesn't compare to the drum micing done on the Neil Peart Work In Progress video.
- Commentary - This is a personal preference, but I hoped to hear some commentary on the music- some tidbits on the songs themselves, or inside stories from Neil... but I guess those are hard to come by and Neil wasn't involved in the production of the video. You'd think with all the letters Neil writes in his book Ghost Rider, he'd at least have time to write a few savory bits to Jamie on the 8 songs he teaches. At a minimum, I had hoped to hear some discussion of the setups Neil used back when each of the songs was made. But this video is purely an interpretation of the drum grooves and fills from the songs with no inside information, however clearly Neil blessed this video in some way since his photo is on the cover.
- 4:3 ratio - its not a 16:9 video. So on a big screen tv, where you can really see the drums, you end up stretching the video out of proportion.
- No sheet music included. The Neil Peart Work In Progress Video includes a transcription of the drum parts. This Video does not.

Despite those criticism, I enjoyed the video very much and I'm still using it to learn some of the songs. The interpretation is not perfectly accurate, but given that Neil himself has no video on these classic RUSH songs, this is the best we can do for now."