To quickly introduce Paul Jones and give an overview of his achievements I took this short summary from the website because I believe it sums it up pretty well.
"Paul Jones is a British session drummer. As a seasoned music professional, his knowledge and experience has helped artists like Sigma, Labrinth and others, sell out their live shows and tours both here in the UK and Worldwide and become household names."
-Source: Paul Jones' Website (http://paulthefunkydrummer.com)
The masterclass started off with him doing a short introduction of himself and then proceeding to play us two original songs and one remix which he produced.
Afterwards, the audience had the opportunity to ask questions and some of them were very interesting and his answers were informative.
One person asked how to go about getting endorsements and his answer was that he approached the brands himself and emailed them or talked to representatives. It's very important to get out there and play a lot of shows and gain exposure and a fan base because then brands will be more likely to want you to represent them since you are able to represent their brand in front of an audience and thus they are gaining new customers.
The next question was from a production student who wanted to know how to get a good performance out of a drummer in a particular style and genre like for example Drum and Bass. Paul explained that communication is essential and that it's best to just sit down with the artist in the studio without recording and just try to make clear exactly what you are looking for and give him reference tracks which sound similar and then maybe let him play you some stuff and you try to give him feedback in which direction you want it to go.
Another student asked how he got the gig for SIGMA and interestingly enough he replied that he got the gig by emailing their booking agent who also was Labrinth's booking agent who he had played with in the past and a couple of months later SIGMA had a meeting with their management team and they invited him along and it worked out and he was able to secure the gig.
After the Q&A he proceeded to give us a rundown of his live setup with which he is able to play EDM tracks without a problem. He explained the signal flow of the setup and how he could seamlessly switch between songs by using Ableton to trigger different sounds and loops.
Then he showed us how he chops up loops and assigns them to the electronic drum pads to play them live.
In the last part of the masterclass, Paul played us another two of his original Drum and Bass tracks which were my personal favorites from the five tracks he had played to us and then he let five people volunteer to try to jam to one of the songs on his drumkit. It was very fun to hear all the different drummers attempt to incorporate the electronic pads with the samples and listening to how unique the style of each student was.
What I took away:
Perhaps one of the most important things I got out of the masterclass is that you always have to be proactive and never afraid to ask people for opportunities and work because sometimes unexpected things can happen.
Another thing that is very important is to stay relevant because nowadays the music industry is so saturated and there is so much content available that if you do not go out there and play gigs and put out new content and meet people you will easily fade into the background and get forgotten.
I have seen a couple of drummers with a hybrid setup who are able to play EDM like for example the drummer of Modestep but I've fully understand how the signal flow works so the Masterclass gave me new insight on that.
Critique:
In my opinion, Paul could have spent a bit less time on how he chops up loops in Ableton because the majority of students don't have a lot of knowledge about how to use DAW's anyway and there was not enough time to go in-depth enough.
All in all, it was a very fun Masterclass and I definitely enjoyed it a lot even if I didn't learn a lot of new things.
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