Mike Shockley is an intuitive, energetic drummer who turned me on to punk rock music including Black Flag, Dead Kennedys and in particular my favorite punk band, The Minutemen. Below in four short videos he shares the simple program he developed for himself to build the stamina for punk rock drumming.
I used to cut down punk rock and only listened to all the [funk, rock and jazz] drummers… I finally realized I couldn’t play the fast punk shit, I discovered this album [Just Can’t Stop It by The English Beat] and developed an exercise to go with it… this album is one of the greatest albums ever made and the drummer is so impeccable he’s basically a metronome.. I still do this exercise and it never gets boring because this album is so great… so this album is the key to it all…And I made this exercise really simple… So simple you could watch TV while doing it… you basically sit at the drum set and play 16th notes around the drums to this album… At first it’s very hard… So you do eighth notes for a measure sixteenths for a measure till you can build up to doing sixteenths the whole time… I think the album is about 48 minutes long… literally within two weeks of doing this my drumming improved 100%… And after a lifetime of doing this it’s my secret to staying ahead of the game…. keep in mind this exercise is about stamina… It’s about working 10 times harder than you would experience on stage… So at any point on stage you can’t be taxed
Mike Shockley, Rehoboth Beach, Delaware November 2019