Give The Drummer Some (Advice)
Lessons I wish I had learned sooner behind the kit
First I want to thank everyone that has reached out after my last letter. Hearing from Montana’s friends as well as from strangers has meant a lot to me. I also want to thank the folks that signed up for this newsletter after last week’s post. I hope you’ll understand that for good reason most of what I write will not be like the last letter. Despite this, I hope you stick around.
This week I’m going to deliver on the advice-giving that I alluded to last week. I think Montana would appreciate sticking to a plan.
This year I plan on learning as many songs as I can from a list of roughly 500 tunes. I’ll explain why and to what end soon. Before we get to that though I need to make sure that my foundation is strong enough to bear the load of all that drumming. To do that I’m going to write down the advice that I’d give to my younger self back when I first started playing drums.
Who am I to be giving advice? Well, the portion of my life spent drumming is reaching the 66% mark, so at the very least I have the credentials to instruct the version of me sitting at the tail end of the 33% pre-drumming portion. I’ve played my share of packed houses and empty rooms, both essential learning experiences. I’ve earned enough money to pay consequential chunks of my rent from drumming. I’ve taught a few lessons to beginners here and there. I know enough to know I’m not as good as some of my friends and peers, but I’m good enough to not really by bothered by this. Finally, I’ve earned another consequential chunk of my rent through writing about music, so I’m reasonably confident that I can explain the lessons I’ve learned behind the kit in the written word.
Much of what I’m going to offer here are reiterations of lessons that I picked up from my drum teachers throughout the years. Thank you Peter Davenport, Frank Donaldson, Tom Hipskind, Udo Dahmen, Tony “Thunder” Smith, and everyone else that’s passed along their knowledge to me. I also owe a debt to all of the drummers whose instructional videos and books and playing I’ve picked things up from. If I started listing those drummers now we’d never get to the actually useful information, if there is any to be found, in this letter.
Stretch before you even think about picking up the sticks.
This may seem obvious, but you play drums using your body. As a kid who was god awful at sports and decent at video games I was inclined to think of music as something that I made with my brain and considered the physicality of the process as an unfortunate afterthought. This meant that I would overlook how crucial my limbs were to translating the ideas in my head to physical reality. To support this misconception I latched onto a legitimately true fact about drumming. Playing drums with good technique isn’t a matter of exerting force, more often than not gravity does the work for you. What I was conveniently ignoring was that learning how to have this good technique meant being aware of my body enough to know what was and was not exertion.
I first tried stretching after seeing Cryptopsy drummer Flo Mounier’s stretching routine on his instructional DVD Extreme Metal Drumming. I figured if a guy that could play blast beats at 200+ bpm was taking the time to stretch before playing then hey, worth a shot right? The benefits were immediate. Before I started stretching it always felt like there was a disconnect between what I wanted my hands to do and what they were capable of, as if I was sending my ideas through a dial-up modem. After I stretched it was like switching to high speed internet. I played faster, looser, and with a casual ease that made me more confidant that what I wanted to play would sound good when I tried it. I am sure that if I had been committed to stretching from the beginning I would have internalized my early drum lessons much faster.
For God’s sake wear ear plugs
Drumming isn’t just something that you do with your body, it’s also something that happens to your body. Being in the same room as someone playing drums loudly can do irreparable damage to your ears if you aren’t careful. Doubly so for the person sitting directly behind those drums. Wearing earplugs doesn’t look cool and being concerned for your health doesn’t strike most people as being “rock’n’roll”. But if you’re trying to play the long game and don’t plan on being plagued by a high pitched screech for the rest of your life suck it up and plug those damn ears!
A few of my musician friends have told me that wearing ear plugs has made it harder for them to hear what they’re playing. I don’t think that my friends are liars, but personally I’ve had the opposite experience.1 Wearing ear plugs blocks out all of the excess ringing from cymbals and the conflicting resonance of the drums. Instead I hear the attack of each instrument clearly, which makes it easier to focus in on my timing. Win-win!
Focus on your posture, and learn how to improve it
Now that you’ve stretched and protected your hearing, it’s time to sit down behind the drums. This too is more complicated than I imagined when I first started playing. Playing drums with bad posture can block up your playing in the same way that playing without stretching can prevent you from playing loosely. The more balanced and at ease your body is, the smoother your body will move from instrument to instrument and the better you’ll feel after hours of playing. Slouching over your snare will warp your back and your hearing. If you sit up straight and keep your body turned directly towards your kit you’ll prevent soreness, hear the balance of your playing better, and you’ll have an easier time catching cues from your bandmates.
There are two ways to improve your posture behind the kit. First, you can adjust the kit to fit your body. Drums are a blessedly modular instrument. Unlike your string playing companions you can move each part of your kit to wherever you need it to be. You can adjust the height of your stool2. You can change the angle of each drum and cymbal to fit your play-style and the particulars of your body. One of my teachers would refuse to start the lesson until I customized the kit I was practicing on first. This was a lesson unto itself: take the time to feel good and you’ll play better.
The other side of fixing your posture requires work away from the kit. As an old roommate of mine once put it, “if you care about your posture you’ll never be bored”. It still takes constant reminders for me to roll my shoulders and straighten my back, especially after hours of sitting. But I have had to remind myself less often as I’ve become more consistent with exercise. In short, if you want to be better at drums, consider doing some squats.
I feel like this could be misconstrued as a brag or a suggestion for a serious lifestyle change so I want to make it clear that nothing that I’m doing is particularly impressive. I’m just some guy with two 20 pound dumbbells in his apartment who also does (very) infrequent yoga classes on YouTube. You do not need to suddenly become a power lifter in order to benefit from working out. Part of the problem with the most public advocates for exercise being models, actors, and athletes (i.e. the professionally hot) is that we assume that fitness is an all or nothing deal. Not so. Find something that you can do consistently and then consistently do it and I bet you’ll feel better and play better on the kit too.
If you can’t hear your bandmates, play quieter
This advice is mostly for the rehearsal room. On stage or in the recording studio you might need to play at a specific volume in order for the music to “work” correctly. But if we take to be true the old maxim that practicing alone is about learning your parts and practicing with the rest of the ensemble is about learning everyone else’s parts then you’re going to want to play at a volume where you can actually hear what everyone else is doing.
This has practical benefits of course, but it also helps instill a mindfulness of your bandmates. You are playing music with them, not at them. The easier it is to hear what they are doing, the easier it is to write parts that fit with what they’re playing. Maybe you’ll start to pick up on how they feel. Maybe it’ll start to be easier to maintain relationships with them. Just a thought!
Having the best gear doesn’t matter (but not having bad gear does)
Something I didn’t quite appreciate until I started working a normal office job is how many companies exist only to sell things to companies that sell things. This is true in the music business as well. When I’ve written about the state of the business I’ve usually done so under the framing of musicians as merchants who sell the product of their labor. But musicians are also a consumer class. And as consumers they are the target of a massive marketing apparatus determined to sell them as much gear at the highest price possible.
As a drummer someone is always trying to sell you cymbals, hardware, sticks, drums themselves, drum heads, foot pedals, stools, practice pads, gloves (?), shoes (??). The marketing departments for each of these products is betting on your desire to be a better drummer at any cost. They need you to believe that you are one cymbal, one new pair of sticks at just the right size, away from being as good as your idols. To conceive you of this need, and their ability to fill it, they leverage the very idols that you seek to play like. Open up the liner notes to some albums and you’ll see the logos for Vic Firth, Evans, Tama, Sonor, Sabian, Paiste, Zildjian, Gretsch, Pro-mark, etc alongside the lyrics and copyright information. Looking for footage of your favorite drummer breaking down his parts? Your best option is spon-con for the company providing him with skins.
To be clear, I don’t begrudge the musicians for taking part in this ruse. Getting free gear and promotion for your playing is nothing to sneeze at. But buying Neil Peart’s signature cymbals won’t get you any closer to being able to play “YYZ” then buying a pair of Jordan’s will get you to six rings. You put Tony Royster Jr behind a child’s practice kit and he’ll sound more like himself than a child will sound like Tony Royster Jr behind his luxury sedan of a drum kit.
So, young Ian, don’t worry so much about not having Mike Portnoy’s Maxx Staxx, or Aaron Harris’s exact drum heads, Danny Carey’s signature sticks, or just the right double kick pedal. Focus on yourself and you’ll sound just fine.
…unless you’re playing on absolute trash gear. The flip side of this marketing scheme is that plenty of drummers never get hooked enough to convince themselves they need a 9-piece bubinga wood drum kit. For those just passing through, the cheap stuff will suffice. And the cheap stuff suuuuucks. Entry level cymbals and drum kits are probably responsible for as many abandoned drum hobbies as bad teachers. Opting out of improving your gear at all, either out of stinginess or anti-consumerist obstinance, will ruin every session and show that you sit in on.
The solution is a middle path. Find the gear that you think sounds good to you, regardless of who’s name is on it, and invest in it. Your audience and bandmates will appreciate even if they don’t notice why. More importantly you’ll enjoy playing on better gear. The better you feel playing, the better you’ll sound in the long run.
Learn music from the music, not just the books
The summer before I went to college I filled in a country gig for a bandmate of mine. One of the songs he asked me to learn was, on paper, pretty straightforward, driven by the same basic kick-snare pattern that I’d played thousands of times in indie rock bands. But when I started playing the groove with the band something felt off. Gradually through both practice and intent listening I realized that it wasn’t the part itself that was wrong, it was the way I was playing it. There was a microscope difference in timing, the kind of thing that would never show up in a transcription, that made the whole track groove in a particularly country way.
This was an invaluable lesson, one that would be of great help to me in college as I learned how to play soul, pop, and R&B tunes with the appropriate feel. Every genre requires you to feel time in a way specific to that style. For years I loved learning bossa nova and funk grooves from transcriptions and instructional books, but every time I tried to play them with a band I still sounded like the prog rock drummers that I spent most of my free time listening to. You have to hear how the parts work in their original context to hear how they’re supposed to feel. A book can only get you so far. Your ears will have to take you the rest of the way there.
Thanks for reading. I think I’ve been hemming and hawing long enough, so next week I’ll announce the big project I’ve been hinting at for the last few weeks. I could stay in prep mode for ever so it’s best at this point just to jump in and learn as I go.
I’ve also found that custom fitted earplugs have a more nuanced balance of the “real” sound compared to the corner store foam variety. If you can shell out for customs, go for it. I really enjoyed using them but would lose them too frequently to make the math work out.
I love and respect the arrogance of drummers calling their furniture a “throne” but I’ve never met any royalty behind the kit so let’s just call a stool a stool.