The Best Lesson I Learned From Each of My Drummer Teachers

Five teachers, five lessons

I had every intention of sending you another entry of Drumming Upstream this week. I’ve been learning this particular song since April. It’s another long one and it has taken a long time to get right. This weekend I thought I’d cross the finish line but it was not meant to be.

First I got a last minute gig that took up my whole Friday. I was happy to have it, any excuse to get paid to play drums. The next time I could make it to the practice space was for an agreed upon cleaning meeting. If you’ve watched my drum covers you’ll know that our space accumulates a lot of stuff, and since a lot of us are shooting videos in there these days it behooved us to declutter the frame a bit.¹

While we were getting the room into shape I glanced at my phone and saw an email from Action Button announcing the publication of the latest Tim Rogers video. This is a calendar clearing occurrence for me, not just as a fan of Rogers’ work but as a working critic. As implausible as it seems, watching a six hour long review of a video game that was never released outside of Japan genuinely qualifies as research for me. Action Button Reviews is one of two primary stylistic influences on Drumming Upstream (the other is Stereogum’s “The Number Ones” fwiw). On top of that, the theme of nostalgia for a summer in the countryside is directly relevant to the song I’m learning.

The next drum cover will likely be ready next week, but in the spirit of learning from the masters I thought I’d cook up a quick letter about the most enduring lessons that I learned from each of my drum teachers. Some of this might be review from my letter about drumming advice I’d give my younger self, but as I’ve learned from years of taking lessons sometimes you need to hear something more than once in order for it to sink in. Let’s get started:

Teacher #1: Peter Davenport

The Lesson: I like playing drums and I like getting better at playing drums

I took weekly lessons from Davenport from 8th grade until I started my first semester of college. We’d resume those lessons each summer when I came home from Chicago. The entire basis of my technique, style, and skill set all come from those nine years of on and off lessons. That I even ended up playing drums for that long wasn’t a guarantee. While it is impossible to think of myself as anything but a drummer now, any number of things could have derailed me from that path. I can’t help but credit Peter Davenport with teaching me to stick with it. I learned how to learn an instrument from Davenport. I learned that I was willing to suffer being bad in order to eventually be decent. No other lesson would have been possible with out that one.

Teacher #2: Larry Finn

The Lesson: “Anyone who can play something that you can’t is a better drummer than you.”

In the summer of 2007 I attended a six week long summer program at Berklee College of Music. Twice a week I took group lessons from Larry Finn. There were about eight of us, each behind our own drum kits set up in a semi-circle facing inward to Finn. Nervously waiting to play the week’s assignment in front of the rest of the class while Finn spectated in a bicep-hugging black t-shirt is the closest my drum education has ever come to Whiplash. Finn was no tyrant though, and I had a great time in class. The guy had a lot of one liners and anecdotes that I’ve chewed on for years. Near the end of the six weeks in the middle of a lesson that I’ve otherwise completely forgotten, Finn offhandedly said the sentence I quoted above. To a bunch of competitive teenagers the line was taken for a challenge, but as I’ve turned it over in my mind in the years since I’ve found it humbling. I’ve turned it into a reminder that any drummer can teach me something. Getting better isn’t a straight line upwards, it’s a web that stretches out in every direction.

Teacher #3: Tony “Thunder” Smith

The Lesson: “You can’t judge music until you learn how to play it.”

At the same Berklee summer program I also took lessons in a smaller group with Tony “Thunder” Smith. Smith took mischievous joy in wrong footing us on the kit. All of his assignments were rhythmic tongue-twisters, awkward five note phrasings, songs with their downbeats obscured. In retrospect I think he was trying to teach us to be flexible, to maintain our balance even in the strangest circumstances. He once described playing for Lou Reed as like trying to balance a spinning plate on a stick, so these exercises were teaching something he knew had practical value.

But his most consequential lesson came away from the kit. While we were packing up at the end of class Smith casually mentioned that he once decided to learn how to play country music to see whether he liked it or not. The way he saw it, he couldn’t judge it unless he really understood how it worked. Turned out that he still didn’t like country music, but hey he gave it an honest shot.

Open-mindedness isn’t a passive activity and the work is worth doing.

Teacher #4: Tom Hipskind

The Lesson: I need structure in order to learn.

Tom Hipskind was my private drum teacher for my last two years of college. Before Hipskind my private lessons at school had been more like office hours. I spent two years without any clear program of what to work on privately. I still had plenty of material to practice, but most of it came from my ensembles. I hadn’t realized how bad this had been for my motivation until I started taking lessons with Hipskind. Hipskind laid out a steady plan of exercises and assignments from books. These assignments had their own benefits, but the larger benefit was taking away any mystery of what to do when I sat down at the kit. Was it always the most exciting stuff to work on? No, but working through those vegetables gave me more energy to chow down on dessert (read: stupidly complicated time signatures, I was in college after all) on my own time.

After I graduated and left this structure behind I hit a major skid in my playing. I got lazy. I indulged all of my worst impulses. I stopped pushing myself. It took me years of steady gigging to get my feet back under me. Ever since I’ve made sure that I always have a project to chip away at so that all of my tools stay sharp.

Teacher #5: Udo Dahmen

The Lesson: Trust your instincts.

The school Udo Dahmen runs in Mannheim had (and probably still has) a partnership with my college, so every year he’d fly in for a week to watch the ensembles practice and give one-on-one lessons. The first time I met him he sat in to watch an ensemble I was a part of that had two drummers. This particular ensemble was assigned to write original material with each other. We did not choose to have two drummers. The teachers never said it openly but they insinuated that figuring out how to make this awkward lineup work was part of the point of the class. We never solved the puzzle. I think the two of us could have gotten on the same page eventually, but we were always playing catch up to the songs the band was writing. The provisional solution was to stay out of each other’s way, to not make big deal out having two full drum sets, and sometimes to switch off songs on one kit.

After watching us play a few songs we were working on, Udo Dahmen gave us a few general compliments before smiling to himself and saying that he wished we had made more of having two drummers. Hearing this I felt shame for having felt ashamed. This class and given me the chance to be a part of a band built around the drums and I had squandered that opportunity. I had bent to the will of normalcy and played it safe when I could have been daring.

A year later Dahmen taught me this same lesson again. By then I had started teaching drum lessons myself. To get my student used to coordinating their feet and hands I tried assigning exercises that moved a single rhythm through a matrix. This way the student could feel what playing that rhythm was like at any part of the beat. I got the sense that the student found this approach too mechanical. They wanted to learn a Jack White song instead. After a few months the lessons ended under the pretense of not having the time. I had liked having the extra money so this bummed me out. It made me wonder if this matrix concept was a mistake, some over intellectualized version of learning music that was bound to alienate students.

This time around Dahmen taught me as a private student, and the first thing he made me play was a matrix. The rhythm was more complicated and better suited to an intermediate player, but the core concept was the same. That I had inadvertently reverse engineered one of the same tools that the head of our sister school in German used blew my mind. Maybe I had tried it out on a student too early, but the idea had merit.

If you have a clever idea, try it. If you have two drum sets, don’t hold back.

1. If you’d like to see what one of my drum-room-mates has been using the space for, check out Adam Holmes’s drum transcription of a Cole Anthony post-game interview.