On practising, distractions and bad breakbeats…

I had a bad drumming day yesterday.  It hasn’t happened for a long time so it took me somewhat by surprise, and to be honest it hit me quite hard.  It didn’t seem to be a creative block or a lack of ideas, but it was as if my limbs defied me, and what I had in my head didn’t want to manifest itself on the drum kit.  The main culprit seemed to be my right leg, it felt heavy and just didn’t want to play, and was putting all its energy into convincing the rest of my limbs to join its rhythmic boycott.

A logical mind would say that my legs might be physically tired, I’d done two 5k runs in the preceding days.  I was playing stuff that was fast and energetic, whereas most of my practice of late has been slow deliberate coordination exercises.  But my brain didn’t think any of that, it just panicked because suddenly the means to express oneself had been cut off, and due to this panic even things that would normally flow easily suddenly became clunky and wooden.  I started thinking too much about the mechanics of playing, which was constantly taking me away from the moment.

I’m glad to report this morning that everything seems to be working again.  My rational mind has taken over again, and just to be sure I dropped in a few foot workouts into my warmups.  However, it has got me thinking about the ritual of practice, and this pursuit of mastery of the rhythm that I, along with countless other drummers, have the need to engage in.

I started learning drums in 1991 when I was 11, a pre-internet era where play-along backing tracks came on cassette tapes, and the only way to see a master drummer was to physically find a gig, or if you were lucky a masterclass or workshop.  Every so often a copy of Modern Drummer would arrive in the local shop, and if I was the first one of the drummers in our town to get there I would have a window into the world of the larger drumming community.  In the pages towards the back of the magazine were adverts for VHS instructional videos by masters such as Dave Weckl and Greg Bissonnette, although their price point was far, far too high for my pocket money allowance.

You practised in a bubble, not quite sure what level you were at compared to other drummers immediately outside your peer group, which became an echo chamber.  I was lucky that my first drum teacher gave me a solid foundation of technique (he wouldn’t let me go on the kit until I’d done a year on the practice pad) but outside of my studies, I didn’t know what I wanted to practice.  So I just put on my favourite albums and played along, often badly, but little by little working out different fills and grooves, until these became part of my playing.  It was quite easy to choose what to play along to - cassettes were expensive (CDs prohibitively so) so I was limited in my choice.

Contrast this to how a drummer first coming to the kit would experience the world of drumming now.  There is a wall of digital noise getting ready to throw you off track, countless YouTube, Instagram and TikTok videos which show feats of coordination, groove or just sheer showmanship.  While in one way this is a great thing, the bubble of personal practice just got a lot bigger and you can gauge your performance skills on a global scale, there are many side roads and dead ends which will take you off your path.

Let’s face it, no one is ever going to ‘complete’ drumming, it’s a game that gives you an extra level every time you think you’re nearing the end.  Trying to learn everything you see will be a futile path and one which will ultimately lead to frustration.  But having the knowledge that some things are possible can help you get to where you want to be.

Other than drumming, my other teenage obsession was electronic music, and the 90s was an amazing time to be into that genre.  Acts such as the Chemical Brothers, Leftfield and The Prodigy (who blew my mind with a live show in 96) were bringing electronic music into the mainstream, this then allowed more niche genres to shine.  When I first heard jungle and drum & bass (via John Peel’s radio 1 show) I was fascinated by the rhythms. The first thing I did was try them, and failed, miserably.  Through the limitations of my technique, and mindset, I decided that such rhythms were not humanly possible, this sentiment was mirrored by my echo chamber, and for years I only ever played fast breakbeats on the turntables, not the drum kit.  It blew my mind when a few years later I discovered the Jungle Drummer playing such breakbeats at breakneck speed with London Elektricity.  A large part of my drumming persona now is recreating electronic beats, but only became possible because I realised it could be done.

That scenario wouldn’t happen today, I would have logged onto social media and found countless drummers blasting out these beats from KJ Sawka to Jojo Mayer.  I could then find some tutorials on how to apply these rhythms to the drums, and if I found my technique was to blame I could find an abundance of information online on how to improve this, and at least some of it would be good.  If all else failed I could find a drum & bass specialist and book a lesson with them online.  The tools at our disposal are countless compared to when I was initially learning.  And when used in a focused way these ultimately get closer to our goals.  However, it’s easy to get overwhelmed;  unlike my modest tape collection in the 90s, I now have pretty much every album ever made accessible on my iPhone, it could take me an hour just to decide which album to play along with.

But to avoid digital burnout knowing one’s path, or at least having a good idea of the direction we want to take, I feel, is pretty essential.  When we’re initially learning it is good to have a varied diet of all things rhythm and drums and even include things that we don’t initially ‘get’.  As we progress and build our musical DNA we need to narrow down our sphere of influence a little and apply a filter to the input.  This doesn’t mean we have to be narrow-minded or ignore new things, but it maybe means asking ourselves, when we see the pretty shiny new thing on Instagram, “is this going to help take me where I want to go, or is this a distraction?”.  You won’t miss the good stuff, because that will resonate so deeply that you won’t be able to ignore it.

The filter will help you work out what techniques you need to work on, what music you need to listen to more of, or what album to throw on jam along to.  Decoding the DNA of the music and musicians you listen to will help you develop your style.  If you just copy a fill or a groove, you literally just doing that - copying.  If you work out what it is that made that rhythm or fill pop out and connect with you, break it down to its individual elements, and reconstruct it and create new rhythms using that knowledge, those grooves will become part of you, and you will have more tools to intuitively reach for.  We become curators of our own influences, take the inputs, process them, and then the output becomes something truly unique.

The journey of rhythm is ongoing, there is no end destination, and the path sometimes has some wrong turns.  But having a reliable compass helps.

Footnote:

I personally find Benny Greb’s book on practising offers a good way to build a practice routine, Jojo Mayer’s Secret Weapons video series is great for patching up technique, and Rich Stitzel’s DrumMantra books have some great exercises to get me on the kit and get the practice starting.  The influence of my teacher, Mark Guiliana, is strong in these words.