9 Drumming Tips from the Pros

Date:2020/3/3 10:29:42 Hits:

No drummer is an island, entire of itself. It’s only in listening to and learning from our peers and idols that we’re able to reach our full potential. Here are nine tips from nine professional drummers to motivate and inspire.

Casey Cooper (COOP3RDRUMM3R)
“The most valuable lesson I have learned as a drummer is that there’s always someone better than you. Don’t take that as discouragement. Take that as inspiration. At the end of the day, it’s not about being better than people. It’s about being the best you can be.”

As Teddy Roosevelt opined, “comparison is the thief of joy.” As drummers, we are each uniquely gifted in our skills, talents, strengths, and passions. Don’t get hung up on trying to best your peers or competition. Focus on being the drummer that you’d want in your band, and always seek to challenge yourself. In this way, you’ll find satisfaction through the thicks and in the thins of your career.

Play with Other Musicians as Often as You Can
Jordan West (Kailee Morgue, independent)
“While practicing techniques and patterns on your own is important, learning to listen and lock in with other musicians is essential. Play with other people whenever you can. That includes playing along with records. Find some that inspire or challenge you and go for it. When I first started drums, I took every James Brown record I could find and just played through them all. I learned so much about groove and focus just by playing along with Clyde Stubblefield (Brown’s drummer) and trying to match his feel. Playing with others or records is also a great thing to do if you’re stuck in a rut — it helps open up your ears and give you new ideas to try.”

Should you ever find yourself burned-out or stalled in your growth, Jordan recommends a change of scenery. Sit in on a pickup gig, start a cover band, or learn a new album from top to bottom. Getting out of your comfort zone by learning new styles and techniques and playing with new musicians can stretch those musical muscles and help you discover a new love behind the kit.

Build Your Drumming Vocabulary
Mike Johnston (MikesLessons.com)
“I’m thinking of these [patterns] as little letters that I’m building up my vocabulary with. So maybe letter A would be six notes long and something like, ‘kick, kick, right, LEFT, right, left.’ And letter B might be something like ‘kick, right, LEFT, kick, right, LEFT,’ where I’m popping the left and ghosting the right. Once you master those two letters, A and B, you can start putting them together. If it takes four letters to make a one-measure fill, I’ll probably go, ‘AABA.'”

Rudiments form the building blocks of common musical phrases and provide a frame of reference for communicating ideas with other drummers. But what about patterns that fall outside of the scope of rudiments? For these, Mike recommends “glossarizing” your own licks and fills and using them to build more and more complex musical sentences. Begin to take inventory of your most used musical patterns, and before long, you’ll be conjugating at a graduate level.

Learn to Read Music
Steve Ferrone (Tom Petty, Eric Clapton)
“There’s some people that feel they don’t have to learn to read music. And then there’s other people that think that reading music is everything. And that’s not it either. There’s a happy medium. There’s playing from the heart, which is good — it’s what you do if you don’t read music. And then there’s playing from the head. Neither of which on their own are good. It’s good to expand your musical ideas in other directions.”

Sweetwater is fortunate to regularly host some of the industry’s top talent under our roof. At GearFest 2018, Steve Ferrone led a drum workshop and kindly answered some questions from drummers out in the crowd. One of his more surprising answers was about the importance of reading music, a skill that Ferrone, king of the groove and top-40 golden ticket, picked up at the age of 21 when he returned to school. Learning to read music will not only make you more valuable as a drummer but will also open up a whole new world of inspiration and music appreciation.

Get Loose or Ditch the Click
Craig Anderton (Author, musician, audio guru)
“When you look at the tempo track for a lot of current pop music, it’s a flat line…and we all know what flatlined means. This isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but it’s not always a good thing, either. Songs without a click track have tempo variations that can help a song breathe.”

Click tracks (metronomes) have arguably done a lot of good for the recording process, tightening up performances and greasing the editing gears. But what a static pulse fails to re-create is the natural push and pull of how a drummer interprets a song. Craig’s study shows that some of the most celebrated music of the last century has a detectable ebb and flow to its verses and choruses. So how to implement this in 2018? Try recording live on the floor without a click track. Or, if you must play to a grid, build a tempo map based around the drummer’s live performance.

Get into Character
Vinnie Colaiuta (Megadeth, Steely Dan, Jing Chi)
“During my formative educational years, I listened to everything. I didn’t really differentiate between genres. I just embraced everything. Eventually I started getting into sessions. If there were types [of music] I wasn’t familiar with, I would listen and try to get into the whole character of it — the whole, ‘what is it about?’ I think if you can get inside the concept of a genre and open yourself up to what that music is saying to you, then the other things will follow.”

You’d be hard-pressed to find a drummer more musically diverse than Berklee-trained Vinnie Colaiuta. From interviews and performances, it’s clear this living legend has an appreciation for, and understanding of, the drum kit that transcends beats and patterns. This stems from Vinnie’s love of such a wide swath of musical styles — a love that continues to grow with the projects he chooses to take on. If you want to diversify your grooves, study genres outside your comfort zone. You may walk away with more than just a new set of chops.

Overcome Instrumental Plateaus
Stewart Copeland (The Police, Gizmodrome)
“Music is a wider world than whatever your instrument is. You’re not a guitarist, you’re a musician. You’re not a drummer, you’re a musician. You’re not a singer, you’re a musician. When you get sick of singing, go pick up a guitar or a piano, or even a page! I urge all my rock ‘n’ roll buddies, ‘Look, that reading/writing music thing, it ain’t rocket science.'”

Within each drummer is the soul of a creator and heart of a composer, whether or not you play other instruments. If your creativity has become stifled behind the kit, don’t be afraid to move on for a time. Plunk away at a piano or pick up a guitar and noodle. Learn basic music theory. Sight-read a piece of sheet music. Maybe even test the waters with a new instrument. Any skill you pick up outside the kit will have a net positive on your value behind the kit, in the forms of new musical sensitivity and appreciation, and perhaps a new project (as with Copeland’s Gizmodrome and Oysterhead) altogether.

By the way, the full Copeland interview, written by our friend Paul Kobylensky, is full of pearls like this one. It’s definitely worth your time. Be sure to check it out here.

Create a Functional Practice Routine
Kenny Aronoff (Smashing Pumpkins, John Mellencamp)
“I look at, ‘what things do I need to work on right now?’ — you know, take care of business first. I narrowed it [my practice routine] down to 20 or 30 minutes. It maintains that extra 3% you can lose if you don’t practice each day. I’ll sometimes do it three times a day: early in the morning, before a show if I’m on tour, and crazy enough, sometimes before I go to bed, so I’m that much more warmed up when I wake up in the morning.”

Ever wonder what a daily practice routine looks like for author and industry icon Kenny Aronoff? He gave Nick D’Virgilio an inside look during an exclusive 2016 interview. Kenny’s quadrupedal practice pad routine, based around his own 13 Hand Patterns exercise (see Power Workout: Complete), is a set of steps he follows every day to stay limber and warm up before a show. If you want to fast-track your workout routine and maintain your progress in and out of season, follow Kenny’s exercise steps, or build your own routine based on what needs improvement today. Make it interesting and challenging enough that you can stick to it every day, and your chops will stay up in and out of season.

Study Yourself
Josh Dun (twenty one pilots)
“I would go to shows and then go home and play drums and try and get better. Sometimes, kind of how athletes watch game tape afterwards, I would set up a camera while I play and dissect it and figure out how I can improve. I’d watch myself play a drum fill and be like, ‘It doesn’t sound cool’ or ‘It doesn’t fit’ or ‘I think I can do something a little more exciting’ — just from watching it, because what I feel in my head feels way different than how it really comes across. Even now, I go on YouTube and watch our own performances and kind of critique us — the stage in general — but then myself as a musician.”

Have you ever watched yourself perform? It’s a vulnerable place to put yourself on the chopping block and dissect your own art, but it can be awfully telling. As Josh told us in a 2017 interview, self-critique was and continues to be an important step in his progress as a drummer and showman. If you can’t stomach scrutinizing yourself, invite a friend or loved one to give you tips about how you can improve. It won’t always be fun, but it can give you some ideas of your current strengths and how you can better yourself as a performer and artist.

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