Talk about a drumming revelation you've had

Here's a copy/paste of part of my story from another thread:

During my first 22 years of playing drums, I played either at church or in various Christian bands. Whenever I gigged, it was usually at a Christian-based club, coffee shop, church, youth rally, etc. I never really gigged anywhere outside of this kind of venue. Also keep in mind that a lot of these venues paid nothing. And if they did pay anything, it was so small that it went either to food, gas, or equipment purchases/repairs because we all were poor and our gear was always beat to pieces.

So about three years ago, I hooked up with some guys who were tired of playing bluegrass who actually gigged out quite a bit. We started playing Americana music (a mix of Creedance, Doc Watson, John Prine, Chris Knight, etc.), and we got booked to play a college campus about 4-5 months after we started playing together. I was 40 years old and never played a "secular" venue in my life. We played, people loved us, and we got PAID! And I got to keep my money! It was then that I realized that maybe, just maybe, I was something more than "just a church drummer." It opened my eyes to a whole new world that showed me that, heck, maybe I'm pretty good at what I do.

I wish I would have started a decade or two earlier.
 
Pork Pie Guy, I can relate to what you just posted. I've been mostly a church drummer since I started in 2003 at the tender young age of 33. I've played outside of churches a couple of times, and it's always nice to get paid. Of course I'm a professional level trumpet player, and I've gotten paid to play my horn for a touch over 30 years, so I'm no stranger to gigging and getting paid, but I haven't done it much on drums. With that said, my current church gig is paid - not a ton, but it makes it worth the time I put in to it.
 
8Mile said:
I had a private lesson with Jim Riley some years ago and he said (I'm paraphrasing here), "If a fill works, it's okay to repeat it. Nobody is going to care that you played the same thing twice. If it's what works, play it again."

This was something he said he was told by a producer/engineer years ago and he took notice of. It seems simple, but left a lasting impression on me. I played a lot of improvisational music, where repeating oneself is considered un-hip, so I tried to carry that over to rock and pop music. But I found I was over-complicating things trying to avoid any repetition when sometimes repetition is exactly what the music needs.

What was a revelation you've had about drumming?
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I had to be re-assured by my first teacher too. I had a weird insecurity that I was playing the same things too much, and my first teacher looked at me funny when I explained that I felt like my drumming was sort of repetitive.

She said "Uh, that's okay. Drumming and music is a repetitive thing". I was on some weird quest to never repeat my fills and be "original" but this is not helpful when everyone else just wants you to play what's best for the song, regardless if that's the same things over and over, or a linear thing.

It's hard not to make rules for yourself. Gotta let that stuff go and do what sounds best even if it doesn't make you look personally great. In the end, it kinda does anyway to the right people.
 
Dr_Watso said:
I had to be re-assured by my first teacher too. I had a weird insecurity that I was playing the same things too much, and my first teacher looked at me funny when I explained that I felt like my drumming was sort of repetitive.

She said "Uh, that's okay. Drumming and music is a repetitive thing". I was on some weird quest to never repeat my fills and be "original" but this is not helpful when everyone else just wants you to play what's best for the song, regardless if that's the same things over and over, or a linear thing.

It's hard not to make rules for yourself. Gotta let that stuff go and do what sounds best even if it doesn't make you look personally great. In the end, it kinda does anyway to the right people.
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I used to think that way too. I remember hearing November Rain by Guns n' Roses when it first hit the airwaves, with Matt Sorum playing the same drum fill (or a slight variation of) for pretty much the entire song, and thinking "wow, how completely lazy and unoriginal" (I was super into Rush and Dream Theater and the like at that point). But as I got older, I realized that that's just what the song called for.

Learning to play for the song, regardless of how simple it seems, is a huge turning point for every drummer, I feel. Yet it seems to be hard for some to wrap their heads around the idea that you don't always need to be technically "impressive" with your drumming. The most impressive thing you can do is make the song feel great... Even if that means playing a boring or repetitive part. Hey, it worked for AC/DC - another band I used to dismiss because of the basic/"uninteresting" drumming.
 
My revaluation (although not new) “less is more.” I play in a pop/rock dance band. A few months ago I decided to scale back my kit to a 3 piece. Kick, snare, and floor. One crash, ride and hi hat. I have gotten more compliments on my playing then I got in my last 40 years. Even my bass player whom I have been working with on and off since 1990 stated how he felt I had one of my best gigs yet a few weeks ago.
 
PorkPieGuy said:
Here's a copy/paste of part of my story from another thread:

During my first 22 years of playing drums, I played either at church or in various Christian bands. Whenever I gigged, it was usually at a Christian-based club, coffee shop, church, youth rally, etc. I never really gigged anywhere outside of this kind of venue. Also keep in mind that a lot of these venues paid nothing. And if they did pay anything, it was so small that it went either to food, gas, or equipment purchases/repairs because we all were poor and our gear was always beat to pieces.

So about three years ago, I hooked up with some guys who were tired of playing bluegrass who actually gigged out quite a bit. We started playing Americana music (a mix of Creedance, Doc Watson, John Prine, Chris Knight, etc.), and we got booked to play a college campus about 4-5 months after we started playing together. I was 40 years old and never played a "secular" venue in my life. We played, people loved us, and we got PAID! And I got to keep my money! It was then that I realized that maybe, just maybe, I was something more than "just a church drummer." It opened my eyes to a whole new world that showed me that, heck, maybe I'm pretty good at what I do.

I wish I would have started a decade or two earlier.
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So how did drumming change or improve your trumpet playing? Just asking.
 
smoothy said:
My revaluation (although not new) “less is more.” I play in a pop/rock dance band. A few months ago I decided to scale back my kit to a 3 piece. Kick, snare, and floor. One crash, ride and hi hat. I have gotten more compliments on my playing then I got in my last 40 years. Even my bass player whom I have been working with on and off since 1990 stated how he felt I had one of my best gigs yet a few weeks ago.
Click to expand...

Welcome to Drummerworld, where all your drumming questions get answered and more...Like Japanese toilets :)

The longer people try to avoid this, playing less, the longer they put off their own happiness.
 
I had a revelation when I was younger and playing with a few cover bands.

I used to have trouble learning structure/arrangements of new tunes. I tried making cheat sheets, and full transcriptions, but those proved to be cumbersome.

Then one day I was talking to a guy at the local GC and he told me that he just focused on learning the lyrics of new songs and that is how he learned them.

I've been doing that since with great results!
 
Capital D said:
I had a revelation when I was younger and playing with a few cover bands.

I used to have trouble learning structure/arrangements of new tunes. I tried making cheat sheets, and full transcriptions, but those proved to be cumbersome.

Then one day I was talking to a guy at the local GC and he told me that he just focused on learning the lyrics of new songs and that is how he learned them.

I've been doing that since with great results!
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I do the same thing. It's so much easier if you learn the words to the song. Every band I play with wants to give me a mic to sing backups, cuz they see me behind the drums singing along to every song. Singing is not my strong suit though, so I squash that idea pretty quickly.
 
smoothy said:
My revaluation (although not new) “less is more.” I play in a pop/rock dance band. A few months ago I decided to scale back my kit to a 3 piece. Kick, snare, and floor. One crash, ride and hi hat. I have gotten more compliments on my playing then I got in my last 40 years. Even my bass player whom I have been working with on and off since 1990 stated how he felt I had one of my best gigs yet a few weeks ago.
Click to expand...

Not to hijack this thread (new thread?) but I'd love to hear more about this. Maybe some pics of your setup and let us know what type of music you play - how you approach fills in covers if you do any, that sort of thing. I think a lot of people like the idea of 'less' but it can be hard to put that into practise!
 
Dr_Watso said:
It's hard not to make rules for yourself. Gotta let that stuff go
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For me, this was the biggest revelation; that there are no rules and to just let go.

I recall as a teenager watching various drummers on MTV, and not watching them as examples, but watching them as "ok, here are the rules..." And my drum teachers perhaps didn't help that with "here are the formal books..."

Even after being in numerous bands, and giging, etc, I'd sometimes find myself struggling with a simple little thing now and then, and if I stepped back to think, ok, "why is this simple thing difficult?" I'd realize I'm trying to fit something into predefined rules rather than realizing it just is what it is.
 
The day in my early 20's when I stopped comparing myself and my level of playing to other drummers I looked up to in general and in my family.
 
yammyfan said:
It's a small thing and probably a "well, DUH!" thing for most of you... but I more or less cured my tendency to rush fills when I realized that I had as much time to complete the fill as I had time to play the money beat or whatever proceeded it. In other words, if I had 1...2...3...4... to work with BEFORE the fill, then I also had 1...2...3...4... DURING the fill itself. This helped me to relax and not stress about fills so much.

The other super simple thing I realized is to LISTEN TO THE BASS PLAYER. Instead of leading all the time and trying to be the boss, I've learned to lay off and take cues from the bass player. It has made all the difference in the word.
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^^ Both of the above, but the second bit also depends on the bass player. S/he has to lock into me as much as I have to lock into her/him, enabling me to do my job, and I've played with some bassists who don't even seem to know I 'm there.
 
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Smoothly: Lovelykit, Clean look. What ride cymbal are you using?

I've had a couple of revelations very recently:
When practising: 'don't listen to the click, listen to the sounds coming from the kit!' Sounds obvious, but playing with a gap click or a click set to whole notes (I.e 30bmp if I'm I'm practising a groove at 120) has made me realise this. Instead of trying to hit the clicks I'm paying much more attention to the feel and sound of the groove I am creating.

When playing live: 'don't think'. I'm not sure how else I can put this one but if I can't play a groove fluidly then thinking about it doesn't help. So my practise is all about internalising those grooves, and my live playing is about letting what has been internalised come out. If a groove isn't fully internalised then a simpler one will come out, and that usually sounds better than 'trying' to play the 'right' groove.

I expect most on here are a long way beyond this though, I've not been playing drums for that long.
 
Swiss triplets made me finally realize how helpful rudiments are, which in turn made me understand tool's drumming a lot more. turns out most of his patterns are rudiments of some sort.
 
Not really anything that important, but to me it was.

When I was much younger I remember seeing a band playing live on TV. The drummer was wailing away like a baboon. Though he was bashing really hard, I could hardly hear him in the music mix. The drums were just buried under all the other instruments. Then, on another day and another band playing live on tv, I saw a drummer just tapping his kit. His arms barely moved and it seemed he was just gently caressing the drums, and yet the sound was big and nice and up front with total clarity. It was then I realized just how important those in charge of mic'ing and mixing the instruments really are.
 
No specific time, but the same revelation I had with golf after watching or playing with others. I may suck, but I'm having fun what I'm doing. I'll always try to get better, but the revelation was "if it's not fun, it's not worth doing!"
 
Another revelation.

Drums are loud, especially the snare and some crashes.

When I was a youngster, I thought I had to hit hard to keep up with the amps. It must have sounded like hell out front.
 
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