Of durmming
Yesterday, on the bus home from work (it was too wet to bike), I ran into an old friend I hadn't seen in a long time. She told me her daughter, who is about 10, wanted a drumkit for Christmas. Her world - and the world in general - not being ideal, I suggested that getting her lessons first might be a better idea. I know from experience that it's hard enough to keep adult drummers away from a drumkit at times that don't suit everyone else in the house and neighbourhood.
So, my friend asked, would I be prepared to take up the instructional challenge?
There are several reasons why I'm reluctant to teach. One is the obvious: I can't see how you can teach feeling, which is crucial to expression. Why else do you play an instrument, sing, use a camera, paintbrush, keyboard, whatever?
Another is that I've always been embarrassed about my almost total lack of technical knowledge in the field of drumming. (I have trouble enough tuning the durn things.) I'm not a drummer; I'm a durmmer. I'm entirely self-taught in drumming - as I am in almost all my limited areas of knowledge. My standard advice to anyone wanting to learn to play, which I repeated to my friend yesterday, is simply to listen to records and play along with them. I started playing with my mother's knitting needles (kneedles?) on vinyl-covered stools.
Even if I knew technique I doubt I'd make a good teacher, as I feel quite disabled in general communication.
But hey! Perhaps I need not be embarrassed after all. I see just now that a far more accomplished drummer than myself, Chris Cutler, learned the same way I did (and still do in probably all fields). He calls it a "top-down" approach:
Since I was self taught, I didn't find out about rudiments until I had already been playing along with records for a while and I suspect that's why I formed, from the very beginning, a top-down rather than bottom-up approach to playing; and why the sound, rather than the rudiments, became the centre from which I instinctively worked. Perhaps I should clarify this. Books and teachers start with the elements: tiny modules, individual patterns and exercises, and then show you how to use them to assemble a complete drum part: you take this pattern, add that one, spice it up with grace notes and syncopations - and there it is. This is a thinking built on modules and assembly. I learned the opposite way, thinking, hearing or imagining a whole and then trying to discipline my hands and feet to produce it. Using this method, individual parts simply emerge as epiphenomenal effects. When I say I was driven by sound, I mean the whole that I heard I heard as a sound rather than an agglomerated rhythmic pattern. It was this sound that I was trying to make happen, not the discrete elements of a rhythm.
I suspect such an approach is not uncommon in music, or any art. Consider Matt Middleton, who, as someone once pointed out, plays guitar as if it were a clarinet, with his fret hand over rather than under the neck.
I just put on PiL "The Flowers of Romance" for the first time in years. It's still brilliant!
So, my friend asked, would I be prepared to take up the instructional challenge?
There are several reasons why I'm reluctant to teach. One is the obvious: I can't see how you can teach feeling, which is crucial to expression. Why else do you play an instrument, sing, use a camera, paintbrush, keyboard, whatever?
Another is that I've always been embarrassed about my almost total lack of technical knowledge in the field of drumming. (I have trouble enough tuning the durn things.) I'm not a drummer; I'm a durmmer. I'm entirely self-taught in drumming - as I am in almost all my limited areas of knowledge. My standard advice to anyone wanting to learn to play, which I repeated to my friend yesterday, is simply to listen to records and play along with them. I started playing with my mother's knitting needles (kneedles?) on vinyl-covered stools.
Even if I knew technique I doubt I'd make a good teacher, as I feel quite disabled in general communication.
But hey! Perhaps I need not be embarrassed after all. I see just now that a far more accomplished drummer than myself, Chris Cutler, learned the same way I did (and still do in probably all fields). He calls it a "top-down" approach:
Since I was self taught, I didn't find out about rudiments until I had already been playing along with records for a while and I suspect that's why I formed, from the very beginning, a top-down rather than bottom-up approach to playing; and why the sound, rather than the rudiments, became the centre from which I instinctively worked. Perhaps I should clarify this. Books and teachers start with the elements: tiny modules, individual patterns and exercises, and then show you how to use them to assemble a complete drum part: you take this pattern, add that one, spice it up with grace notes and syncopations - and there it is. This is a thinking built on modules and assembly. I learned the opposite way, thinking, hearing or imagining a whole and then trying to discipline my hands and feet to produce it. Using this method, individual parts simply emerge as epiphenomenal effects. When I say I was driven by sound, I mean the whole that I heard I heard as a sound rather than an agglomerated rhythmic pattern. It was this sound that I was trying to make happen, not the discrete elements of a rhythm.
I suspect such an approach is not uncommon in music, or any art. Consider Matt Middleton, who, as someone once pointed out, plays guitar as if it were a clarinet, with his fret hand over rather than under the neck.
I just put on PiL "The Flowers of Romance" for the first time in years. It's still brilliant!