Bill Bruford's Earthworks - Triplicity (Live In Santiago, Chile 2002)

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This Earthworks song ‘Triplicity’ is a sort of Afro-Cuban feel, but in 7/4 (sub-divided 4 and 3), a meter not generally associated with that genre. There is a passable demonstration of how I arrived at it here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=96L90KorP_A . Several of my compositions have started the same way as ‘Triplicity’, by finding something on the drum kit that can be reconfigured, or expanded, or contracted, to provide a ‘B’ section to the main ‘A’ section master rhythm.

When I did a bit of teaching many years ago, some potential students said to me ‘I don’t believe in taking lessons. It might spoil or change what I already have.’ This is a rather naive view of studying a musical instrument, but such an attitude exists. Some have asked why I don’t teach technique either in my studio or on-line. The subject is already well covered, and I don’t want to be yet another voice insisting “do it this way and YOUR SPEED WILL DOUBLE BEFORE LUNCH!” Additionally, I’m not confident that I have the ‘right way’.

One difficulty with online discussions about the right way to do things – improve your mental health, bake a cake, learn how to play drums - is that it tends to be a ‘one size fits all’ approach. It might be the right way for me tomorrow, but not today. I don’t feel mentally, intellectually, technically able to tackle that yet. The ‘right way’ is occasionally no more than the way the instructor prefers to instruct. There is a lot to be said for having instruction, so you don’t waste time going down rabbit holes, but also finding your own way. Allan Holdsworth, from whom we’ve heard a lot on this channel recently, was one who found his own way.

The attraction of online instruction for the consumer is the implied promise that if you just do this, that will happen: X will follow Y. When the beginner can’t make it happen, or it happens in a different way, follow-up advice can be hard to come by. Without getting to know a student as a person, the information just sits outside her frame of reference (how should I use this stuff?) without really entering her world.

It’s a mess out there in cyber-space /drummer world. It’s guys trying to be like other guys and missing by a mile. It’s guys holding the sticks in bizarre and personal ways because we have yet to concoct and agree on a right way, let alone teach it. Unlike, say, violinists, for whom after several centuries, there is at least a correct way to hold the bow. It’s guys doing it wrong deliberately, going against a perceived grain. That ‘going against’ makes them feel or sound good, or it doesn’t feel or sound like anyone else, or they just hated their drum instructor.

Put a hundred of these oddballs on the same drumkit with the same sticks and heads, and ask them to play four bars of the standard rock beat, and I guarantee you’ll get a dozen wildly different interpretations of what that might be and what it might sound like, and I think that’s great. (It also, in part, highlights the inadequacy of standard music notation when it comes to drumkit matters).

Yet the substantial demand for someone to ‘show me how to play the drums’ persists. There is no one single way, and no one single way that’s best. There is no secure pedagogical route through the undergrowth that points to an accepted set of capabilities, the acquisition of which entitles you to call yourself a drummer. It’s a mess, from the sludge of which may emerge an individual character who points to the future.

We drummers are mongrels, or at least the interesting ones are, and long may it be so. We want character, style, individuation, so Fred doesn’t sound like Jane, who doesn’t sound like Harry. A good teacher can help, but he can’t do it all for you.

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Видео Bill Bruford's Earthworks - Triplicity (Live In Santiago, Chile 2002) канала Bill Bruford