This is Your Brain on Drums

Being "Set" in Our Sets

2010-07-05T00:11:00.006-04:00

Ever seen a drummer playing an unorthodox kit and feel yourself wanting to criticize him or her? Or at least being interested in what they're going to play and how they're going to use the weird arrangement of objects in front of them, but reluctant to ever try to play a similarly "wrong" set up? What you're dealing with here is what's called a 'norm of behavior,' and it goes hand in hand with the fallacy that what is "normal" is "good" and anything abnormal is "bad." We see a standard 5 piece kit, and we consider that normal, or typical, because it's what we're used to, or what we're told a drumset should look like; if we then see a lateral set up like Bill Bruford's, it seems screwy.

But Mr. Bruford doesn't have to justify his set-up anymore than you do. Are you not allowed to set up your drums however you want them? Is it guaranteed to make your drumming worse or musically irrelevant? The answer to both of these questions is "no."

Since drumsets and cymbals are something marketed to us, almost all of them with very little exception follow a standard template. Granted, it makes most instructional material easier to grapple with for both teachers and students, since charts and exercises can be written with more or less standardized notation, but I implore you to come up with another really good reason to follow any guideline in terms of how your kit is set up. What, so it's easier for other people to sit in? They're probably going to have trouble with the layout of your toms and cymbals, or the tension of your bass drum pedal or height of your hats, and at least will likely be uncomfortable with the relationship of your throne and your snare. You don't really have a reason. If you look back at the history of the drumset, manufacturing is the sole reason that we have a definition of a "normal" set-up. Some of the early pioneers of the instrument such as Baby Dodds used drum sets that could be very different from what we're used to. There might not have been any floor tom, and all sorts of knick knacks on the trap tray that sat over a relatively large bass drum (and Baby Dodds was not a fan of hi-hats and didn't use them).

So when drums stopped becoming "trap sets" that were cobbled together and starting becoming "drum kits" that could be purchased through a store or a catalog, things started to change. Drums became, literally, a kit (and still is in the majority of cases) that one would buy which was designed to be assembled a certain way. It's like a recipe that uses pretty much the same ingredients, but is made by different chefs (in this simile, drum companies)--it will create the same dish. But who says you can't take the same ingredients, screw up the recipe or leave part of it out, and end up with an equally good but different dish?

Granted, the norm we're dealing with here doesn't really have a consequence. Nothing happens if your toms don't go from smallest to largest as you go from left to right, or if your ride cymbal is above your hi-hats. There's no drum police that will find you and make you pay a fine or beat you with a pair of 5Bs. Really, your set-up doesn't have all that much to do with your playing, except in the sense that however the pieces are oriented to you they should make it easy for you to play whatever you want to play, and however you want to play it. The ability to play drums is something you possess regardless of the size or number of things in front of you, so don't feel any obligation to set up your drums a certain way unless that's what you really prefer.

Now I'm not saying you need to radically rearrange your kit, but don't be scared of doing so. You should set things up however you want. For instance, I like having a splash cymbal to my right, down low near the floor tom. There's no reason to put it there besides the fact that it's where I like it. If I put it above a mounted tom, or in the air on the left side of my hi-hat, that's perfectly fine too. There's no rule of thumb for me to put it anywhere. Same with if I want to have another snare drum where my floor tom usually goes--why shouldn't I? Is there any reason not to? Chris Dave does it and he seems to get by just fine. If anything, the reason to rearrange your kit is that it might allow you to get different combinations of sounds and textures out of your gear which are facilitated by the proximity of different objects. The key word here is "might," so the only way you'll ever know what could possibly be waiting for you is to experiment. You stand to lose nothing.

It's On the 1, Baby!

2010-06-29T11:34:00.008-04:00

Bootsy had it right. If someone in a band doesn't know where they are, it's the most meaningful thing you can shout at them. It's the cornerstone in pretty much all forms of music, regardless of origin. Being on the 1, or at least knowing where it is, just might be the most important note you play. Conversely, you might not actually strike anything on the 1, but that's just as important to the groove. But what is it? I'm not meaning this in any sort of deeply philosophical way, but really, what makes the 1 "the 1?" Quite simply, we do. The point where a downbeat hits in any song, and basically in any meter you care to play in, is something we decide upon. It doesn't matter if this is by consensus (i.e., everybody else in the band puts the 1 at the same point in time), or if we're dictating it for another musician who might be lost, or if we're playing by ourselves. With the notable exception of completely free playing, where there isn't really any meter, the 1 is the most important thing in music. Now, you may be thinking that there are other things that you consider higher on the totem pole, or perhaps more integral to making music, but baby, it all comes back to the 1. Let's take a look at how this mental signpost determines nearly everything else in music.

For starters, music usually relies on rhythm. Rhythm isn't something that exists outside of our head--it's something that we have to perceive. Bear with me here: sound waves are all over the place, basically all the time, and they are essentially a form of energy. We have these things on the side of our heads that look like dried apricots which directs the energy of sound waves to bunch of specialized sensory nerves, and from the messages those nerves send to our brain, we try to figure out ways to arrange this energy into some combination of groups so it's easier to deal with. No matter how we group these sounds, we have to mentally anchor them somehow, and that's effectively what the 1 does. Rhythmic illusions (a la Gavin Harrison) rely on subverting where our mental anchor is to fool us into assigning (however temporarily) a false grouping around a series of sounds. Easy examples of this are the songs "Only Us" by Peter Gabriel and "Pie-Eyed Manc" by the Stanton Moore Trio--listen to either of these and see if you're fooled by the beginning of the tunes. Rhythmically, the 1 is the ultimate signpost for all musical phrases that follow, whether it's 8 bar phrases or 12 bar blues form or whatever. When the pattern cycles back around, the 1 is the point where we perceive the start of the phrase.

We obviously can't talk about rhythm without talking about tempo. The way we judge tempo (again, it exists in our heads) depends on the speed of the sounds we're hearing relative to time. The determinant of tempo is called an inter-onset interval, or IOI for short. An IOI is the amount of time between what we perceive as the moment of attack of one event and the onset of the next event. One note in isolation doesn't have a tempo--it's just a noise. When two or more notes follow each other, we're automatically judging the IOI so our brain can organize what may come next into a coherent pattern (namely, whatever subdivision of time we're dealing with whether it be 8th notes or triplets or quintuplets and so on). However, the IOI is used for more than tempo; it is also used to group distinct patterns together by the relative progression of IOIs in a series of notes (in other words, the syncopation of a musical phrase). So, when a musical phrase of several notes that occur close to each other in time are perceived by our ear, we're deciding whether the IOI between the notes fall in line with a pattern we've already recognized or its part of a new pattern. This is a large part of distinguishing an A and B section from one another (melody being the obvious other part). It doesn't necessarily matter if the tempo fluctuates (as it does in many classical pieces) or if it's consistent--the relative IOI between notes is what's important. "That's unnecessarily complicated," you might be saying, but here's where it comes back to earth--the boundaries between patterns are a vital part of how we perceive music. If we know a song, we anticipate where the boundaries between longer sections (e.g., A or B, verse or chorus, etc.) may fall, and each of these longer sections is comprised of a series of smaller divisions of time that guide us along. And what's the signpost at those boundaries? The 1, baby! For example, in an 8 bar phrase you may count "1, 2, 3, 4... 2, 2, 3, 4... 3, 2, 3, 4..." and so on, but the main currency is where the 1 happens. Notice what's going on here: we have 'minor' 1's which mark each successive bar and we're assigning a 'major' 1 that marks the larger phrase boundary.

Now what else is there? Melody? Melody occurs in context, and the start of any melodic phrase (even if the written note would be a rest) is on the 1. Syncopation? That's more about where your rests are, but it's still all relative to the towering signpost of the 1. Composition? Almost all long-form pieces are composed in sections, and those sections typically have boundaries that fall on the 1, and have to be written as such even if there's a weird bar of odd time thrown in somewhere. This leads us to another interesting item, and perhaps the most telling--our whole system for writing music, whether it's drum notation, treble clef, bass clef, Nashville numbering, takadimi, fingerpaints, or whatever, starts on 1 or relies heavily on knowing where it is. The 1 is quite simply the skeleton key to music, whether written or played.

Now, should this really be blowing your mind? I doubt it does. Still, the part that the 1 plays in how we perceive music might be deeper than you realized, or you simply may not have thought much about it before. Hopefully, having a better understanding of what our mind does once it decides where the 1 falls will help you in your musicianship, whether it be drawing the line for the others with you on the bandstand or playing a trick on the audience. As a drummer, it's your job to be the keeper of the 1, so if someone gets lost or drops an eighth note and you have to readjust, where you place that downbeat is the end-all be-all for everyone else. Bootsy tried to tell you...

What are You REALLY Warming Up When You Warm Up?

2010-05-28T13:17:00.004-04:00

Warm ups are important, without question. We all pretty much know that, even if we don't actually follow suit and do warm ups before every gig we play. There's a ton of great stuff out there on different ways to warm up your hands (my personal favorite is from Peter Erskine, where you do 8 single strokes with each hand, then 7, then 6, all the way down to 1 per hand and back to 8). But what are you really doing here? What does playing paradiddles for half an hour get you? It's certainly not a bad thing, and please don't think I'm suggesting that anyone stop their current warm up routine, but ask yourself why you're doing this and whether or not it really mirrors what you'll be playing on the gig.

For the most part, we'll be playing on a kit (not just a pad or our knee), using different grips depending on where our hands go (it's more natural to play in French grip when you're striking something that isn't directly in front of you), and using a lot of different muscle groups. So how does a torrent of flamacues, likely played in German or American grip, and also played primarily with smaller muscle groups (namely, the forearms and hands), help you with all this stuff? It should be obvious where I'm going with this: the answer is that it doesn't.

If the goal of your warming up is to physically prepare yourself for the repetitive motions of playing the drumset, what you should be doing is light, isometric stretches. Surely, those paradiddles do help warm up the smaller muscles in your hands, but they do very little for your legs or your arms and shoulders. Furthermore, if you're warming up because you've had past issues (or current issues) with tendonitis or carpal tunnel syndrome, guess what? Your hand technique is probably wrong or at least wrong for you in particular (but might be okay for other drummers). You also could be absorbing more shock than is necessary through your hands when you get to the kit, in which case you need to revisit the whole kinesiology of how you move when playing and how your strokes function with the physics of the drums and cymbals you're striking. If you fall into either of these camps, warming up using bad hand technique won't help squat.

So, outside of doing some stretching, what are you really warming up? Rather, what should you be focused on? It's not playing as fast as you can, or ripping through all the rudiments you can think of, but reviewing your technique. If you have any problems with any grip on either hand, warming up is the time to consciously focus on how you are gripping the sticks and the fluidity of your strokes. When you get to the gig itself, the pressure is on: there are the other band members, the audience, maybe some distracting lighting, a suboptimal monitor mix, and any other number of hiccups and technical problems that you'll have to deal with on the fly. The more you take the time to ensure your hand technique is correct before the gig as a refresher, the less likely you'll be to develop bad habits over the course of the gig. For instance, you might be able to rocket through inverted flams before the gig, but when you get out there you can't hear the vocals or the guitar amp is roaring next to you or someone who works for the venue got on your nerves just before you went onstage, and you tense up your grip and play in a way that might cause you to injure yourself. When you're focusing on a relaxed hand technique when warming up, you're making good technique more automatic, meaning that your reflex will be to default to this regardless of other outside stress. It's even worthwhile to review your hand technique between sets (you can use some of the same exercises you use to warm up) to make sure you're keeping things consistent. "But I know good hand technique," you might be saying, "and I could show it to you right now." That's great, but do you always play with that technique? Is that really what you're doing in the middle of a bad gig where you're fighting to be heard over amplifiers and can't hear half of everybody else on the stage and have a pebble in your shoe? If so, that's awesome, but I'm willing to bet most of us have bad habits that start to creep in (and it isn't like I'm not guilty of this too). The more stressed we are (whether good or bad stress), the more we will revert to what is habitual, and there's gobs of research that backs this up. Simply being in front of people amps us up, as does playing anything difficult, and when you throw in a few more wild cards your body is essentially fighting to manage all these stressors and will rely heavily on autopilot for everything it can so you have the mental resources to deal with the situation at hand. So merely knowing good hand technique is very different from that technique being your default setting when you're under pressure. Every chance you have to learn and re-learn and over-learn hand technique is time well spent, even if you've been playing for a long time and started out correctly--we all drift if we're not keeping ourselves in check.

Again, I'm not saying stop what you're already doing. All I'm advocating is that you make warming up just as much about preparing yourself mentally as you are physically. From the largest arm movements to the tiniest twitches of your fingers, you are in control of every aspect of your technique on the drums, so it's up to you to make sure you're doing it right. And there's no better time to do this than when it will help the most--right before the gig.

The Myth of the "Creative" vs the "Technical"

2010-05-24T16:17:00.005-04:00

There's an idea that gets thrown about quite often by some drummers about having a 'creative' side and a 'technical' or logical side of the brain (right and left, respectively). We all know that practice is vitally important, as without practice we don't develop technique and timing, and without those things we can't play solidly. Also, we know that without honing the ability to be creative, nothing that we want to say on the instrument can be expressed. But to think that these two things are in conflict is wrong, and to think that the brain is organized this way is not only misleading but grossly oversimplified.

For humans, the two sides of the brain are in constant communication, and one side relies heavily on the other side to get us through the day. Interestingly, there have been cases where the two sides of the brain are severed at what's called the corpus callosum (this is sometimes done in severe cases of epilepsy) and outside of a handful of small inconveniences (I'm not downplaying that--your brain doesn't have sensory nerves, so it's not like it hurts for the hemispheres to be separated), there are relatively few side effects in terms of disrupting thought or behavior. If you didn't already know, the two sides of the brain for the most part do the same things, particularly when it comes to moving our bodies. The left side of the brain sends the signals to move the right side of the body and vice versa. Unless both sides of the brain are working together, playing a simple beat would be a task of mammoth difficulty. The two hemispheres of the brain depend heavily on the crosstalk between them, and it has the amazing ability to reroute signals through alternate channels even if the brain has been damaged intentionally or unintentionally, such as when someone has to relearn how to walk after an accident.

This whole idea of a 'creative' side and a 'logical' side, like some sort of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde thing, exaggerates the fact that some areas of the brain are specialized for certain functions. True, in most people the left side of the brain is specialized for language and the right side is specialized for spatial processing (movement and orientation of objects in space and things like that), but there is literally tons of information shared between the hemispheres of the brain about visual information, motor information (movement of the body), sensory information, etc. We don't have a 'creative' side, nor do we have a 'technical' or 'logical' side--instead, both sides complement each other and function as a team, and your brain isn't going to work any differently whether you think I'm wrong or right.

So what? What does this mean to drumming? For starters, let's talk about how to use the notions of 'creative' vs. 'technical' in a meaningful way. The way we think about drumming and the way we approach it can be guided by understanding the need to balance between creativity and logic. Without the logic of patterns, the mathematics required to understand rhythms, and the rote technique to develop physical coordination and control, we'll fail to understand how to play the drumset effectively. Without the creativity of musical choice, using space and textures, and integrating musical ideas together in new ways, we'll fail to understand what to play. Think about the relationship between these two things--only concentrating on one of these things does not make for a good drummer. But the combination of the technical and the creative is what has given us the pioneers of the instrument. Any great drummer, whether it be Buddy or Elvin or Vinnie, is much more than simply a master of technique. They thought to play things in a way nobody had before, and/or in a musical context nobody had before, and that's what makes their playing creative, since they are/were largely unobstructed from playing whatever they wanted due to any lack of technical skill.

If you're able to play anything insofar as technique is concerned, your only limit is what you can dream up to play. In no way are there two opposing forces fighting for dominance in your head; there's only you and the way the brain is hardwired to work. And if you think your playing is too technical, you're not doomed, same as if your playing is too loose and you lack the skills to execute the musical ideas you want. We all were horrible drummers at one point, and we learned to get better. We can learn to get better again. In no way are creativity or technique at odds with each other--one facilitates the development of the other. As drummers, we're cheating ourselves if we focus exclusively on one side of the coin.

What's This Blog All About, Fella?

2010-05-15T11:37:00.004-04:00

This is a blog about the intersection where drumming meets applied psychology. And when I say psychology here, I'm not talking about healing or therapy or anything, but the study of our behavior, perception, and cognitions in reaction to the world around us. When I say drumming, that one should be pretty obvious. What's the point of blathering on about how many things about the drumset are related to psychology? For starters, there's not a whole lot of great information out there for drummers (and some that is misleading), and in my opinion there is far too much about the activity of playing drums that is far more mental than physical. So, the long-winded nonsense that I post here is in some small way a stab at remedying the lack of good (or at least well-informed) information. Hopefully, the difference here is that I'm an active researcher and consultant in applied psychology, so I should have some idea what I'm talking about since I do this for a living.

I welcome any suggestions, comments, criticisms, anecdotes, recipes, and so on...