Being the over-analytical person I am, I love talking about technique. I love offering my knowledge and love learning more about the teeny-tiny technical details of being a percussionist, of being a musician.
During such a conversation with a couple friends, one of them asked why I felt the need to talk in such detail about technique. He postulated (and I paraphrase): does having these conversations really matter when, ultimately, we just need to concentrate on finding a way to play in manner that is comfortable and feels good?
Yes, of course. Ultimately, it’s very important that the way one plays feels good. But, I answered, understanding what our bodies do when we play drums will help us to reach that state of comfort.
I have taught more students without natural ability than I have with natural ability. Obviously. And, of course, that means there are several things to fix. When showing them basic technique, they hold the sticks they way they think they’re supposed based on what I show them. They stroke the way they think they’re supposed to. They strike the surface the way they think they’re supposed to. And often times it’s awkward, uncomfortable, and they don’t know any better because it’s new. So, my job is to go in and tell them not to whip the wrist; stop pinching the thumb and index finger; don’t smack the drum; don’t lift out… et cetera.
For beginners, it’s important not to over-explain things. Too much information will only confuse them. But you also have to be careful to be correct in your explanations. Correcting the wrong thing can cause problems or yield unwanted results.
Then there are the advanced students, the ones that have already gone though the awkward and uncomfortable phase. These are the ones with better coordination, dexterity, and chops. These are the students that can use the fine tuning. You can go into a little more detail with these drummers, fixing finger placement here, smoothing out wrist action there, bringing out the second beat of a diddle somewhere else…
In any case, whether teaching a beginning or advanced student, you have to understand any problem you might come across. You’ve got to understand how your your fingers, your wrists, your arms, your posture – your entire body – affects your control over the sticks, the drums, the keyboards. You need to understand how stick placement can affect sound, articulation, and rebound. You need to be able to adapt your default technique to different players. Again, et cetera. And this all comes from a detailed examination of technique.
Without a deep understanding of the technique you want to teach, teaching will be more difficult. In the drumline world, uniformity of technique helps the process of cleaning and also prepares the percussionists for long (long!) periods of playing. For drumset players, there’s a complex set of ergonomics to consider. For concert percussionist, there’s a different type of touch needed to approach that type of music. Knowing how body mechanics affect the use of the striking implements, how to achieve a good balance of dexterity, chops, and appropriate power for any given musical situation, and how to avoid injury is important in order to help the student enhance his or her skills.
Writers use this method all the time. Comic book writer Greg Rucka has talked about doing a lot of research for, say, his spy stories, researching the actual vocation as much as he can so he feels comfortable in his knowledge about the real-life job. He knows he won’t use all of his research material, but the fact that he has learned so much about the subject means that anything he writes about comes from a place of believability. His research informs what he writes.
This is the same for teachers. Distilling information for beginning students must come from a deep understanding of the subject so that the lesson sets the students on what the teach believes to be the right path. Teaching advanced students requires that the teacher is able to spot problems, find ways to enhance what is already good, teach them new things that will add to the students’ skill set, and help students stay on the path of heathy physicality when playing.
But for those percussionists that aren’t teachers, is analyzing technique still worth it? Of course. For the same reason why a computer user needs to know more than how to save a file in Microsoft Word and how to use YouTube: you’ve got to be able to troubleshoot your own problems. Single strokes aren’t fast enough? Examine how your wrists and fingers are working together while playing them. Want to play faster rolls? Examine your use of arm and how you hold the sticks during faster tempos while working on your chops. Forearms starting to hurt, and not in a good way? Examine how tightly or comfortably you hold your sticks. Don’t have enough control over the transition from accents to taps? Examine the way you stop the stick after an accent, right before you play a small beat. If you are only a performer, there’s no guarantee that you’ll always have a teacher around to help you. Sometimes, you’ll have to teach yourself, whether it be through observation of others or observation of yourself.
This all seems obvious, yeah? So… why talk about it? Why have these conversations? Why write a blog post about it? Why take up space on the Internet?
Teachers teach other teachers, and good teachers learn from everyone. These conversations, these articles – they’re all a way to share that information and, in the case of an actual conversation, the back-and-forth you get from another person can lead to new discoveries, new ways of thinking about things, and even introduce concepts that you absolutely disagree with and will want to avoid in your own teaching and playing.