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My first teacher sat me down,
and the very first beat I ever played was:
boom bap, boom bap.
I’m Matt Johnson— groove number two
for TED.
And he’s like, that’s the simplest beat,
basically in the world.
But you will never master it.
And he was right.
Hey, you! Yes, you.
Is there music inside of you?
We’ve recruited working musicians
from throughout the industry
to help you hear it, hold it, and share it
with this wild and wonderful world.
I got started playing music at a very
young age because of my parents.
We had a family band,
so at age 13 I started to play drums
with the family band.
I remember hearing KC and The
Sunshine Band when I was five.
It's one of my earliest memories,
actually, and I was like, what is that?
And knew kind of instantly
that I wanted to pursue drumming.
I really liked watching footage of Jerry
Lee Lewis and Little Richard as a kid,
whenever they came on TV, I was always
very excited by the flamboyance
and the showmanship and what have you.
And I kind of just wanted
to be a piano player playing loud music.
I was a very mediocre piano player,
but it was definitely a great entry
into other instruments subsequently then.
I got my first drum lesson
when I was about 10 years old,
and I remember going home
with my dad in the car and saying,
well he told me to practice,
I think, for 20 minutes a day,
and I was like, well I’m going to practice
for 40 minutes a day!
You know, I'm going to double the time
and get, you know, twice as good.
I remember feeling very inspired
at the end of the lesson.
The role of the drummer in the band is
basically the heartbeat of the band.
Spinal cord of the entire body
and keeping everybody together.
It’s basically teaming up
with the bass players to form,
almost the sort of bedrock of a song
and create a foundation
upon which the other stuff is added—
the melodic stuff, the guitars, keys,
singing, et cetera, et cetera.
If you have somebody that's a little
wishy washy on the drums,
the band does not sound good at all.
And everybody’s kind of tentative.
It’s hard to dig in when you don’t
have a consistent timekeeper.
If you're a drummer, that's
the thing that keeps you up at night.
And that’s the thing that,
if you screw it up, everyone can hear.
And you have to make sure
that you are perfectly on time
and you’re keeping that time
and your emotions are not forcing you
to speed up or slow down.
Because everybody in the band
will be performing to you.
I’ve always had a tendency
to pick up the pace a little bit,
or play a bit more frenetically
during an exciting moment in the song.
I think I would be disingenuous
as a performer
if I didn’t allow what was happening
to affect me in some way.
The reason that there are all these great
rock bands back then
is really attributed a lot
to the drummer’s style.
Like John Bonham
with Led Zeppelin has his style,
and that’s why Zeppelin
sounds like Zeppelin.
And then you have Keith Moon
and The Who— he’s crazy and wild.
It's not just about hitting
the drum and playing a pattern.
It’s connecting with it
as if it was a part of your soul.
Rudiments are sort of like
the periodic chart of drumming.
There’s a, I mean, a gazillion rudiments.
They’re sticking patterns, essentially.
So, a five stroke roll is a left,
left, right, right, left, right, right,
left, left, right.
It’s almost like kung fu:
right, left, right, right, left, left.
Usually the next thing you
learn is foundational grooves.
Groove is basically like a rhythmic
signature of a piece of music.
That’s it— right? So that’s the groove.
Just a four bar groove is—
you could just loop it, loop it, loop it,
and it will make people dance.
Unbelievably primal groove—
that’s a rock groove
that will sound different
with every single drummer that plays it.
You really just need the hi-hat,
snare, and the kick for most grooves.
Then you can add tom-toms—
those are for fills and for accents.
And you can do a million things
with drums.
The drumming world is an endless world
of possibilities
because there’s just so many
types of drums.
You have the traditional drum set,
and then you have the classical
percussion world,
the Latin percussion world: timbales,
the congas, the bongo.
So many different things.
But it’s all based
on one principle: rhythm.
I think it's important
to learn the basic stuff,
but it’s just as important
to practice and to play with people.
Don’t play just in your bedroom—
you need to play with people.
That's the most important thing.
The sooner you can get out,
play with people.
Because that really informs
your playing better than anything else.
I believe a good drum instructor will
strongly advise any new musician
or new drummer to actually
practice with a metronome.
You’re just like, oh my god,
this is not inspirational.
But, the more you practice with it,
is the more you’re going
to internalize how to keep time.
I just make sure every day that I go
in and play for at least a half an hour,
just to keep the signals between
my brain and my limbs open.
At the end of the day,
yes, it can be mathematical
because one bar has eight beats.
You know, you could keep
subdividing it: 8, 16, 32.
Just subdividing it more.
But you have to be able to feel it,
it’s about the feel.
It’s about this cadence that sometimes
is not a 100% squared.
It just takes you.
What seems like something
that might be good on paper
doesn’t necessarily translate once you’re
actually trying to do it in the room.
So you’re continually listening
and just trying to trust your own judgment
and actually how it just makes you feel.
Somehow my algorithm
figured out I'm a drummer
and I get a lot of clips
of people who are amazing,
the best drummer you’ve ever seen, but
then there’s another one is even better.
And it's easy to get discouraged.
For your own peace of mind, you have to
try and filter out that stuff
and just focus on whatever
it is you’re doing
and try to figure out
what your strengths are
and further develop
whatever voice it is you have.
It's about doing it over
and over and over again.
So it doesn’t matter who you play with,
as long as you play.
You’re never too cool for anything.
Just play, play, play, play.
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