Technique Basics

After having a look at stroke technique and a little hint of moeller technique last time around, I'm going to pull back a wee bit for this lesson and talk about technique in general.

Before I start talking about technique and what I consider to be “Good” and “Bad”, I'd first like to define what I consider technique to be. When drummers talk about somebody like Virgil Donati or Marco Minneman, a typical thing you'll hear is “Oh, he's a great technical player!”. What is meant here is that the drummer has great control, speed and ability to play absolutely dumbfounding stuff. But that's not what I'm talking about when I talk about technique.

Technique is the mechanical aspect of playing the drums. It is possible to get really good without having great technique. I once saw Gary Husband play at Ronnie Scott's in London, and he has quite possibly the worst technique I've ever seen in my life – but it works for him, and he sounds great and can play some amazing stuff. But on the other hand, the majority of professional players in any style do have really, really good technique. Danny Carey is incredibly relaxed even when absolutely belting out a four-limbed 32nd-note fill. Vinnie Colaiuta looks like he's not even trying when he plays. Even the guy from Yellowcard has pretty tasty technical chops. Technique makes it easier to play stuff. You can get good at playing stuff without good technique, but it requires better ears and a lot more practice. And hey, we're all lazy, right?

So how do we get better technique? Putting it simply, by thinking logically about the requirements of playing music, breaking this down into physical requirements and then training our bodies to respond in the most efficient ways to these requirements. Let's take that a step at a times.

Musical Requirements

Musical skill on the drum kit is all about control, and particularly control over three things: Time, Dynamics and Sound. What you do with the skills you develop is another matter, but that's your business – technique is for everybody. You can use it to play any style, as long as you remember what it is for.

Control over timing is essential for drummers. Initially we just need to worry about playing the right rhythmic note – playing the snare on the 2 and 4 for example. But as we get better, we start to worry more about being slightly ahead or behind the beat to influence the feel of a tune.

Control over dynamics (volume) is equally essential. Drum grooves are typically made up of a combination of accented (loud) and unaccented (quiet) notes, and having a consistent way to move between this is an absolutely mandatory part of being a good drummer. You can't play snare drum backbeats at different volumes throughout a song without sounding like an amateur. So we need consistency and control here too.

Lastly, sound. There's two sides to this. One relates to getting around the drum kit in order to be able to access all the sounds sources you have available, the other relates to how you go about hitting each sound source. With just a single drum or cymbal there are at least five or six different ways of hitting which will produce audibly different sounds. If you don't have a consistent scheme for this, your drumming will come out sounding “messy” rather than clean, as no two notes will sound properly matched. Here's my assertion with respect to sound: If you hit a drum in the exact same place, from the exact same height, with the exact same motion and follow-through then it will sound the same. So control over sound is all about controlling the motions of your body.

Physical Requirements

Looking at the musical requirements above, a common thread emerges – consistency. We need to be consistent in our ability to play in time, at the right volume and in the same manner – the same physical shapes. So we need some rules. We need to make sure our technique is always the same, if that is possible. I don't mean that you should play like a machine, but merely that you don't just consider a drum beat to be a series of hits on a kit, it is like a dance – every part of the motion your body makes is important, and should be played consistently each time you repeat the groove or fill. Now, if we're going to start setting general rules there are a few that seem like sensible places to start:

1. We must be relaxed when we play. Tension makes it hard to control sticks moving at high speed, and can cause muscle stress, blisters, back problems and even serious injuries. Vinnie Colaiuta once broke a bone in his foot while attempting to force an unfamiliar technical approach during a bass drum sampling session.

2. We must be balanced when we play. Leaning on your hi-hat foot is a bad idea. What happens when you need to open the hi-hat while playing a difficult bass drum part? Typically, drummers that need to do this either shut their hi-hat way too soon (which sounds very uncomfortable) or severely fluff the bass drum part.

3. We need to find physical solutions that let us play both accented (loud and quiet) parts and also single-volume parts without accidentally playing accents.

4. We need to find physical solutions that assist us with playing in time.

5. We need to find physical solutions that allow us to always hit the drums or cymbals in manner in which we intend.

So with those rules in place, we then get into the realm of techniques. Techniques are ways of making all of the above things happen. There are many good techniques for both hands and feet, and some of them are better for certain musical applications. For example, in the realm of bass drum technique: It is easier to control very quiet strokes if you play with your heel down, resting on the bass drum pedal at all times. It is easier to belt out loud strokes without getting tired if you lift your heel off the base plate and use the weight of your leg to your advantage. So there is no “perfect” approach to technique that will give us the catch-all solution to every musical problem. Hence the choice of technique comes down to the musical styles you intend to play, but being educated in the theory of various technical approaches certainly can't hurt you in understanding the way you want to develop your own playing style.

There's a final subject I would like to touch on before wrapping up this monster of an article – how we go about training our limbs to respond to musical impulses without forgetting about technique.

Learning technique

Human beings may not be unique in nature in being able to use tools – some primates have been known to use twigs to catch ants, for a start – but it is without a doubt that our brains are more adapted to picking up inanimate objects and using them as an extension of our bodies than any other species in the world. As drummers, this is what we do – we use our sticks as extensions of our bodies. When you drive a car, you don't think “Left foot on clutch... move left hand to gear shift lever.. change to 2^nd gear... accelerator down slightly... release clutch... turn steering wheel”, you just think “I'm going to turn left at this Give Way sign”. Once you've learned to drive, your brain does all the extra low-level work for you - assuming you've trained it correctly, and you don't try to push it past the limits of the training you have given it.

Learning techniques is all about training your brain to respond correctly to ideas like “play a fast bunch of 16^th notes on the snare and then hit a crash cymbal in unison with that next guitar chord”. With good techniques already trained into your brain, your body will just do this for you automatically and without any worries about timing, dynamics or tension.

People learn by repetition. The first time you tried to get on a bike, you probably fell off it. I think most people can remember the first time that they actually managed to stay on the bike, and it kept going without overbalancing. After that you tend to think “I can ride a bike now”. You don't remember the fact that when you got past that first ride you still fell off, you still wobbled all the time and you couldn't look backwards without turning. All of those things – the detailed control – comes gradually. There isn't a moment where you go “I'm the perfect cyclist now” and you're done. You just wake up one day and notice that you can ride a bike pretty good, then you start to forget that it was actually quite hard to learn in the first place.

All of this detailed stuff is handled by something called “Muscle memory”. I'm typing this on a keyboard now, because I have good typing muscle memory. I learned that by typing a lot. It's not like the Matrix where you can load a skill into your brain and just use it – you don't go to a teacher and learn like that. In order to train your muscle memory, you need to repeat the thing you want to learn. A lot. If I recall correctly I was once told by somebody with a psychology background that after approximately 300 consistent repetitions of something your brain will start to pick it up and hand it off as a “background task” - you can start to think about other stuff without making mistakes.

But here lies the problem – what if you consistently repeat something incorrectly (ie- inefficiently or with tense muscles) 300+ times? Your brain then starts to program itself to respond incorrectly. It is harder to correct a problem in your technical habits than it is to develop something unfamiliar. Once you've learned something your brain likes to go onto "autopilot" and not think about it - otherwise we'd constantly be worrying about breathing and walking. So doing a good job at the beginning is very helpful.

The best way to make sure you do something right is to:

• Isolate. Don't try to learn to play a really hard fill by bashing along to a record which is spitting parts at you faster than you can execute them. Sit down, work out exactly what the notes are. Understand what you're trying to do. Don't try to learn a five-minute song in one go, find the bits you can't do yet and work on those in isolation.

• Slow Down. Nobody learns to drive by getting in a car and putting their foot to the floor on the first lesson. You need to work on things slowly, then once you understand the movements you can speed up gradually, always keeping in mind relaxation and control as goals; not speed. Speed will come later, and it's much easier to deal with if you're in control of it. This seems obvious when you're learning to drive, as crashing has quite serious consequences, but playing an instrument makes it very easy to screw up and then forget about it. If you learn to drive by crashing all the time, you will crash while you're driving later. If you learn to play by allowing yourself to get away with mistakes all the time, you will make mistakes when you play in public.

• Pay attention. My first week in music school, a teacher of mine (Brian Greene – if you're ever in the UK then look him up!) gave the best example of this I've ever seen. He picked one of the students at random, and told him that he was to watch his eyes until he said “stop”, and count how many times he blinked. Brian stood there for about thirty seconds, blinking occasionally. After a while, he came out of that and said: “That's what I want to see when you're practicing”. When you're really focused on something and paying complete attention then you will execute the material better, and need less repetitions to achieve the best results.

Conclusion

That's a very long but still fairly simple overview of the basics of technique. As you've probably noticed, there's virtually nothing about drumming in there at all. Developing technique is more about understanding a problem and understanding methods for finding a solution than it is about saying “play exactly like me”.

There were more than fifty drummers in my year at Drumtech in London, and every single one of us left with different techniques. We've all got a few basic principles that we picked up off the same teachers teaching the same lessons, but we all had different musical goals and different physical approaches to motion. None of our teachers had the same techniques as each other either, but they all worked great for what they were doing. With a bit of dedication and concentration with some rational thoughts, you can have good technique as well. I've not got to where I ideally want to be with it, but I know how to identify problems and fix them – that's the real skill of developing drum technique. Once you learn that, difficult drum parts stop being something amazing or impossible and they just become a question of time - how much time do I need to dedicate to that to learn it?