First things first - grab your free transcription here.
It took me till almost a decade out of music school before I finally understood the significance of the words Nas drummer Haze Amaze tossed out a few weeks ago like it was an aside.
Two things exist at once: we hear our favorite drummers doing this right, and sometimes they even talk about it. But we still don’t do anything about it.
Why?
I’m talking about the quotation right in the thubnail: “without them flamming”.
I think Haze Amaze dropped that like it was so obvious it didn’t require further commentary. Like it wasn’t probably the single most fundamental issue affecting drummers trying to become great.
And to say it is simple: when two limbs are playing together, make sure they’re really together.
Then we’ll go and practice, and work on pretty advanced stuff, and we won’t take Haze’s advice.
Why?
The answer hints at the limitations of verbal communication, and adaptation-over-time to suboptimal stuff. We hear “don’t flam”, and somehow we encode it as “sure, don’t flam, but as a third-order priority/cherry-on-top once I’ve mastered all this other stuff.”
We also get “used to” the feeling, so we don’t necessarily clock it unless we record ourselves.
And I think there’s a third reason. A word that’s ubiquitous in drum education. Say it with me: “independence”. A word that subtlely reinforces a mental image of limbs in parallel tunnels, arriving at the destination at more-or-less the same time, instead of understanding that “independence” is a mirage. A gestalt of a series of micro-instances in which limbs are either occurring together or not.
As another great drummer, Matt Wilson (#iykyk) said…well, he said exactly that!
“Your limbs are either playing together or they’re not.”
We think of a samba as a bass drum “part”, and a hand “part”, almost as if they’re floating free of one-another, when in reality, a conventional samba has 8 kick notes and 7 snare ones, 3 times they’re supposed to sound exactly together, and 4 times they’re not.
Through that lens, we view a samba as a literal coordination problem, and we’d likely zero in on those 3 “instances” with a spotlight, making sure they’re “perfectly” together.
But great drummers rarely mention this. The same way David Foster Wallace’ fish wondered what water was. From Louis Cole to Ringo, they’ve all just played without flamming for so long it no longer occurs to them it might be hard for some players.
But Haze called it out. So we should listen.