Why is good feel on the drums so rare, even after we’ve basically built a religion around it?
You can’t read an article or watch an interview without hearing the importance of feel.
Steve Gadd
Steve Jordan
Bonham
Bernard
Jeff
Clyde
Ziggy
But - thought experiment: if you were putting up flyers for a drummer for your band, what percentage of the people who called you would have an amazing feel?
My quick back-of-the-napkin math says less than 10%. (I haven’t listened to auditions for drummers for my own bands, of course, but I’ve been one of the people auditioning, listening to others play, and I’ve listened to auditions for other things. Plus I’ve walked down the halls of New York practice spaces for the better part of 15 years.)
My conclusion? We don’t actually care about it as much as we claim to. When the lights are on, and the camera is recording, we talk a good game about feel, but behind closed doors? When it’s just us and the drumkit, and noone will ever know?
I think we think we’re already better at it than we really are, and I think we secretly think chops are more important.
But all it takes is a couple of “first takes” recording ourselves along with a tune to realize chops are meaningless if our beat placement is wack. And to hear the delta between the way we think we sound, and the way we reeeeeally sound.
And many-a-time, after having that revelation, people will wonder “how do I get better at this?”
Well, one way is to increase your sensitivity to where you’re placing your beats. One way, which I’ll discuss next week, is by playing simple beats and just “zooming in” on your beat placement with your attention. Kind of like meditating. Which is time consuming.
But there is another way. Isolate and exaggerate the weakness, so you can target it.
And it’s in this lesson that I’ll show you how I do that.
Hope you enjoy.