First things first - grab your transcription here.
A few years ago I made a video called “stop trying so hard to groove” (linked in the card in today’s video), in which I made the case that the advice “just feel it” has limits, since sometimes our perceptions in the moment aren’t accurate.
For a very quick example, many of us are susceptible to “temporal optical illusions”, a fancy way of saying that offbeats will feel slower than they are, and consecutive half notes will often feel faster. Only by “training” our perceptions can we reach a state where “just feeling it” produces reliable results.
But today we’re diving deeper into “feel” writ-large.
Because it’s not just metronomic accuracy. Nor is having the perfect hypothetical ability to perceive feel without any idea where to go. And in the video we examine a deceptively complex question: why is “feel” so hard?
I begin with an anecdote about when I was first learning drums - I had one of the books everybody studies, and when I played exercises from beginning to end without “messing up”, I got to move on. So the first definition of good feel is something like “the difference between playing a Steve Gadd transcription as a beginner with all the notes ‘right’ and what it sounds like when Steve does it.”
It’s here that you get into taste, and “just feeling it”. (Sorry, commenters against whom I went kinda hard.)
If you don’t know what it feels like to dance, you don’t even know what you’re chasing.
Of course, the next stage is to be able to play on the drums what’s in your head, then to make the audience feel what you’re feeling, and it’s here that all that metronome stuff is important.
But there’s a level above even that!
Because there are recordings in which you’re happy with how you sounded listening back to the playback after 5 minutes, but which you’d find “wanting” after 20 more years. There are those subtleties that take years to hear - like local accents.
That complete deep-dive is in today’s video.
Hope you enjoy!