First things first - coupon codes coming.
Does formal instruction take away the grit and rawness that makes you an individual? That gives your playing soul and wabisabi?
When some random commenters implied as much, I was at first defensive of the idea. (As a drum coach myself, I would certainly hope not.) And indeed you can find multiple soulful drummers, from Max Roach to Adam Deitch, who received formal training, and don’t seem the less soulful for it.
Still, it’s hard to get that example of “teaching birds to fly” out of my head. The archetypal illustration for my generation is the show choir from American Pie. Memory is sketchy, but one character joins show choir to meet girls, and accidentally ends up soloing in the end-of-year concert. Not the point. The point is the choir covers a song Marvin Gaye and James Taylor made famous - How Sweet It Is to Be Loved By You. And they do not do it justice. The “academic-ness” of their performance is played for laughs, but it sticks with you.
Did Marvin have a choir director shouting “chest voice” at him? Did James sing “bumble-bee-eee” to warm up? What about Bob Dylan? What about Eric Clapton or Robert Johnson.
Schooling, you see, gets a bad rap.
We picture square, untalented paper-pushers, pushing “square pegs into round holes”, and preaching “one-size-fits-all” pedagogy probably developed by somebody equally untalented, smoothing out all the individuality. Filing off the grit. Stealing the soul.
But how real is this?
First, there’s the issue of good vs bad pedagogy to confront. Yes, bad teachers can probably take a natural talent and kill it, mostly by killing the drive. But good teachers can foster and nurture that talent.
Next are two sets of very different things that can seem the same.
At the beginning, there’s “novice sloppiness” that can, at first glance, seem like “soulful wabisabi”. And while there’s certainly a rawness and abandon some students exhibit that we don’t want to squash, for most novices, including me, that sloppiness is nothing like the grit of the greats. We rush and drag in decidedly-unsoulful places, have inconsistent dynamics, are passive instead of proactive in playing for the song, don’t listen well, etc.
Next, there’s the “crucible” every learner needs to go through as part of the learning process; a natural artifact of taking something innate and intuitive and deconstructing it and making it conscious. A good educator can do this in a more “as necessary”/”microsurgery” way, but some self-consciousness is probably inevitable.
We’re seeing Nate Smith and Adam Deitch at the end-state, not during their first 2 years of drums.
So what was going on with that show choir?
Probably nothing very representative of the overall effect good training can have. I too have been in high school music programs, and the emphasis is to take a group of people with various levels of training and interest and create a serviceable performance on a deadline. You’re going to round off some edges. But considering the experience levels, it’s probably not like you clipped the wings of a fledgling Erykah Badu either. If she was in the choir, she had plenty of time to keep going on the journey.
Just like you, dear reader.
Hope you enjoy!