Stan Bicknell on Creating A Life Around The Drums

It’s fitting that two weeks after hearing from Chris Turner, a man with one of the most whimsical, intuitive approaches to drums I’ve ever encountered, we encounter one Stan Bicknell, who’s built a brand around a mindful, deliberate, disciplined approach to the drums, and to architecting a life around it.

Stan wowed audiences with his appearance on Drumeo 5 years ago. Around this time, his touring career was taking off. But after the birth of his child, Stan made the decision to put his life front-and-center, move back to his native New Zealand, and design a role for drums, drum practice, drum teaching, and drum performance, that served his life goals.

Stan’s story resonated with me, because I made a similar decision around a decade ago, when I decided to start the 8020 channel. (I should say, I wasn’t turning down touring opportunities.) Speaking to Stan was a great “meeting of the minds”, because we’ve read many of the same books, and thought along the same lines.

It’s just that he’s doing practically all of it better than I am.

Which inspires an adage - “find the person who’s doing what you want to do better than you are, and draw inspiration from them.”

Stan is like the Qui-Gon Jinn of the drums, with his disciplined practice routines, mindfulness, goal-setting, and integration between drums and life. And it shows in his playing. Stan is almost 100% self-taught, which is to say he emulated his drum heroes like Weckl and Vinnie largely without teachers as intermediaries, and while he wouldn’t recommend that for everybody, all that extra work left him with some revised first-principles.

He also coaches drummers in not-only the instrument, but in life-satisfaction, and, as the episode title says, building a life around the drums.

I hope you’ll find this discussion as fascinating as I did.

Has This Simple Invention CHANGED How We Play Drums?

First things first - grab your free transcription here.

Hear me out…

I think there’s been a change to the way we play the drums in the past few years, and I think it’s going to be a lasting one.

Last year I contemplated the proliferation of this stack of cymbals that looks like a pancake stack or Dali painting, and asked whether it was a “fad”, like Zil-bells or roto-toms, or whether it was going to have an enduring effect on the way we play, like - say - the double kick pedal.

Increasingly, I’ve been coming down on the side of the latter. I think these stacks are here-to-stay, and I think they’re rewiring how we approach the drums. In a way, though, that’s the least interesting question.

I’m far more interested in the “how/why”, and the “what do we do about it”.

In today’s video, I’ll explore, at least at surface-level, a trend in music that began in the late ‘70s and early ‘80s, and how that contributed to drummers changing their equipment and style of playing a few years later. Then we’ll talk about the unique characteristics of the music the “Dali stacks” were emulating, and why it’s got more staying power than some of the other trends.

Finally, we’ll explore a bunch of categories of beats we can make with these contraptions, now that they’re here.

Know you’ll enjoy!

5 Things "Pro" Drummers Know That Many Beginners Don't

First things first - grab your free study guide.

Every-so-often I find it fun to take a “clickbait” premise, and try to wring some actually useful insights out of it. “What would this video look like if I delivered on the clickbait title.”

And this week’s video didn’t come out of the blue. In these slow days of August, I’ve been reflecting on almost a decade of running the channel, and all the people I’ve seen play - online and in my various practice spaces - and questions I’ve received over those years. If you heard the Rob Brown interview, you might have heard be allude to this, but there are certain things you realize you take for-granted that other people don’t necessarily assume.

That’s often a great font for “stuff pros know” insights.

But additionally, there were things I needed to learn between 2014 and today, and those are in this video too.

Anyway, if you’re expecting this to be a list of stuff like “the 25 essential rudiments”, and “how to show up on-time for a gig”, it’s not that. It’s simple stuff like “rimshots are a thing”, and “there’s a whole spectrum when it comes to beat placement, from inconsistent-and-not-great to consistent-and-great”, and “you can influence a band live in room with things in your playing and even eye contact, and you’re wasting an opportunity if you’re just staring down at your kit.

So I hope you’ll join me as we explore these and some other insights that I believe “veteran” drummers take for-granted, that beginners don’t necessarily know.

Know you’ll enjoy!

Chris Turner on Falling in Love With The Drums Every Day

Chris Turner is kind of the undisputed modern “double kick king”. Which, if that was all he was, might be of less interest to my audience. Luckily he’s also one of the most musical and creative drummers, and one of the most interesting and inspiring humans I’ve met recently.

One of the underrated benefits of getting to speak to great drummers is seeing the variety of different ways they’ve achieved, well, greatness. And you learn there are really very different archetypes, from the “acerbic everyman”, to the “systems and discipline person”, to the “rocket-fueled motivation machine”. (The last might describe Isac Jamba and Richie Martinez, among others.)

Chris Turner has the seemingly-bottomless-pit-of-motivation that some of the other guests have, but it’s combined with an easy-going, “come-what-may” kind of whimsy. He literally says he structures his life to avoid doing anything he doesn’t want to do in a given day. If you’re wondering about the obvious paradox between that approach and the discipline and longevity required to reach his level on drums, I was wondering the same thing, and his answer mildly floored me.

Chris says for his entire life, he’s strung together a series of independent days of falling deeply in love with the drums. When I asked him if he’s seen 50 First Dates, the Adam Sandler/Drew Barrymore rom com, he agreed “it’s like that.”

I was rather pleased that in this hour-long conversation with the world’s foremost double-kick player, we only broached double kick twice: once as an aside as Chris described his relationship with teaching, and a second time when I say I’m “not going to ask him about that.”

Instead we talk about motivation, psychology, finding a relationship with what you love, and his newest object-of-focus, YouTube.

Chris has an energy I think you’ll find infectious, and I know you’ll enjoy this convo regardless of the genre you’re interested in.