Grab your free transcription of the exercises in this video (it will be emailed to you).
Pretend you were an alien, and intercepted a radio signal from Earth. Something called “The Beatles”. You’d probably understand melody and harmony, assuming your species perceived sound - those are just “pleasing” special cases of the physics of vibration. You might even understand the rhythm of the song, and the drums. After all, that’s just using regular intervals in time (a “beat”). These Earthlings apparently find that pleasing.
But it’s likely you’d have questions about the man seated behind some objects at the back, striking them with some kind of rods: “why is it crossing its arms one-over another?”
Because you’d likely understand engineering, and possibly robotics, and you’d know you’d never-in-a-million-years design something like that.
“Hmm. Maybe it’s an earlier model,” you’d muse.
And scene.
But seriously - why do we cross over when we play the drums?
If you’re a bit of an aficionado of drum history, you might have a story in your head. It’s maybe the same story I had, and it goes something like this:
“Traps” came indoors, adapting military and “second line” percussion for stages. The invention of the bass drum pedal occupied the lead foot. With the snare in front of the player, that left only the left foot free, and the invention of the “low boy” occupied that before it occurred to anyone we might be playing it with the hand. In the late 1920s, somebody invented extending the low boy stand to put the cymbals in reach of the player, but nobody noticed or cared, because everybody was playing jazz over on the ride cymbal. It wasn’t until we got to rock and, roughly, Ringo, that drummers realized they were “painted in” - forced to “cross over” if they didn’t want to relearn the drums.
That’s a nice story. But, as I discovered, there’s a big fly in its ointment. And when you see some 1930s big band footage, you’ll probably realize what it is.
But the real story is both more interesting and more illustrative of how we can “evolve into corners”. And I actually have a crackpot conspiracy theory about how we got here, that I don’t think anybody’s really talked about much. (At least I couldn’t find it in several hours of googling.)
And to learn all of that, I invite you to watch the video.
Hope you enjoy!