How do Drummers Know What to Play?
If you’ve ever taken part in a jam session or have composed drum parts to a song, you’ve likely had to pause and ask yourself, “what am I supposed to play?” It’s a relatively simple question, but there’s no clear answer. So how exactly do drummers know what to play in a given situation?
Music is a Language
Music and language are often compared to one another, and for good reason. If we think of learning to play the drums as a sort of language acquisition, we can draw many parallels between how the two develop.
Over the past year, I started learning and practicing Spanish more consistently. The similarities between learning another language and learning the drums are striking. The last time I studied Spanish in any capacity was nearly 15 years ago in high school so I basically started from scratch again. The first several units were focused on the absolute basics of syntax, vocabulary, and simple common phrases. Learning to play the drums begins the same way: the fundamentals of technique (how to hold the sticks and properly strike the drums), simple rhythms, and basic beats.
The more you practice and focus on developing a solid foundation, the basics of technique and movement become second nature. After a month of practice, you might be able to effortlessly play a solid rock groove, whereas that same groove may have previously required all of your focus. Freeing up mental bandwidth is crucial for playing with more fluidity and reactivity. Ideally, you want to train your brain to move faster than your hands, which is much easier said than done!
To relate things back to learning a language, the equivalent would be having a very basic conversation in the new language (“Hello, how are you?” “I am well, thank you.”). I noticed that for the first few months (and still a lot of the time now), I always translated everything that I heard in Spanish to English in my brain, or formulated sentences first in English before trying to translate them into Spanish, as opposed to just “thinking” in Spanish. But the more vocabulary and common phrases I learn, the better I can create a complete thought in Spanish. My mental processing essentially works faster.
Critical Listening
The flip side to just learning patterns and beats (the equivalent to words and phrases) is being able to identify them in context just by hearing them. Developing solid listening skills takes years of practice. Thankfully, the best way to practice is by simply listening to as much music as you can in as many different styles as you can find. Of course, begin exploring with your favorite music or anything that you really enjoy listening to. Familiarizing yourself with the fundamentals of many different styles trains your ears to identify how the drums blend in with and support other instruments and parts.
If you take drum lessons, your instructor will provide you with a list of some of the most commonly used drum grooves, as well as songs that make use of them so you can begin sharpening your listening skills. As those basic grooves become hardwired into your brain through repetition, you’ll begin to quickly recognize them in different songs, and even different styles of music.
Now, there will undoubtedly be lots of things you hear that make you go, “what the heck was that?” But an excellent way to develop your listening skills is through mimicry. Even if you’re unsure of what exactly you’re hearing, do your best to recreate it and see how close you can get. More often than not, just making the attempt will help you discover new patterns and phrases, even if they don’t exactly match with what you’re trying to replicate. And in that case, you’ll develop a bunch of ideas that are more unique to you, which is how drummers develop a personal style.
Every drummer’s sound is ultimately a metaphorical soup of their musical influences. That’s why it’s good to listen to many different styles of music. If you make a soup with only a couple ingredients, like only broth and carrots, that’s going to be a pretty lame soup. But if your soup has carrots, chicken, celery, rice or noodles, and a bunch of seasonings, not only will it be delicious, but other people will want to eat your soup. We want people to want to play music with us. And that requires learning more than just a couple basic beats so you have a bunch of different “ingredients” at your disposal.
When I first started learning the drums, I would attempt to play along with some of my favorite songs. In my mind at the time, I thought I was nailing the parts! But upon revisiting the same songs a few years later, and after beginning drum lessons, I realized that my younger self was missing out on so many subtler details in the drum parts. I simply wasn’t able to perceive everything present in the recording. But as my “drummer brain” developed, I was better able to accurately decipher parts by ear based on the vocabulary I had.
To relate everything to language again, I’ll sometimes watch videos or shows in Spanish to see if I can acquire new vocabulary, but also to test my recognition skills. Since I’m not even close to fluent in Spanish, I maybe understand between 30% and 50% of what I hear, depending on the subject matter. It’s certainly a challenge, but listening to native Spanish speakers helps me “hear” the language faster, which forces me to think faster to understand what’s being said. Relating back to music, that’s the same as listening to a masterful drummer, like Tony Williams, improvise and create on the spot. We ultimately want to be able to play the drums as fluently as we can speak our native language(s).
Considering Context
Now that we covered the importance of a solid vocabulary and understanding the basics of thinking like a drummer, we need to revisit the big question; how do you know what exactly to play?
Not every groove works for every musical situation, in the same way that a spoken phrase can have a drastically different meaning depending on context and inflections. A heavy-handed thrash beat simply won’t work with a jazz ballad - that’s like screaming in a library. Conversely, delicate brushwork won’t provide the drive required for a hard rock song.
This is exactly where your critical listening skills need to combine with your vocabulary. If you spent time listening to many different styles of music and attempted to mimic some of those parts, you may already have a better idea of how to blend in with an ensemble. Having the ability to listen to yourself as you play is necessary in order to gauge how well your playing supports other musicians in a group. But listening to yourself as you play requires most of the mechanics to be locked into muscle memory. Active listening demands mental bandwidth.
Playing drums in a band or ensemble is very much a team effort. Since the drums are generally one of the loudest, if not the loudest, instruments in a band, it’s easy for us to drown out other instruments. Each band member essentially represents a puzzle piece carrying out a specific function. When placed with the other instruments, their parts should snap together to create a cohesive product. The context of what each person plays makes the song. It’s not always what you play, but how you play it.
Here’s one of the most important things to keep in mind - just because you CAN do something, doesn’t mean you should. Restraint is an elusive virtue. I’ve recently come to the realization that a lot of my favorite drummers have the ability to play incredibly fast and complex patterns and grooves, but more often than not, they make the conscious decision not to. Instead, they develop creative parts that best suit the whole of the music they play.
Developing such musical sensibilities simply requires a lot of trial and error over a long period of time. Thinking back to our language comparison, you might learn a whole bunch of complex words, but smooshing all of the biggest words you know together into a sentence likely doesn’t make any actual sense. Or even if it does technically “make sense,” most people won’t actually understand what you’re trying to say.
If you’re jamming with new people for the first time, the best thing to do is to just start simple with basic beats that you can play in your sleep. Once the groove is locked in and steady, make only small changes to further develop it. Such changes could include adding a couple ghost notes, opening the hihats, adding a couple extra kicks, or switching to keeping time on the ride cymbal instead of the hihats. Ideally, if you’ve been practicing well, you’ll have played along with enough music in different styles to gauge whether what you’re playing fits in or not.
To compare to language (again), think about when you have a conversation with someone. You don’t necessarily plan every single sentence in your head before starting to speak. You can react to the person with which you’re conversing. That’s because you have enough of a vocabulary and a good enough grasp on syntax and context clues that you can “improvise” in your language. We just need to train ourselves to drum with the same fluidity.
A stellar example of a musical conversation is the tune “Actual Proof” by Herbie Hancock. With Herbie Hancock on keyboards, Mike Clark on drums, and Paul Jackson on bass, they’re undoubtedly one of the strongest rhythm sections of all time. And their improvisational abilities are practically unparalleled. Even though each musician plays complex patterns and phrases, they all still manage to complement one another without stepping on each other’s toes. It’s an incredibly fine line to walk!
Ultimately, knowing what to play on the drums requires having a solid vocabulary, critical listening skills, sensibilities that only develop through trial and error, and your familiarity with different musical styles.
To take your drumming and listening skills to the next level, schedule a trial lesson with one of our instructors! Beginning drum lessons is the quickest way to best understand what you should (or shouldn’t) play in any musical scenario you may find yourself in.