have you experienced something like this? yesterday i sat behind my drumkit with time to practice. i haven’t done that in months because of the big move and the chaos surrounding it – there just was no time for this. but yesterday i went to rehearsals an hour early to work on technique a little. when i played drums during the last few months it was either for rehearsals or for recording – so just playing. but now i found myself sitting there, knowing i really needed to work on my technique, but kind of clueless where to start. so i took some really simple exercise (rrll for the drummers out there…), trying to make it sound nice and even……and failed miserably! no matter if i did it fast, slow, loud or soft – it just sounded like some wooden box had been kicked down a staircase, unbelievable.

and the funny thing is, i’m positive the grooves i play now are more groovy than ever before. so it’s not the overall playing that sucks, it’s just the technique. on the one hand i strongly believe that feel, tone, soul is so much more important than technique. however, technique is kind of your toolbox – the things you need to be able to express yourself on the instrument. so you need technique, but it’s not what it’s about – more like the way of getting there.

i wasn’t disappointed about my rusty technique, a rather obvious thing. what i couldn’t figure out was why the overall playing didn’t suffer along with the technique. ok, i have played a little during this period but not that much – so shouldn’t the result become worse if the tools get crappier? it seems i have grown as a musical drummer while i was shrinking as a drummer’s drummer.

anyway, i take that as a good thing. and although i’ll spend more time on technique (again) from now on, i don’t think this will make me a less musical drummer. because hopefully this experience meant that musicality grows over time, even if you’re not focusing on getting better – while technique suffers if not taken care of, but without a major impact on who you are as a musician. i hope that’s right……it sounds quite cool, now doesn’t it?