Have you ever met someone you did not like or understand at all and later you became best friends or even lovers? Not to get too personal but learning rhythms, studying drumming can be like this.
Often a rhythm we can not play or feel feels so foreign. Maybe we even hate it or it makes us uncomfortable. But when we stick with it can become our best friend or we even learn to love it.
Rhythms and arrangements are so interesting. Before I studied Haitian drumming intensely my teacher gave me a tape. Back in the day before CD’s we had cassette tapes!
Everything on the tape sounded the same. I was wondering, “what is this”?! I studied with him for a year. I listened to the tape a year later and everything sounded completely different from each other. I could now hear the rhythms and it was beautiful. I looked at the tape and could not believe it was the same tape. I’ll never forget that. The same thing happened when I began my studies on djembe.
I think many people hear west African drumming or afro cuban or other forms of drumming and they simply can not hear it at first. We need to give it a chance.
When I first played traditional style dunun with a full ensemble of three dunun drummers and four djembe players I had a spiritual awakening and epiphany. It’s hard to write about it or understand unless it’s happened to you.
When we learn new rhythms we have to be open and we need to make friends with the rhythms. What we are in resistance to, rhythmically speaking is often what we needed can provide counter balance.
People that only study and get too in to their head, who are stuck on always being correct and having to do thing s “right” often can have way more fun in their drumming by counterbalance. By letting go and dropping into the feels. By going to a jam session and letting loose! By jamming with out being mental about it.
People who have never studied a rhythm and only jam and who only go by feel can more often then not (in my playing experience) also benefit by studying. You can learn to play different things and to widen out your repertoire as well. It’s all about balance. Earlier on in my career I thought I knew it all.
When someone told me I did not and I came around to studying a whole new world opened up to me. I was in resistance to writing out rhythms for many years and when I learned to write this also opened up new doors and pathways.
Please be open to learning, be open to jamming be open to dealing with and making balance with what makes you feel uncomfortable . Because more often then not what we are in resistance to is what we actually need for our growth and balance.