Master The Drums, Play Your Favorite Songs, With Pro Drums Teacher (5+ Years Of Experience)

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• 1) When did you first develop a passion for music and your favorite instrument?

  I came up on guitar, and I wasn't much good at it. Fifteen, sixteen, desperate to be the one out front doing the solos like everybody else. Then one night there's five of us jamming at a friend's place and it's a racket, everyone soloing over everyone, no bottom to any of it. There's a bass leaning in the corner that nobody will touch. I plug it in, I've no real idea what I'm doing, I just play the root notes along with the kick drum. And the room changed. People who'd been sitting down got up. I felt it in my chest before I understood it in my head, and that was that, it's been the bass ever since. Took me years to stop being a bit ashamed of it, mind, because in your head the bass player is the guy who couldn't cut it on guitar. Then you grow up and work out he's the one holding the whole thing up off the floor.

• 2) Is there a particular type of music or artist that you listen to on a loop without it driving you crazy?

  I don't really listen to songs. Sounds daft, but it's true. I put a record on and I go straight to the bass and the kick and what they're doing together, and I'll miss the words completely. Ask me what a song's about and half the time I couldn't tell you. It's Motown mostly, the singles with James Jamerson on them, "For Once in My Life," "Bernadette," where the man plays a whole melody down at the bottom and never once gets in the singer's way. And What's Going On, which apparently he cut lying flat on his back on the studio floor, and it's some of the finest playing on any record ever made. My wife's banned me from the car stereo because I'll rewind the same eight bars going "listen, listen to what he does there," and she can't hear it, and honestly, why would she. Mind you, I'll also happily sit and play flashy rubbish on my own for an hour, stuff I'd never drag onto a gig. So I'm not exactly consistent. That's different though. That's just for me.

• 3) Explain to us the most difficult or riveting course you could personally give to a student of music.

  The hardest thing I teach is the part you can't see, which is time. Not counting. Anybody can count, that's just maths. I mean feel, where you sit inside the beat, whether you're right on top of it or leaning back behind it, because that tiny difference is the entire character of the music and most people rush without having the faintest idea they're doing it. I'll put a student on a dead simple line with a drum loop and they'll swear blind they're locked in when they're a fraction early the whole way, dragging the thing forward, and they cannot feel the gap. Getting somebody to actually hear that, and then lay their notes down in the pocket on purpose, is months of unglamorous work. Guitarists are the worst for it, God love them, they will not leave a space if their life depended on it. But that patience with time is the only thing that separates a bass player you'd book from one you wouldn't.

• 4) What do you think is the most complicated instrument to master and why?

  People expect a bass player to pick something with a hundred notes in it. I'd go the opposite way, to the timpani. Hear me out. It's basically my job in a tailcoat, you're the bottom of the whole orchestra and the timekeeper, except the timpanist has it far harder. He'll sit and count eighty bars of rest doing nothing while everyone else plays, then come in alone and exposed on maybe four notes in the entire piece, and every one has to be dead in tune and dead on time or the whole hall knows in an instant. And he's tuning the drums with his feet the whole while, pedals underneath, quietly retuning by ear in the gaps between his own notes because the pitches change as the music goes. All that waiting for so few notes, and no margin to be even slightly out. I'll take a busy part over that kind of exposure any day of the week.

• 5) What are your keys to success?

  Two things, and they're not equal. The big one, the one nobody wants to hear, is that you have to play with real drummers, in real rooms, for years. Your metronome at home lies to you. It gives you lovely time on your own that falls apart the second you're in with actual people, because time is a conversation, not a stopwatch. The small thing is learning to enjoy playing something simple without dressing it up. The players who get bored holding a groove are the ones who rush, and they're the ones who don't get the second call.

• 6) Name three musicians you dream of meeting in your favourite bar in the early hours of the morning. Explain why.

  James Jamerson first, no contest, even though I know he's long gone. I'd just want to watch his right hand, because he did all of that with one finger, they called it the Hook, and I still don't properly understand how a man swings that hard off a single finger. Then Carol Kaye, who as far as I know is still going strong, and who by every account will tell you exactly how it really was and argue you under the table about which of those famous lines were hers and not some fella who took the credit. I'd lose the whole night to that and enjoy every minute. And Bootsy Collins, because the other two and I would sit there getting all misty and reverent about the old days, and somebody has to be the one in the star-shaped glasses keeping it daft. Three bass players. I looked at the list afterward and thought, well, of course it is. What did you expect, that I'd invite a singer.

• 7) Provide a valuable anecdote related to music or your days at music school.

  I never went to music school, so everything I know got knocked into me on bandstands, and the one that stuck cost me a gig. I was about twenty, playing in a soul covers band, and we landed a proper booking, a packed function room, hot night, everyone dressed up. And I was flying. Throwing in little runs and fills, walking up to every chord change, sliding all over the neck, really showing everyone in that room what I could do. I came off drenched in sweat and completely certain I'd been the best thing on that stage. Then I waited all week for the call about the next one, and it never came. I chased it up and got a very polite nothing back. And I could not for the life of me work out what I'd done wrong, because in my head I had played brilliantly. Months later I'm having a drink with a drummer I trust, an older guy, and I'm moaning about it, and he just looks at me and says, dead flat, "Because you played all over the singer. Nobody could hear her for you." And it landed like a slap, because he was dead right. I'd been so busy proving I was in the room that I'd trampled the one person the crowd had actually paid money to hear. It had genuinely never once occurred to me that my job might be to not get noticed. Took getting quietly dropped to understand it, and from that night on I played less and got hired more, and it's never gone the other way since.

• 8) What are the little touches that make you a Superprof in music?

  It's all methods, not personality. First lesson, before anything else, you're playing along to a drum loop or a track, never on your own, because a bass by itself is half a conversation and it teaches you next to nothing. I'll have someone play one plain two-bar line for ten minutes solid until they stop trying to prettify it and it actually starts to feel good, which they resent at the time and thank me for later. I record them on my phone and play it straight back, because nobody believes they rush until they hear themselves doing it, and then there's no argument left. And here's the one that irritates other teachers: I tell beginners to leave the slap and the scales alone for a good while and just lock roots into a groove, because you can bolt the flash on later, but if the foundation's shaky then all the flash is just a shaky thing played fast. I'll be honest about my own limits too, I read music slowly and badly and always have, I've run on my ears for forty years. Most people come to me wanting to sound impressive. I'm trying to make them sound necessary, and that's the one that keeps a bass player in work.