I started drumming early in life, became obsessed, and was given every opportunity to become a professional musician. I worked hard on my speed and dexterity until I was confident in my musicianship and, by my early twenties, felt I was ready to play on hit songs and big tours. The problem was, I had overlooked grooving. I had practiced diligently at being a good drummer, but I hadn't prepared myself to be a successful musician. 

It wasn't until I was replaced on my band's first "single" that I began to question my playing. It seemed the drummers on the top level approached everything differently. I was starting to wonder what constituted "good drumming" in the first place. It wasn't so bad that I'd been replaced on the track. What scared me was that I couldn't tell why the replacement track was better! I could hear what the drummer played and even emulate his parts in the video. But I couldn't figure out why his track was so good. I couldn't pin point why it was so much better than what I was already doing. What was I doing? After playing drums all my life, I was suddenly baffled as to what to play.

After taking some time away from music I decided to listen intentionally to a few of my favorite drummers and analyze their playing. I was hoping to study some of the most successful, most listened to drummers in the history of popular music, and see if there was anything I could identify to help me approach drumming from a different angle. 

I chose Ringo, Charlie Watts, Mick Fleetwood, John Bonham, Roger Taylor, Bun E. Carlos, and Bev Bevan. I listened to their parts, tones, choices, dynamics, and anything else I could hear to figure out what they did and why. What size sticks, tuning, compression, effects? Drum sizes? Weight of cymbals? I tried to understand their choices and factor it all together. 

During this process I would learn something different from each drummer but what made the biggest impression on me was not how they varied, but what they all had in common. Each drummer I studied - no matter what band, country of origin, drum set size, style of music - took great care to play with a solid groove. Their notes were spaced appropriately, their time was steady, and their feel was consistent. Be it simple, complex, loud, or soft... the consistency, spacing, and volume of their hits was always accurate, and the feel was always clear. It wasn't just the notes these drummers had played, but how they'd played them. I suddenly realized I had been staring at the waves without seeing the ocean. 

At that point in my career I sounded better playing intricate parts than I did a simple beat. I was better at playing a Mozambique ride pattern than I was at playing 8th note hats. I could fit large groups of notes together and come back in on the 1, but I couldn't stay with the same feel for 4 minutes. If I was going to make a living playing the popular music I'd always loved, I needed to work on the consistency of my note spacing and volume, at all different tempos, and figure out how to play with a more dynamic feel.

Unlike other topics, the subject of grooving isn't as easy to comminicate. You can't describe a good groove like you can a lick or pattern. Grooving creates a feeling out of a delicate balance of sounds, and to analyze those sounds kills the very mood you are trying to study. It's like describing a sunset. What do you say?

"The sunset is beautiful!"

How is the drummer?

"The drummer is grooving!"

I couldn't find an intructional book on the subject and had nothing to work with, so I decided to put together some material myself, and I wrote up a series of exercises and ideas that would enable me to address the depth, weight, and consistency of my own playing. The first step was to define grooving. Next was to figure out how to approach it from a drumming perspective. In trying to break down this huge subject, I identified three distinct parts of grooving that could be isolated and practiced, allowing a drummer to actually develop the quality of their groove and become a better, more in demand, musician. 

Please read on if you would like to know more about grooving, how you can work on it, and how you can book a realtime, private drum lesson with me online using Skype.

All the best!

Steve Bowman