What are you bringing to the kitchen?

One of the biggest frustrations for musicians who are starting to develop into good players is often the people around them. I'm sure I'm preaching to the choir, as it were, but here goes.

Think of a rehearsal like a bunch of cooks in the kitchen. Each member of the band or group has the assignment to bring an ingredient to make, say, chocolate chip cookies. You need eggs, milk, flour, chocolate chips and so forth.

So let's say you spend time finding just the right wheat, preparing it, sifting it, grinding it into beautiful flour. You have it ready well ahead of the rehearsal, and you bring extra, just in case there's a spontaneous double batch in the works.

When you get there, the person who was supposed to have the chips says, "Sorry, still making these chocolate chips. I'll have them ready next time. And you're totally going to love them, they'll be so awesome! Let's bake some cookies anyway, and imagine they have chocolate in them."



And the egg guy or girl is like, "Yeah, no eggs yet, but I brought the chickens! Let's try it again, and maybe they'll lay some eggs."

Pretty soon you lose your motivation to work on your flour, or you take it elsewhere, or you give up baking altogether.

The point is that we can spend more time baking a better, tastier cookie if the ingredients are all there very early on in the rehearsal process. You have to ask yourself if you're bringing the highest quality, best produced ingredients that you're capable of, or if you're compromising the end product with your lack of preparation.

Prepare your ingredients well, and you'll find yourself "baking" at a high level with serious pros.

Happy drumming!

The recipe is not the cookie!

Today I worked with some AWESOME junior high percussionists. They worked hard, and we had a lot of fun. They also put up with my crazy analogies and stories really well. (Thanks, guys!)

Along the way we discovered another great way to think about sheet music, or what we sometimes call, "the chart." Whatever you call it, it's the paper with ink on it that tells you what to play, be it tabs, standard notation, a lead sheet or head chart.

This comparison is really simple: the written music is the recipe, as if you were making a batch of cookies. The recipe may call for flour, sugar, eggs, chocolate chips, etc, just like the music calls for rhythm, pitch, dynamics, phrasing, etc.

Ultimately, the addition of the ingredients, the mixing, the tweaking and the baking? All up to you. That's why my version of cookies is very different from my mom's, even though we follow the exact same recipe. And that's why your version of a song may be very different from somebody else's.

One more thing: It's been said that you can tell when food is cooked with love, and the same can be said for music. When following the "recipe" for your next performance, cook it up with love and both you and your audience will appreciate it.

And remember, just like the recipe is not the cookie, the sheet of paper with all the ink on it is not the music.

Happy drumming!