Evolve Or Die – The Value Of Taking Chances In Your Creative Process

I recently worked on a record that included a song-writing collaboration between a pop band and a rap producer.  The project was born out of the enormous mutual respect that the artists had for one another’s work.  Also, each was fascinated by each other’s very different musical universe.  In the days leading up to the session everyone was super pumped about mixing it up with songwriters who made music so different, and so differently, than they did.

But when the musicians finally got down to actually making music together, the positive, easygoing vibe between them evaporated.  All the excitement they’d felt was replaced by an obvious uneasiness about the work ahead.

Going into the collaboration each camp had assumed that the other made music roughly in the same way they did.  This assumption couldn’t have been further from truth. The pop band made music in a highly calculated way. The group would spend days or weeks writing music for a song.  Later, lyrics would be written (and re-written) to accompany the music. Then an arrangement would be worked out. And all of this would happen long before the band entered a studio.  The rapper, on the other hand, was used to working at light-speed, composing a beat in an afternoon and recording a verse over it (often improvised at the mic) after dinner.  One creative process is methodical, the other impulsive.  One process puts its faith in a taking-ones-time-to-do-it-right approach to songwriting, the other puts faith in the inspired moment.

There in the studio, the artists were paralyzed by the thought of composing music in a different way, and a collective fear of trying something new shut down the entire collaboration. Each artist had achieved success working in their own way, and now neither was comfortable leaving their comfort zone.  Reaching across the creative divide was an act of faith that neither side seemed willing to commit.

My experience with the pop band and the rapper illustrates the kind of impasse creative partnerships can encounter when they’re forced to find a new way of being productive.  In fact, roadblocks like this happen all the time within groups of seemingly like-minded artists, artists within the same genre, even between artists who have worked together successfully for years.

It happens a lot - a group will be prolific for a long time, then one day the tried-and-true approach doesn’t work anymore and the music stops.  Maybe a band’s key songwriter gets writer’s block.  Or maybe the band’s line-up changes.  Or maybe the band consciously decides to change its creative direction, to significantly alter its sound. Whatever the interruption, suddenly the group’s old ways of making music no longer work and the members either learn to create in a new way or the fire dies.  In order to realize its potential, a band, like any creative partnership, must be willing and must have the courage to work in new ways. In other words, a group must be willing to evolve.

Evolution Requires Taking Chances 

The most successful organisms and organizations continue to innovate even after they’ve proven themselves to be viable.  In nature, plants and animals are always experimenting with more effective ways of putting themselves together, thanks to the random accidents of natural selection. In the history of ideas, the world’s major religions continue to be relevant and win new followers thousands of years after their humble beginnings, thanks to constant reinterpretation of scripture by adherents.  And in the realm of big business, Apple Computer, after pushing the frontiers of personal computing for 25 years, now pushes the frontiers of our own music industry, thanks to the chance-taking ingenuity of Steve Jobs.

The organisms and organizations that are most successful are the ones that dare to ask “What if?”  What if primates were able to walk upright?  What if “crusade” and “jihad” weren’t justifications for murdering non-believers, but rather merely metaphors for the importance of preserving a faith’s core principles?  What if your mobile phone could contain and playback your entire record collection? 

The revolutionary potential of “What if” applies equally to creative partnerships.  In your band, what if everyone agreed to write a song a week (including the members who’d never written a song in their life)? What if everyone committed to becoming proficient on another instrument?  What if your group began every rehearsal listening to a song and discussing why it’s great or why it’s not? What if your band’s non-singers each sang lead on a song? What if your band spent fifteen minutes of every rehearsal improvising and you recorded it to gather song ideas? What if you asked other bands to co-write songs with you - maybe a pop band, maybe a rapper?  What if?!

Evolution Is Scary

The truth is that the vast majority “What if” questions lead to nowhere.  So it is that the history of natural selection is littered with countless biological oddities that were doomed to early extinction, and that most religious systems are short-lived and attract only a small number of devotees, and that for all his successes, Steve Jobs is responsible for some of the biggest product flops in the tech sector. 

Hyper-aware of this risk of failure, we humans resist chance taking in our everyday lives (this despite the fact that human beings are themselves the extraordinary result of spectacularly successful chance “accidents”!).  We find what works, and we stick to it.

The same is true for creative partnerships, particularly when a group has had success working in a particular way in the past.  Soon after a band forms, the process by which it makes its art takes shape, determined by a number of factors including the members’ unique personality types, members’ various apparent talents, and the nature of the members’ pre-existing friendships.  If the resulting creative process bears no fruit, the group isn’t likely to last long.  But if the band finds success – wins a competition, gets a song on the radio, attracts a zillion friends on MySpace – then the creative process that led to that success gets validated.  And once validated, the group’s way of doing things tends to get set in stone and the members no longer challenge it.

Understandably, as long as a band is successful and happy, members feel no need to work any other way.  The danger with becoming attached to one way of working, though, is that even when that way is no longer fruitful, or when circumstances change, members find they’re unable to imagine doing things another way.  And when we can’t imagine doing something differently, we usually don’t.

Evolution is Egoless

Overcoming our innate hesitation to take chances can be difficult. It usually entails a major shift in thinking. It requires us to suspend, at least temporarily, our opinion about a right way and a wrong way to get from A to B.  Often it requires us to let go of our traditional role in a group. It requires a group to cultivate a supportive working environment, one in which people are encouraged to voice radical opinions and make suggestions that may at first seem bizarre, and may very well lead to nowhere.  And importantly, since we know that many “What if” questions do lead nowhere, it also requires members to have the wisdom to know which innovative suggestion lights the way to a new frontier, and which is simply a harebrained idea.

In other words, evolution is an egoless process, uncovering better ways of doing things by trial and error, free from the bias and engrained habits that characterize the process of doing things the same old way.

Evolution Unlocks Potential

Back in the studio with the pop band and the rapper, the standoff seemed, from the outside, to exist between the artists.  But we know that the artists were fans of one another, and that they respected and were fascinated by each other’s unique way of working. In fact the actual standoff was between the artists and their own personal fears of what they had to lose by trying to approach an unfamiliar situation in an inventive way.  No one wanted to look like a fool, so the camps retreated to their respective corners and expected the other to follow.

We resist taking chances because we can’t see the potentially beneficial result ahead of time, and because we lack faith in our own ingenuity. Run DMC and Aerosmith might have ruined their careers remaking “Walk This Way” together in 1985.  Public Enemy and Anthrax might have done the same releasing “Bring The Noise” in 1991. The artists involved in both of these unlikely collaborations braced themselves for ridicule.  Instead, both projects earned the artists a whole new level of respect among fans and critics.  

When allowed to take its course, evolution unlocks hidden potential in an organism or a group. Key to unlocking that potential is having the courage to take chances.

For The Good Of The Group - Listening In Performance

Listening To A Mime: A True Story

When I was a kid growing up in Iowa, I had a band called Outrage with two friends who were brothers, Robb and Jeff.  We were a power-trio specializing in Rush covers, and for years we practiced almost every night of the week in Robb and Jeff’s basement, driven to become the greatest musicians.  One night, as part of our unceasing quest for musical perfection, someone invited a mime to band practice, believing he could teach us a thing or two about live performance.   That’s right, a professional white-faced mime.

Now, I can’t remember who invited that mime to our practice, or why they thought a silent artist who specializes in climbing in and out of invisible boxes could school three young prog-rockers in the art of musical performance.  But school us he did.

How?  First, he spent fifteen minutes just listening to us jam.  Afterwards he silently stood up, reached theatrically into his oversized pocket and dramatically pulled out a long chain of rainbow-colored handkerchiefs.  Then he untied three of them, threw one to each of us, and motioned that we should blindfold ourselves and resume playing.

So that’s what we did, and immediately things felt – and according to Robb and Jeff’s parents, things also sounded – different.  Right then and there we began to understand that making great music as a group means listening beyond our own instrument to take in the sound of everyone playing together.  And right then and there we began to care less about being the world’s greatest individual musicians and to care more about becoming the world’s greatest band.

The Wine In The Potato

How strange that a performer who works in complete silence taught me, a rock drummer, my first great lesson about listening when I play with others.  Or maybe it’s not so strange.  With the ability to act out entire scenes without uttering a word, a great mime has learned to communicate a lot more in the visual world then we typically do in our day to day lives.  The mime who visited my band understood that great musicians do something similar in the world of sound, and he showed us that, by heightening our sensitivity to the players around us, we can use the energy of the entire group to blend many parts into a single, unified voice.

Blending – the process of bringing separate elements seamlessly together - is a skill that great artists of all kinds develop.  A painter thinks about it when mixing colors.  A sculptor thinks about it when accurately representing the proportions of a human body.  A writer thinks about it when maintaining cohesiveness in an essay or book.

Musicians in a group also must figure out how to bring all the pieces together, and the challenge is the same whether you are part of a rock group or a huge orchestra.

Sarah Fishgo is an arts journalist for a weekly NPR radio program, and she recently looked into how orchestral musicians create unity out of so many parts.  “It’s the orchestral paradox,” Sarah says, “making sure it sounds the way you want it to sound, and listening to everyone else around you at the same time, to blend it.” 

I listened to Ms. Fishgo’s piece on my kitchen radio a few months ago while concocting one of my favorite winter recipes - Spanish beef stew.  I couldn’t help but notice the parallels of her story with what was happening on my stovetop.  The trick to making a great stew is getting each ingredient to absorb a bit of the flavor of every other ingredient, and with Spanish beef stew the specific challenge is getting the sharp tang of the green olives and the Spanish red wine to mellow out a bit by penetrating the hard vegetables - the carrots and the potatoes.  The magic happens only when the various ingredients cast their flavor throughout the entire stew.  When the blend is right, your mouth knows it. 

Musicians on a stage are just like the ingredients in a big stew pot - every component is important because of how it interacts with the others, not how it exists on its own.  So whether it’s a Klezmer band, a barbershop quartet, or the Sex Pistols, the musical purpose of performance is always the same – for musicians to come together as one, to create a single experience for the audience out of many parts.

The Anatomy Of “Tight”

People commonly praise a good live band by saying they are “tight.”  When a fan tells me that my band is “tight,” I know it’s meant to be flattering.  But to me, “tight” implies something rigid or tense – something I hope my band is not - so I always have to do a quick translation in my head before I smile and say, “Hey, thanks.”

So what are people hearing when they call a band “tight?”  I think they’re hearing a group whose members sound connected because they pay attention to subtle shifts in time and dynamics, thereby moving through the music together.  Benny Goodman’s amazing big band did this, as did classic funk bands like James Brown & the J.B.’s and The Meters/

These groups are known for their unbelievable shows. How did they do it?  On stage these guys never sleepwalked through shows.  They were present in every moment, constantly playing off each other musically. The members of a great band are connected by sound.  They are planets in a solar system, each vibrating at a different frequency but bound by the common gravity of the music.  The result of this interplay is that a band’s songs continue to feel alive and exciting to the audience even after the group has played them a thousand times. 

There’s something else, too, that can help unite a band’s sound – instruments with complimentary tonal qualities.  As the sound of a group evolves over time, certain kinds of drums, guitars, and keyboards sound better together than others.  In my band, Spymob, for example, a lot of our songwriting was inspired by the popular music of the 60s and 70s, so it’s no coincidence that over the years we all gravitated toward instruments that evoke the sound of music made in those eras: vintage Ludwig drums, darker K Zildjian cymbals, vintage Fender guitars, a vintage Fender Rhodes electric piano, and old low watt tube amps.  In the context of Spymob, it just wouldn’t have made sense for me to play a loud new kit with thin shells and screaming cymbals; I would have overpowered my band mates and the group’s tonal blend would have suffered.

The decisions we make about the brand and design of our instrument are often very personal, which is the way it should be – our instrument is our musical voice.  However, as the member of a group we must be open to trying something different if our sound is somehow detracting from the cohesiveness of the whole.

Self-Mixing

From time to time, my band will play a show in which the sound on stage is so good, and we can hear each other so well, that it feels like there’s a mysterious force on stage weaving us together.  But on other nights, when the sound isn’t so good, we can feel completely out of touch with each other.  The only good remedy for bad stage sound is self-mixing - that is, turning yourself down until you can hear what the other guys on stage are doing.

It’s always fun to rock out, but when there’s too much volume on stage to hear each other clearly, it’s unlikely the audience is going to see a great show.  The more you achieve a natural balance on stage, the more your band’s performance will resonate with the inspiration zipping from player to player on stage.

After all, when the show is over, no audience member is going to remember if the drummer dropped a stick or if the singer hit a few flat notes.  But they will remember if the energy was good on stage.  If it was, your fans will love you for it, and they might even track you down after the show to tell you themselves.  “Yo, you guys are tight!”

 

It Won’t Mean A Thing…If You Ain’t Listening

In my last post I looked at how self-consciousness turns a musician inward, limiting their expressive potential and closing them off from their audience and the musicians with whom they’re playing.  Overcoming self-consciousness both in practice and performance allows a player finally to do what they were meant to do all along: listen.  In the couple entries I look at how listening shapes our playing, first in the process of learning, and then in performance.

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How do we learn to play in an unfamiliar style, or to incorporate new techniques into our playing?  I’ve seen books on the market that claim to be able to “get you playing real funk drums in less than a week!”  No way.  Mastering the nuances of a particular style requires years of practice.  It requires something else, as well: immersive listening.

 

Motion and Meaning

In 1932, jazz composers Irving Mills and Duke Ellington declared, “It don’t mean a thing if it ain’t got that swing.”  Fifty-two years later, Dee Snider of the 80s ultra-glam metal band, Twisted Sister, screamed, “I wanna rock!”  Now, these songwriters could hardly be more different, but on this they would agree: music’s gotta’ move.  The key to making music move is understanding the rhythmic and dynamic subtleties that give that style its distinct character, its deeper musical meaning.

Whether it’s jazz or rock, hip hop or funk, at the heart of every musical style is a signature rhythm, and every signature rhythm has a unique “swing”: a distinctive way of dividing time.  This means that it’s not enough for musicians simply to play in time; musicians must learn to play with time in the manner determined by the style.

Let’s look at samba.  In Brazil, I took weekly samba lessons on a traditional drum called a repique from an old, illiterate man named Miguel.  In my first lesson, Miguel explained to me that the essence of samba is contained within a single bar of time.  So for the next five weeks I practiced one, 2/4 rhythm - over and over and over.  At the end of each week, I took a long dusty bus ride back out to Miguel’s miserable shack, only to hear him tell me, “No, Eric, not quite right.  Watch me again, and listen!”

And listen I did, because even if Miguel could write, it wouldn’t have helped me.  Here’s why: the heart and soul of samba’s signature rhythm is its peculiar swing, and no conventional musical notation can adequately illustrate it.  The time signature of samba is typically represented as 2/4, and each quarter note of time does contain four short notes.  However – and this is the key to samba – six of the eight notes don’t land near enough to 16^th note markers to be depicted honestly as straight 16^th notes.  In fact, both because of where the notes land and because of which notes get emphasized, the rhythm can sometimes sound as much triple as it does duple, as much 3/4 as it does 2/4.

 

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This image is from an actual recording of a samba instrument called a tamborim playing samba’s 2/4 signature rhythm as it should be played.  Note how the performed notes do not line up with the equidistant grid marks of the frame.

 

Samba is the rhythm of a nation, reflecting its beauty and complexity.  Brazil’s stories are told and its dances swing on samba’s slippery skip.  Samba without it’s distinctive motion simply is not samba - and Brazilians will tell you so!  The way I eventually grasped the essential subtleties of samba was by listening to as many samba records as I could get my hands on, and later, by actually going to Brazil to watch and to listen to the musicians whose day-to-day lives are reflected in the rhythms they play.

 

The Peculiar Power of Listening

Mastering samba’s swing on my repique took me months of listening and active practice.  But mysteriously, sometimes listening by itself is sufficient to influence, even revolutionize, our playing.

A few years ago, my band, Spymob, performed with N.E.R.D on a t.v. show here in the States called “Late Night with Conan O’Brien.”  The band leader for “Late Night” is the great drummer, Max Weinberg, from Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band.  Growing up, I loved Max’s rock drumming with Bruce, but on “Late Night” he’s always played a lot more jazz than rock, and he swings really well.

After taping our show, I asked him if he’d been a closet jazzer all his life.  “No,” he told me. “I never actually played any swing music until I started this gig with Conan.”  He went on: “But I’ve been a huge jazz fan my whole life, and when I became well-known with the E Street Band, I got to know Buddy Rich pretty well.  Buddy would always let me sit right behind him at gigs and watch.  I saw him play lots of shows.  I honestly don’t know how I made the physical transition to jazz.  I’m sure that watching and listening to Buddy had a lot to do with it.”

Max’s story is not typical, to be sure; in most cases, a transition like the one Max made would require much practice, regardless of a lifelong love of jazz.  Still, the power of even passive listening can’t be denied.  In his great book, Effortless Mastery (1996, Jamey Aebersold Jazz), pianist Kenny Werner tells this story:

There is a radio station in New York City that celebrates the birthdays of various musicians by playing their music all say, or sometimes all week.  One time they were playing Art Blakey for several days.  I had the radio on that station all weekend.  Day and night, listening or not, Art Blakey was drifting through my ears…Monday night, on my way to the Village Vanguard for my regular gig with the Mel Lewis Orchestra, I was still listening to him on the car radio.

When we started to play, I noticed that everything felt different.  I had automatically absorbed Blakey’s groove, and I was playing things with a different gait.  Others in the band acknowledged the change in feeling.  Effortless listening is like breathing.  I nourishes you without your even knowing it.

Kenny’s story is one many of us can relate to.  Listening, however active or passive, rewires our body and mind.  Suddenly we hear new musical possibilities and, mysteriously, we find ourselves playing something we’ve never practiced before.

 

Xerox Listening

Sometimes when we listen to learn something new, we’re not trying to comprehend such fine points as motion and meaning - all we want to know is “what the #$%@ is this player doing!?”  Basic copying is crucial to our musical growth, opening our mind and limbs to new ways of thinking and moving is the first valuable step in learning new technique.  And if you’re not listening closely, it’s easy to get it wrong - perhaps missing the very thing that makes the original great.

Here’s an example.  Like a lot of young drummers growing up in the 80s, I idolized Neil Peart, the drummer of Rush.  My rock band in middle school performed more than 20 Rush songs, and I tried hard to copy every lick of Neil’s I could.  In high school I became interested in other bands and I completely stopped listening to Rush.  One day in college I was feeling nostalgic, so I put on some of my favorite Rush records, and the more I listened to Rush that day, the more I realized I had never really listened closely to Neil’s playing before.

As a kid, I was very aware that Neil Peart was one of the world’s most technically advanced drummers.  In my futile effort to be equally impressive, I cluttered my renderings of Neil’s parts with additional fireworks in almost every bar.  All those years later, I realized - to my great surprise - that Neil often plays very simply, just laying down time (though it may be in 11/8!).

Because I had listened so selectively as a kid, I heard only Neil’s mind-boggling fills and I wrongly took them to be the constant of his entire style.  As a result, I failed to learn what really makes Neil a great drummer: it’s not the complexity of his playing, but his thoughtful contrast of simplicity and complexity.

Precise copying may be the greatest learning tool for the development of your own style.  It’s difficult to do, and you might be tempted to ignore or alter what you think is easy.  Don’t.  It may be the thing you learn from most.

 

Roadmap for Learning

As musicians, our possibilities for learning are, literally, endless.  We constantly have to make difficult choices about what we need to know and what we don’t – there just isn’t time to learn it all!  Our natural listening preferences are like a flashlight on our map of learning - they show us where to go, because when we’re learning about something we love, we learn the most.

Conversely, no matter how much you may listen to something, if you’re not interested in it, you won’t grasp the heart and soul of it, and you won’t therefore be able to incorporate its essence into your playing.  So though you may feel bad that you’re not a great jazz drummer, or though you may wish you were a better reggae drummer, if you don’t like jazz or reggae, spinning all the records of Miles and Marley won’t help your playing.  And so what?  For most of us, our musical interest extends to just a few styles, and that’s just fine - most of our favorite musicians also have had limited stylistic ambitions.

Now, it is important to listen to musical styles that are unfamiliar to you, as well as to styles that you once thought you didn’t like: doing so you might discover some amazing music, or realize your tastes have changed.  But forcing yourself to listen to music you have no interest in is an educational dead end.  Listening long and deep to the music you love and admire will, over time and with much practice, allow you to fully absorb vital subtleties which you can then incorporate into your own playing.

Letting Go - Removing The Handcuffs Of Self-Doubt

I wrote this article three years ago.  It was the first of my Mind Set columns for Drummer Magazine, and  I later posted it in my now-defunct MySpace blog.  I still get emails about it.  What’s odd - and really gratifying - is that the majority of the emails are from non-drummers.  Some emails are from people who play other musical instruments, but a surprising number have come from folks who aren’t musicians at all.

When it comes to doing anything well, self-doubt is a common bugaboo that limits our potential.  Worse, it can turn the thing we most love doing into something we dread.  It’s ironic that only when we take our limitations for granted, only when we embrace our missteps as inevitable byproducts of going for it, do we free ourselves up to do things and create things we once had thought were beyond us. 

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My friend, Brian, is a great bassist.  Fifteen years ago he handed me a book: The Advancing Guitarist, by Mick Goodrick. I read the title, looked back at Brian, and just as I was going to ask him why he wanted me, a drummer, to read a guitar technique book, he said, “Just read it.” So I did - and my life as a drummer changed.

Goodrick’s book is remarkable because in addition to dealing with matters of strict technique – theory and exercises – he also considers the role our mind plays in our path to becoming a better, more satisfied musician. Among the book’s priceless lessons was this one:  ”Students tend to think that eventually, after they learn whatever it is that they think they need to know, they won’t feel insecure anymore…Well as good as it sounds, it seldom (if ever) happens. In fact, their insecurity tends to get worse. ”

For me, these few sentences were revolutionary.  At the time I read Goodrick’s words I was practicing four to six hours a day and was so aware of my limitations that I stopped taking risks in performance. I didn’t like how self-critical I was, but I believed that if I mastered just one more technique book I’d achieve a skill level so advanced that I would be freed from all insecurity. Of course I was wrong. The better I got, the deeper I dug, and the more I found wrong in my playing.

The quality that separates truly great playing from mere proficiency is a fearless, childlike approach to the instrument.  This quality originates not through mastering sophisticated theory or acquiring flashy chops, but in a different kind of wisdom.  It’s about bringing peace of mind to your playing in each moment of the music.  Musicians with this quality don’t worry about what’s coming.  They simply listen to the other musicians in the room, to the song, and just play now.  You can hear it - it sounds like confidence.  It’s acceptance.  It’s letting go.  These masters aren’t concerned about messing up, not because they think they won’t, but because they know it doesn’t matter if they do. They consider their playing a natural act – like breathing, or eating, or walking.

Try this exercise: walk. Find a long sidewalk and just start walking. Listen to the sound your steps make. Notice the pendular motion of your arms. Feel how effortlessly your body shifts its weight in an easy rhythm. You’re not even thinking about tempo, yet your gate is so steady it’s like a metronome. And you could keep this up, seemingly, forever.

Now, if you were to trip on a crack in the sidewalk you wouldn’t think to yourself, “Oh no!  Maybe I’m not a good walker after all!  I wonder if I can make that turn up there.”  No.  What you’d tell yourself is, “Ah, how silly of me.” and move on.  You’d soon completely forget you stumbled at all.

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When I spent two months in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, drumming with an escola de samba, I learned that drumming is not the rare gift of a few, but instead is universal, just like walking.  From birth, Brazilians are surrounded by family members playing live music, so Brazilian children grow up taking their own rhythmic aptitude for granted. In the months before Carnaval, every Brazilian is a drummer and every object is a potential percussion instrument.  I’ll never forget a shirtless and barefoot four year-old boy playing beautiful and steady samba beats on a Coke can.  And his older brothers – man, those cats could wail!

These youngsters weren’t “schooled” musicians, just average kids.  How is this possible?  How could they play so beautifully? 

The biggest impediments to doing anything, especially anything expressive, are fear and self-doubt.  But for these young Brazilians, fear and self-doubt never enter their musical minds because such emotions weren’t part of their learning process.  These kids don’t worry about messing up because no one has ever told them they should worry.  They wouldn’t think to call a new technique difficult; the way they see it, they simply haven’t learned to do it yet.  And just like you never think, “Okay, I’m going to work hard to walk perfectly,” these Brazilian kids would never think in terms of drumming perfectly.  They just drum the way they drum, and what comes out is steady, pure, and beautiful, unbroken by anxiety.  For them “playing” is just that: play, not work.  It’s music, not math.

The difference between these Brazilian kids and a lot of us is the mindset we developed when we first learned our instrument.  In part, this difference is cultural.  Most of us grew up playing music in societies that promote competition between musicians and recognize a hierarchy of artistic achievement.  In contrast, Brazilian kids grow up in a society that sees music primarily as a force of social cohesion, a common language uniting everyone - young and old, rich and poor. And whereas music education in the West aims at maximizing students’ income and competitiveness in the industry (how many music technical college advertisements boast this very thing?), Brazilian music “education” consists largely of children learning to play through direct participation in their living musical traditions, that participation being an end in itself.  

No doubt, our society’s competitive drive has hastened the advancement of technique, and contributed to the West’s dominance in the business of commercial music (which may or may not be a good thing). Nevertheless, this same drive can lead us players into a mindset that cripples our performance. Ironically, our impatient drive to achieve can hold us back - we become afraid of the professional consequences of screwing up.

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When the musicality of a master and the playfulness of a child come together in a drummer the result is, well, you’ve heard the result: Elvin Jones, John Bonham, Clyde Stubblefield, John Jabo Starks, Steward Copeland, Keith Moon, Zigaboo Modeliste, Ringo Starr, Mick Fleetwood, Joey Baron, Billy Martin, Steve Gadd, and one of my very favorite drummers, Stevie Wonder. These are a few on my list.  You have your own list.

We love the drummers with the ability to make a beat sing.  These are not always the most sophisticated players, though some are sophisticated.  Not always the cleanest, though some are clean.  These players have varying individual styles.  But whether they use many notes or few, whether their time is perfect or changing, their groove has momentum.  They sound freed-up, and they’re relaxed both in the studio and on stage.  They’re spontaneous and unselfconscious.  They’re musical, appropriate, and have the confidence to play simply. And when they let loose, they really go for it.  You hear their emotion.  And if you listen closely, you might even hear them screw up. They heard it too.  And then they let it go.

Reading The Advancing Guitarist marked the beginning of a new mindset for me.  It was like a dam broke.  I realized that the knot I felt in my stomach after every show was limiting my playing.  And I knew that since I was the one who put the handcuffs on, I was the only one with the key to remove them. The result was tangible.  As my focus widened, I started hearing my whole band rather than just my own playing.  My groove deepened, my feel improved, and, most importantly, I was having a hell of a lot more fun.

Becoming aware of your insecurity is the first step to overcoming it.  The more experience you acquire on stage and in the studio, the more you will trust your ability, and the more you will put your insecurity behind you.  Unfortunately, self-doubt is something few of us will ever overcome completely, and from time to time we need a reminder to keep it in check.  My favorite reminder?  A memory of a hot February day in Rio, on an Ipanema street corner, where a scrawny kid with an empty Coke can is making me dance.

 

Green Days - Musicians Walk The Talk Of Climate Consciousness, by Adam Gardner

Eric’s Introduction

 

I’m a hypocrite.  There, I said it.  At home I’m a militant environmentalist - I recycle, turn my heat down when I can, unplug my phone and camera chargers, and turn lights off when I leave a room.  But when I hit the road with a band, it’s party time.  I see it in my band mates, too.  We leave the familiarity and creature comforts of home and our conscientiousness disappears. “It’s just too hard to do,” we tell ourselves.

 

True enough, it’s hard.  But it’s also true that the time has come where we have no choice but to reform our wild ways.  Whether the cause is human or not, we now know Earth’s climate is changing in a way that threatens life on earth as we know it.  We also know that it’s in our power to slow or stop this change.

 

From the civil rights movement, to the Vietnam War, to today’s conflict in the Middle East, musicians have always been the earliest, and clearest voices for needed change.  My good friend, Adam Gardner, from the band Guster, along with his brilliant wife, Lauren, are among the loudest and wisest music-industry voices calling for increased awareness about how we can literally change the world.

 

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“Green” seems to be on everyone’s mind these days. Thanks to Al Gore’s movie An Inconvenient Truth, the Live Earth concerts, and tons of magazines’ green issues, concern for the environment has hit the mainstream.  The question that immediately follows this concern is, “What can I do about it?”  Many rock bands, students, and music fans alike who ask themselves this question are left with a feeling of wanting to be a part of the solution, but aren’t sure where to begin. 

 

For me, I started looking at the effects I had on the environment while touring with my band, Guster.  We were aware of the impact of riding on a fuel-guzzling tour bus around the country for years and were bummed about it—we had been nick-naming it the “Earth-Eater.”  Garbage left behind by fans covered the floor after shows and very few venues had any sort of recycling program.  We started to think about the merchandise we were selling to our fans and where we sourced it from—what was it made out of?  How far did it get shipped?  Were we actually eating all the food we asked for backstage on our contract rider?  What changes could we make to have a more green, environmentally safe tour?

 

Fortunately for Guster I married an environmentalist, Lauren Sullivan.  Lauren and I met in college shortly after I met my band mates. While I’ve been running around in a rock band for the past 16 years, she’s been fighting the good fight for the environment. Through her work on certain environmental campaigns that were backed by major artists like Bonnie Raitt and the Dave Matthews Band, Lauren saw first hand how valuable adding these musician’s voices were to the success of the campaigns.

 

In 2002, Bonnie Raitt launched an environmental awareness campaign on tour at her concerts called Green Highway.  She combined eco-friendly practices on tour while also setting up a festival-like Eco-Village in the concourse area to raise awareness for the environment.  This two-pronged approach to greening tours became the model for how Lauren and I would help other bands follow Bonnie’s incredible example.  In 2004, Lauren and I formed (with much help from Bonnie Raitt and her manager Kathy Kane) the environmental non-profit, Reverb.  Reverb’s mission is to help bands and their fans answer the question “What can I do about saving the environment?”  

 

So far, Reverb has helped green over 50 major rock tours, over 700 events, kept over 30,000 tons of CO₂ from the air, fueled touring fleets with over 300,000 gallons of biodiesel, partnered with over 1,200 environmental non-profit groups and have reached over 4.5 million concertgoers.  The artists that have enlisted Reverb to help them go green include Dave Matthews Band, Linkin Park, Maroon 5, Jack Johnson, Barenaked Ladies, John Mayer, Alanis Morissette, Red Hot Chili Peppers, Guster, and many more. 

 

Dave Matthews Band’s 2007 summer tour is a great example of how a huge touring entity can go green while getting their fans to take simple actions to make a big difference.  As a result, the tour reduced over 3,300,000 pounds of CO₂ – equivalent to removing 190 homes from the power grid for an entire year. Over one third of this carbon reduction is a direct result of fans participating in the Reverb Fan Carbon Offset Program, where concertgoers neutralized the CO₂ from over 1,200,000 miles of driving to and from shows.  For more details on the tour results and efforts go to: www.ReverbRock.org/dmb.

 

Another example on a smaller level is with my own band, Guster.  Guster and Reverb finished their second annual Campus Consciousness Tour—a national music/environmental tour of colleges and universities that includes daytime activities such as the “Pimp My Clean Ride” tour of the band’s biodiesel-powered tour bus and a “Town Hall Forum” with students, faculty, members of the band, and administrators to discuss sustainability on campus. 

 

Going green isn’t an “all-or-nothing” proposition.  You don’t have to change your entire world all at once.  Do what you can to get started and see where it takes you.  Each time Guster goes out on tour we add a new element.  Once you start looking through the environmental lens, you’ll be amazed at how many simple, commonsense changes you can make.

 

Below are some ideas and resources to help you get started, whether you are about to go on a national arena tour, are playing a few gigs around town, or just want to make some changes around the house:

• BioDiesel— If you’re traveling in a diesel car, van, bus, or truck, biodiesel may be a good option for you. Biodiesel is a domestically produced vegetable-based alternative to petroleum diesel that emits over 75% less CO₂ and reduces dependency on foreign oil.  Biodiesel can run in any diesel engine with little to no modification. If you have oil heat in your home you can also switch to BioHeat, a blend of biodiesel and #2 heating oil. . For more info and to locate pumps and suppliers check out:  www.biodiesel.org.

• Idling—If you are parking for more than 10 seconds, turn off your engine.  Idling gets you exactly zero miles per gallon.  If you are touring with a fleet of busses and trucks, ask your drivers to adhere to a no idling policy.

• Waste Vegetable Oil—Smaller bands that want to run on free fuel and don’t mind the adventure of dumpster diving at chinese restaurants across the country, can modify their diesel cars to run on grease.  www.greasecar.com

• Catering supplies— Use reusable coffee mugs, silverware, plates, etc. whenever possible.  Another option is biodegradables:  corn cups, sugarcane bowls and plates, and potato starch utensils are all good alternatives to petroleum and Styrofoam-based products.  You can find some of this at Whole Foods and on line: www.worldcentric.org

• Reusable Water Bottles—By switching from cases and cases of bottled water to five-gallon coolers and using reusable bottles, you can reduce a huge amount of waste over the course of a tour.  I like the Sigg bottles:  www.mysigg.com

• Recycling—Request recycling on your contract rider to venues and promoters (many venues still don’t recycle).  You can also bring your own foldable recycling bins—you’ll be amazed how fast you fill them up, and how little garbage you produce that isn’t recyclable.  www.clearstreamrecycler.com

• Non-toxic cleaning products—Research shows that we spend 90% of our lives indoors. Using non-toxic cleaners in your home and on your tour bus is an easy way to reduce indoor air pollution which can be many times greater than outdoor air pollution.  A great resource for non-toxic living is:  www.thenakedtruth.org

• Renewable Energy Offsets— After shrinking your environmental “footprint” as much as possible, you can neutralize remaining CO₂ emissions from venue energy use, hotels, flights, touring vehicles, and fan travel by purchasing carbon offsets that support the construction of new renewable energy projects such as wind farms.  reduce energy demands from carbon-emitting power sources such as coal-fired power plants.  www.nativeenergy.com/reverb

• Digital Downloads—Buy music digitally and encourage your fans to do the same.  This produces zero waste.  For physical copies of albums try to produce them using post-consumer-recylced paperboard rather than plastic jewel cases.

• Spread the word without preaching—Nobody wants a sermon, especially at a concert!  However, you can make your enthusiasm contagious by providing links on your website, having an environmental blog, and inviting local non-profit groups to table at your concerts. 

 

For more ideas and to check out what other bands are doing to go green, go to: www.ReverbRock.org.

 

 

 

 

 

Adam Gardner is the guitarist/vocalist for the rock band Guster and Co-Founder (along with his wife, environmentalist Lauren Sullivan) of the non-profit environmental organization Reverb. Operating from deep within the music industry and the environmental world, Reverb “greens” artists’ tours and the music business at large while educating and inspiring music fans to take action.

 

Making It, Redefined by Kevin Kelly

Kevin Kelly launched Wired Magazine in 1993, and since then has written books and blogs about everything from global economic trends to innovative ways to use an electric popcorn popper.  The guy is crazy smart.  So smart, in fact, that in an era of greater competition and a battle for marketing bandwidth, he might have figured out a reasonable way for creative types to build a sustainable career doing what they love.  As he explains in a recent post to his blog, The Technium, artists just need to find a 1,000 True Fans, and keep them satisfied.  Is he onto something?  Check out his article and share your thoughts.

 

Kevin Kelly 

How to Sound Bigger, by Jacob Slichter

Eric’s Introduction:

 

“Good artists borrow,” explained Picasso, “Great artists steal!”  And it’s true.  Great musicians figure out what makes their mentors’ playing so effective, and then they incorporate the same things into their own works.

 

The funny thing is, even when we deliberately try to imitate our mentors to achieve a certain feel, we often miss the mark.  As drummers, we may listen to a song a thousand times, but then fail to really understand what it is that makes the performance so powerful.  Why?  Because much of what makes music effective is counterintuitive - we hear one thing, but then erroneously play something else trying to achieve the feeling of the original.  This month Jake Slichter returns to hip us to the counterintuitive art of playing BIG.

 

For all you non-drummers out there, READ ON.  Jake’s principles for helping a drummer to sound bigger are applicable to every art form.

 

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How to Sound Bigger

by Jacob Slichter

 

The vast landscape of clashing egos known as the world of rock and roll is, among other things, a contest to be the biggest.  The defining bands of various rock subgenres—the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Aerosmith, the Clash, U2, Nirvana—are generally those that sound the biggest because we listeners are naturally excited by a huge sound.  No surprise then that when bands audition drummers, the drummer who makes the band sound the biggest generally gets the nod.

 

How does a drummer make a band sound big?  Listening closely to one master of hugeness, Dave Grohl of Nirvana, will shed some light on things.  Grohl is known for the slamming decibel level of his drumming, but loudness is not the only reason Grohl sounds so big.  Grohl has many imitators, some of whom play as loud or even louder than he does but all of whom sound smaller.  Why?  In this article, we’ll examine Grohl’s drumming on “In Bloom” (from the album Nevermind and available for download online) and see what insights it offers into the elusive art of creating a big sound.

 

Contrast

 

The word big implies a contrast with something smaller, and most musicians know that in order for a particular passage of music to sound large, they need to lay the groundwork by first creating something that sounds smaller.  Dynamics are usually the focus of these efforts—‘Make the verses quiet and the choruses loud.’  It’s a familiar approach and one frequently employed by Nirvana.  Drastic changes in volume, however, are not the only way Grohl and Nirvana create contrast and thus bigness. 

 

One way Grohl creates contrast on “In Bloom” is through the relative complexity and simplicity of his drum part.  He uses a busier hi-hat and bass drum pattern in the verses and then simplifies his part in the choruses.  (We’ll talk more about simplicity and complexity in the next section.)

 

He also creates contrasts through the use of timbre. The hi-hat has a crisp, closed sound during the first half of the verses, loosens somewhat halfway through the verse, and finally opens all the way in the choruses and intro sections.  The snare drum has more crack in the choruses than in the verses.  The tom toms are completely absent in the verses, which makes them all the more thunderous when they appear in the choruses and intro sections.  Some of these shifts in timbre are byproducts of changes in volume (when you hit the snare harder, the sound changes), but the timbre differences are important in and of themselves.  When Grohl opens his hi-hat, he doesn’t have to add that much more volume in order to create a contrast; the change in timbre has done a lot of the work for him.

 

Finally, one of my favorite moments of “In Bloom” is also one of the biggest moments of contrast: the triplet fill Grohl plays near the end of each chorus refrain, right after the words “but he, don’t know what it means.”  One reason this brief moment sounds so big is the sharp contrast created by a triplet feel, which comes out of nowhere to interrupt the steady flow of eighth notes on either side of the fill.

 

Simplicity

 

Perhaps the biggest sounding moments of “In Bloom” are the instrumental sections—the intro of song that reappears immediately after each chorus.  It’s important to note that these are the sections with the simplest drum parts, where Grohl plays the fewest notes.  Here, Grohl crashes with the guitar chords and follows up with a relatively simple fill pattern (buh BLAP BOOM BLAP BOOM BLAP BOOM).  This illustrates an important principle of drumming: the simpler your drum part, (the fewer notes you play), the bigger the music will sound.  It may seem like a paradox, for when someone tells us to “make it sound big,” our instinct is to play more, not less.

 

Why does simplifying music make it sound bigger?  Imagine yourself walking along a crowded sidewalk in the middle of Manhattan.  Then, imagine yourself on the Brooklyn Bridge, looking at the city skyline from afar.  From which vantage point will the city look biggest?  Obviously, from the bridge because there you would have perspective.  Perspective, however, comes at a cost.  Perspective—seeing the big picture—necessarily sacrifices detail.  The city looks biggest when you can’t see the individual faces of the people who live there.  It also looks biggest when half of what you see is the empty sky that acts as a backdrop.  Indeed, if you were able to take in zillions of details from your vantage point on the bridge, you wouldn’t be able to take in the totality of the city.  The details would only distract you from the big picture, whereas the absence of details and the surrounding emptiness allow you to see it.

 

So it is with music.  It generally sounds biggest when it’s at its simplest, when one, two, or three ideas stand out in front of an open backdrop.  Drummers play a crucial role in making that happen.  In “In Bloom,” for instance, the choruses sound bigger than the verses in part because the hi-hat and bass drum parts are simpler.  The verses are built on sixteenth-note patterns, whereas the choruses are built on eighths and are therefore simpler and more open.

 

Consider Dave Grohl’s amazing fills.  They sound huge largely because they’re simple.  On “In Bloom,” he’s often hitting with both sticks at the same time, flamming on the snare drum and then on the tom toms.  This makes the drums louder, but using two sticks at once also makes the fills simpler.  When both his sticks are striking in unison, he’s painting in thicker, broader strokes than if he were speeding around the drum set with alternating left and right hands, filling up all the empty spaces with notes.  Simplicity and the emptiness that accompanies it are crucial elements of Grohl’s big sound.  The same can be said of Nirvana: the music is huge in part because of its jarring rhythmic simplicity.  This is lost on many Nirvana and Dave Grohl imitators, who are understandably obsessed with matching Nirvana’s huge sound but who focus solely on volume.

 

Feel

 

The steady, relaxed confidence of Dave Grohl’s feel has everything to do with the size of the sound.  Drummers with shaky time and the musicians who play with them face an uphill battle when it comes to sounding big.  Drummers who idolize Dave Grohl spend a lot of time practicing his fills, but often ignore his incredibly hypnotic feel.  That’s a mistake.  In order to play drum fills that sound as big as Grohl’s, one must first learn to play a drumbeat that exudes the same confidence as Grohl does when he plays drum beats at even the softest of volumes.   A solid drum feel allows the various musicians in a band to play with greater cohesion, an obvious advantage when trying to sound big.  More importantly, it helps listeners to relax and give themselves over to the music.   Nirvana listeners enjoy being lulled in to the hypnotic sway of the verses, only to be slammed by the choruses.  That would be impossible without Grohl’s masterful feel, which makes the verses dreamier and the choruses mightier.

 

All of this takes attention and practice.  The thrilling hugeness of “In Bloom” is evidence of how rewarding such focus and practice can be.

 

 

Jacob Slichter is the drummer for Semisonic and the author of So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, a critically acclaimed behind-the-scenes look at the music business.  E-mail him at semijake@aol.com.

 

A Drum Lesson From Carole King, by Jacob Slichter

Eric’s Intro:

 

Among the themes that recur in my articles is idea that the decisions we make as musicians about both what to play and how to play are formed by far more than what we learn in our typical practices.  This is to say, as vital as our traditional technical exercises are to our musical growth, they’re only one piece of what makes us the players we are.

 

Many of the powerful influences on our playing are unconscious or innate - things like our basic personality and temperament, our natural sense of time, our body-type, our affection or distain for tidiness, our confidence, our fears.  Among the influences that are conscious, the most common are fellow drummers, players we love so much that we try hard to sound like them.   This month, the great drummer and author, Jake Slichter, shows us that when we extend our consciousness beyond our tried-and-true sources of inspiration, we find a rich and inexhaustible source of learning.

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A Drum Lesson From Carole King

I often describe drummers as the musical equivalent of hockey goalies: we’re hidden behind a bunch of equipment, we’re somewhat removed from the rest of the players, and our task is, in certain regards, qualitatively different from those of all the other musicians.   Our isolated existence on stage may explain why drummers are prone to zero in on the drums at the expense of everything else when listening to recordings.  In part, this is justified because a smart player will study the drumming on great recordings, and such listening requires a bit of tunnel vision, or perhaps tunnel hearing.  I have found, however, that many of my best insights into drumming have come from listening to non-drummers.  The brilliant counterpoint in the bass playing of Motown session man James Jamerson, the effervescent flow of Bob Dylan’s acoustic guitar, the hypnotic funky riffs of Prince’s electric, the groove-popping vocalizations of James Brown—all of these can offer drummers an abundance of insight.

 

In this article, I’ll focus on the piano playing of Carole King and explore how her touch on the keys can inform what we do on the drums.  Her songs and voice have influenced a generation of singer/songwriters, but her gifts as a piano player are equally supreme.   Any drummer would do well to listen to her playing and apply those lessons to the drum set.

 

Sibling Instruments

 

First, let’s note some important similarities between the piano and the drums.  The piano is a percussion instrument and therefore more like the drums than any other instrument in a standard pop music setting.  Like drummers, piano players can and frequently do make use of limb independence (and both instruments are typically played while seated, which enables the use of hands and feet).  Thus, on the piano, a bass note pattern played by the left hand can interact with chords played by the right to create something akin to a drum beat.  Both the piano and the drums have a wider range than most other instruments.  The piano spans over seven octaves, while the drum set’s frequency range extends from the deep thud of the kick on up through the tom-toms, the snare, and finally to the cymbals.  With such wide sonic spectrums, the piano and drums can exert an especially large influence on the shape and color of an arrangement, creating sudden changes in mood.    

 

Air Piano

 

The similarities between the drums and piano will become more evident as you play air piano along with a track.  Doing so will help you translate the insights of great piano playing to the drums.   To follow along with the rest of this article, find a recording of Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move,” which is on her landmark album Tapestry and is available for download online.

 

As you listen, sit in a chair, and mimic (as best you can) the two hands of the piano part—low notes on the left, high notes on the right.  Since you can ignore the question of playing precisely the right notes, you can focus instead on the timing of the hand movements; the striking, sustaining, and release of the notes; the dynamics; and the general shape of the left-right movement of your arms.  Hold your hands down for longer notes, lift them quickly for shorter ones, mime the sharpness or gentleness of the attack, and so forth.  Build, as completely and accurately as you can, a physical image of what it would be like to play the piano part you’re hearing.  This will allow you to form a more vivid mental image of what the pianist is doing.  Thus, whenever you hear a piano part, you’ll have a greater physical awareness of what it would be like to play it yourself.  You can then bring that physical awareness to your drumming.  

 

A First Example

 

Let’s work our way through Carole King’s “I Feel the Earth Move.”  First, consider the piano riff that drives the intro and verses.  Notice the interplay between the alternating bass-note octaves in her left hand and the chordal stabs she makes with her right on “Two” and “Four.”  This is, in effect, a drum beat played on the piano with the low notes playing the part of the kick drum and the chords playing the part of the snare.  Hear how convincingly it grooves.  This is a function of not only an excellent sense of timing but also a masterful balance of dynamics and accents and a keen intuition for how long to hold onto each note before releasing it.  

 

Consider, for instance, the chord stabs on “Two” and “Four” of the intro.  Take note of how long they last.  Drummers are prone to ignore note length because we don’t think in terms of sustaining a note.  Each time you strike with your sticks, however, you’re making a decision about note length, because each element of the drum kit has a wide range of possible note lengths depending on where and how you strike it.  A hi-hat, for instance can tick, chick, chook, sizzle, or slosh depending on how hard you press on the pedal, where you strike (the top, the cup, the side), and what part of the stick you use (the tip, the neck, the shoulder).  Each of these sounds has a different length and thereby sets a different musical mood.  So, listening to Carole King play the opening riff of “I Feel the Earth Move,” you’ll notice that her left hand punches out the bass notes while her right hand sustains the chords.  Now listen more closely.  The punches are not the shortest of staccatos; neither are the chords sustained as long as they could be.  These subtle shadings of note length are of huge consequence to the feel of the track. 

 

During the B-sections (“Ooh baby, when I see your face . . .”), her dynamic level drops and the chords ring out, creating (along with the key change) a wonderful change of scenery.  You can think of the contrast between the biting chord stabs of the verse and the lighter, ringing chords of the B-sections as something like the change a drummer makes when moving from a closed hi-hat to a shimmering ride.  And, just like a drummer, she builds back into the verse with repeating eighth-note chords that resemble eighth notes building on a pair of tom-toms.  The way she shapes the mood and creates drama with her piano playing is a drum lesson in itself.  The ultimate lesson, however, lies in the utter infectiousness of her groove.  It’s worth playing air piano along with any Carole King track and transferring what you learn to the drum set.  Her music overflows with an amazing rhythmic feel, and the consequences are spectacular.

 

Moving On

 

Using this technique, you can learn from something as simple as Sly Stone’s piano part on “Everyday People” or something as complex as Stevie Wonder’s overdubbed clavinet parts on “Superstition.”  Eventually, you’ll be feeling the parts as you listen.  The lessons are endless, but I’ll conclude with what I think is the most important lesson of all:  The great masters of pop music, no matter what instrument they play, are all masters of feel.  For drummers, no other lesson is half as valuable.

 

 

 

Jacob Slichter is the drummer for Semisonic and the author of So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, a critically acclaimed behind-the-scenes look at the music business.  E-mail him at semijake@aol.com.

 

Dividing The Pie - Love and Money in Creative Partnerships

A couple posts ago, dumbdrummer explored what I call the “invisible thread,” a mysterious vitality that unites the members of a great musical group, making the collaboration artistically compelling. You can hear this special connection in the group’s recordings and live performances. Sometimes you can see its aura in photos. The origins of this bond are allusive; a band’s brilliance can’t be accounted for among the specific talents of the individual members. Rather, it’s found in the interplay between the members’ unique personalities, artistic sensibilities, and performance styles. In a great group, there are no unimportant contributors - every musician plays a key role in creating and sustaining the unusual thing that makes the band special.

 

Unfortunately, great groups are often ticking time bombs. The same tensions that combine to create a unique and exciting creative partnership also threaten to tear it apart. Bands go a long way toward curtailing the destructive potential of personal and creative differences by practicing some tried and true techniques for maintaining healthy working relationships. Maintaining open, honest and compassionate communication between members is critical, as is establishing an environment of mutual respect.

 

But in addition to effectively managing its personal and creative differences, a great band must also be smart about the way it conducts its internal business.  In particular, it must understand the impact that money, and how it’ distributed, has on members’ commitment to the common cause and, therefore, on the group’s ability to realize its artistic and commercial potential.

 

What’s true for great bands is true for great creative partnerships of all kinds, whether it’s a team of auto designers, video game creators, or advertising creatives - if a collaboration is special, its members must be wise about how they share the wealth and recognition generated by that collaboration, or risk losing it altogether. 

 

Following The Money

 

Bands get paid through many potential revenue streams. Some of these - including selling records and licensing masters for use in TV and film - are generated by means of selling a group’s recordings.  Many more streams are generated by the group’s intellectual property – its songs – in the form of publishing royalties. These include mechanical royalties, sync royalties, broadcast royalties (BMI, ASCAP), and print royalties.  Still other revenue streams include merchandise sales (t-shirts, etc.) and live performance fees.

 

While there are many ways for a group to earn money, traditionally income is not distributed evenly among members.  According to convention, members do share equally in the revenue earned from selling and licensing its recordings, as well as the revenue from merchandise sales and performance fees. Publishing money, however, is treated differently – it’s paid only to the band’s songwriters.

 

The unique financial status of a group’s songwriter is rooted in the history of the music industry. Prior to the 1960’s, professional songwriters rarely recorded the songs they wrote, and performers rarely wrote the songs they recorded. Record companies signed entertainers, and then hired tunesmiths to give the entertainers something to sing. Songwriting and performing were two distinct businesses, each with their own unions and systems of payment.

 

Then, with the advent of rock and roll, a performer’s personal artistic vision became valued above everything else. Rock was the music of rebellion and individual identity.  No singer wanted to be seen as puppet or a fake, and so more and more songwriters became performers, and more and more performers became songwriters.

 

But even as the worlds of performers and songwriters merged, their respective economics didn’t. In bands, only the songwriters signed the publishing agreement, so only the songwriters collected the publishing checks.

 

If songwriting weren’t a lucrative revenue stream for a successful group, the small income discrepancy resulting from an uneven distribution of publishing money wouldn’t be a big deal. But songwriting is potentially extremely lucrative. In fact, publishing is often the richest result of a band’s growing popularity. Yet in spite of this, and in spite of the resulting financial hierarchy that existed between writers and non-writers, groups continued to accept the old tradition that songwriters should be paid more than their band mates.

 

One for you, two for me

 

But while band members didn’t fight the idea that writers deserved unique treatment, they did fight ferociously to get their own songs on their band’s records. It’s well known, for example, that George Harrison long-resented John and Paul’s near songwriting monopoly in the Beatles, and that rift is in no small part responsible for the group’s 1971 split.

 

The Beatles songwriting turf war is just one of countless publishing battles that contributed to a band’s premature death.  The vast majority of these break-ups involved anonymous bands with great potential. Many, though, were high profile acts whose well-publicized splits served as lessons for young musicians. Bands slowly got the message that financial inequity can destabilize a creative partnership, and by the 1980’s future super-groups like U2 and R.E.M. were making music industry history by dividing songwriting income equally among all members - even when only one or two were actually writing songs in the traditional sense.

 

All for one…

 

Why in the world would a songwriter choose to share such a potentially profitable source of income with his non-songwriter collaborators? As it turns out, there are many good reasons why he might. These reasons are informed by understanding the psychological power of money, and are aimed at securing the long-term stability of the group.

 

Quality Control

Dividing publishing equally among members can act as a sort of quality control mechanism on the group’s music. The traditional economics of publishing gives a writer a higher status in a group, and awards her more money for every song her group records.  When this special economic status is removed, a songwriter is more likely to advocate for the group’s best songs no matter who wrote them, not just for her own.

 

Group Effort

While the music industry created a framework for rewarding a group’s songwriters, it failed to come up with one for rewarding the members who booked all the gigs, hung all the posters, designed the t-shirts, got all the press, engineered the group’s record, built the website, and scored a great deal on a van. Dividing publishing equally serves as recognition that it takes more than great songwriting to make a band successful, and validates every member’s important contribution to the common good.

 

Shared Sacrifice

Third, since publishing revenue increases the more a group tours in support of their records, sharing publishing money acknowledges that a song’s success is often proportionate to a band’s collective personal sacrifice.

 

Every Penny Counts

Even when a band is signed to a supportive label, it’s often financially difficult for members to immediately leave their day jobs and to give their group the attention it needs to reach the next level. Until a group is well established, every penny counts.  For many bands, a publishing advance, evenly distributed, has served as the critical bridge between poverty and sustainability.

 

What’s a song after all?

Traditionally, a song is defined as a melody, a chord progression, and a lyric.  These days, however, a smash hit may consist solely of a drum rhythm and a rap - just ask my buddies, The Neptunes.  Or a keyboardist’s distinctive synthesizer line might serve as a song’s crucial hook.  When instrumental elements serve a fundamental purpose in a song’s construction, the musician’s role ascends from mere arranger to that of songwriter.  More and more, groups are acknowledging this trend by sharing both songwriting credit and the publishing bounty equally among its members.

 

Preserving the invisible thread

 

Not every performing songwriter wants to be part of a real band. Backed by a revolving door of hired guns, solo artists have nothing to lose by keeping every penny of their publishing earnings. However, those songwriters who choose to showcase their tunes within the context of a true creative partnership are wise to consider the potential benefits of sharing publishing revenue with their partners. Indeed, if what I suggested in last month’s article is true – that in a great group, every member plays a part in creating and maintaining the je ne sais quoi that makes the band special – then a group’s decision about how it divides its financial pie may be the most important it will ever make.

 

 

OK, Go! - The Creative Power Of A Nomadic Mind by John Munson

Eric’s Introduction:

John Munson is a rock star.  Of course anyone familiar with the great power pop trio, Semisonic, knows this.  But I mea