One of the things I find most strange about out the slightly dystopian reality of the last couple of years is the never-ending march of progress in the world of drum covers. Understandable, of course. If society is locked down (and our industry was completely on ice for the longest time) musicians are going to seek outlets for self-expression.
For those of you not in the know a drum cover consists of a drummer sitting at home playing along with a well-known recording and replicating what the original drummer did note for note.
Undoubtedly this requires talent and some of the results are unquestionably impressive. I have seen recreations of some legendary performances by some of the greatest drummers in music history across all the genres. Many, many hours get invested, but like any investment it's important to consider the likely return that it will produce.
These achievements tend to precipitate cognitive dissonance with me. In addition to finding them impressive they also seem completely pointless. For every social media sensation there are tens of thousands of also-rans, and it's important to consider the true extent to which working up a drum cover skill set will prepare you for playing with actual musicians.
What rather bemuses me is why would you you produce a video where you replicate a solo by Buddy Rich, Steve Gadd, Tony Williams, Vinnie, Weckl, Benny Greb, or whoever, when the end user can perfectly easily watch the original creator in the midst of the creative process. It reminds me somewhat of artists who go to extraordinary lengths to produce knock-offs of historic paintings. Nobody is questioning the skill, rather could that undoubted skill be put to better use? Isn't it an altogether better idea to take the best bits of all your favourite player and fuse them into a special blend all of your own? In so doing you begin to create your own identity, about which more later.
Don't get me wrong there is undoubtedly educational merit in copying the works of the great master players. It's a key part of how we learn the language just like any other language. As a child you learnt to speak by replicating phrases that you heard your parents use. Occasionally they would carelessly let slip some profanity or other, and you would take delight in repeating it over and over again much to their frustration and occasionally despair
Of course you have to be influenced by those who most inspire you, but what you also have to do is to get past the stage of merely copying. Take your heroes' ideas apart, and recast them in your own image. Of equal importance is to apply your freshly developed skills in appropriate musical context.
When I was taking my first steps in the profession back in the 1970s I would spend time copying ideas I heard other drummers play on records, and then take those ideas to the workplace; either the rehearsal room or the gig. Sometimes people would say 'yeah Pete, that's great', other times they would say 'don't do that that's not what's wanted here, that's not what this music requires'. Posting drum covers will seldom afford you the benefit of the wisdom and experience of other musicians; far more likely is a polarising of sycophancy or the dreaded social media pile-on, and not a great deal in between.
What I also found out pretty quickly was that in the early 80s there was no viable career path for a teenager from Sutton Coldfield who played a bit like Buddy Rich, Louie Bellson and a few others. As regards professional career advancement, what the industry required from someone like me was altogether different, so in order to progress I needed to sort that out. It took me a while, but I got there, and in a way, my playing as seen on the video below was a kind of foreshadowing of much of what characterises the drum cover mentality
As a teenager I spent an inordinate amount of time attempting to do thing that sounded like my big band and jazz drum heroes, and fortunately, courtesy of the Midland Youth Jazz Orchestra, I had an appropriate context in which to put those skills to work. I know you've probably seen this one before, but anyway......
The other potential problem for cover drummers is that when you're playing to a backing track you don't develop that all-important facility to control and direct the time and dynamics of the ensemble. Backing tracks will not speed up and they will not slow down. You can incorporate the most absurdly tasteless overplayed drum fills with all kinds of stick tricks and so on and the band will never come back in in the wrong place (or stop playing altogether) because of what you just played. This doesn't happen in the real world. Playing terminal velocity drum fills and incorporating stick spinning is not going to make you a lot of friends and it might lose you the gig altogether.
If Instagram and TikTok are your chosen pathways to success in your drumming career, and your ambition is to be the greatest 'cover drummer' ever, then I unreservedly wish you the very best of luck in all that you do. However if you want to get in a rhythm section and hold down a steady gig, enentually becoming a seriously in-demand, go-to freelancer, you might want to start looking at developing other aspects of your skill set. Have fun creating your cover versions and entertaining your followers, but don't lose sight of the necessities for maintaining an enduring career as a player, so that when the next sensation comes along, (younger, cuter, and faster than you) you'll still have some options, and you won't have been left behind by your peers who have put the hours in to develop their musical team player skills.
Also, just lately that somewhat controversial film Whiplash has once again become a topic of discussion. I guess it must be the anniversary of its release. Where did those seven years go?
At the time I had such high hopes of that movie, thinking it might be possible to bring big band jazz to a new and broader audience. Obviously Hollywood pragmatism took hold and certain aspects of the portrayal of college band musicians bore little resemblance to reality. So my hopes that Whiplash would shine a positive light on my genre of choice were short lived, which is regrettable. However, what I found most interesting is that when one particular very well-known drummer went public with a vituperative criticism of the movie, everybody fell in behind him and agreed with his point of view. Music industry group think is very real: all too often people adopt the opinions of others without undergoing a thorough process of evaluation. Just because a famous drummer practices everything at 40 beats per minute doesn't mean that it's right for you.
Get the broadest spectrum of influence you possibly can, and have faith in your own opinions: be prepared for them to be tested and be prepared to be wrong. Just because you haven't appeared on the cover of Modern Drummer magazine (yet!) doesn't mean your opinions are worth less than those who have.
Opinions should be composed and arranged by you; they shouldn't be word for word 'cover versions' of the views of those you most admire.
"Most people are other people. Their thoughts are someone else's opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation". (Oscar Wilde).
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