When I began taking drum lessons from David Goodman everything changed for me.
I had had wonderful drum teachers previously, but there was something about Dave’s approach that really clicked.
There’s a strong practice of transcription in Jazz education - choosing a fragment of a recording that you love and writing down what the musician is playing, by ear. The aim being to learn it and be able to reproduce it verbatim.
Dave loved and actively encouraged transcription but he wouldn’t stop there. He would analyse it - attempt to zoom out and approximate patterns. With this approach a drum solo by Art Blakey was not an amorphous blob, it was the construction of a mind - building blocks of ideas joined together through a flow state. The individual fragments or 'licks' were secondary to the underlying idea behind it. If you could devise a system with rules and constraints that could reliably recreate the same effect, you could feed in all sorts of new material and produce endless variations of the initial lick of inspiration.
I like to think of this process through the analogy of being the company Phillips and scrambling to create your own response to the Sony Walkman in 1979. The steps would be something like this.
I had had wonderful drum teachers previously, but there was something about Dave’s approach that really clicked.
There’s a strong practice of transcription in Jazz education - choosing a fragment of a recording that you love and writing down what the musician is playing, by ear. The aim being to learn it and be able to reproduce it verbatim.
Dave loved and actively encouraged transcription but he wouldn’t stop there. He would analyse it - attempt to zoom out and approximate patterns. With this approach a drum solo by Art Blakey was not an amorphous blob, it was the construction of a mind - building blocks of ideas joined together through a flow state. The individual fragments or 'licks' were secondary to the underlying idea behind it. If you could devise a system with rules and constraints that could reliably recreate the same effect, you could feed in all sorts of new material and produce endless variations of the initial lick of inspiration.
I like to think of this process through the analogy of being the company Phillips and scrambling to create your own response to the Sony Walkman in 1979. The steps would be something like this.
- How does this product work?
- How can we copy this exactly?
- How can we create our own version of this and reliably reproduce it at scale?!
Step three is undoubtedly the most difficult. As Elon Musk reflected when scaling Tesla Motors:
The product is not the product, the mass-produced version of the product, the supply chain, and the manufacturing process are the product
This is also true for learning. To learn is not to know a thing. To truly learn you must internalise it. You must be able to break it down to it's smallest components, recreate it with variation, categorise it, and generalise it. Is it integrated with other ideas? Can It be recalled on demand, under pressure?
Abstraction is an essential tool of this process. It wasn't until I started programming, some years later that I realised this can be applied globally.
It's common for non musicians to ask drummers questions like "how can you make your limbs move completely independently from one another?". I think they imagine a multi-track recorder with a track representing each limb. I used to respond, somewhat facetiously, "how can you keep balance on both feet and hold a conversation with me at the same time?!".
There was a time in all of our lives when keeping balance required almost all of our available mental focus. Yet, it's taken for granted that this is a skill that everyone will master to the extent that It can be combined with almost all other skills without even thinking. This isn't because we've mastered the ability to think "learn forward - lean backwards - lean left - lean right etc..." at a ferocious speed. These smaller skills have been bundled and abstracted into larger ones. "Stand" is now a pointer to a series of actions.
Jordan Peterson often says "Learning how to write is like learning how to think". This is especially true for writing code. Concepts like abstraction are literally represented with features of programming languages. When you work with other people you realise that each individual sees the world through their own lens, and thus when tasked with modelling an aspect of it in the virtual realm, will often structure things quite differently to you.
As I enter a new season of renewed creative endeavours I remain eternally grateful to Dave for showing me the way.