The Drumeo Edition
On music, craft, and repetition
Colin here. I never managed to get good at drumming. But it was a fun high school activity to perhaps burn off some of the energy in my brain and manifest it into something physical (to the detriment of neighborhood ears).
It was fun to play the rapid-fire pop-punk patterns (think Millencolin or late 90s Pennywise), and when I heard music like Photek or Roni Size—breakbeat-driven drum and bass—I fell completely in love. Reaching higher thresholds of any type of drumming is an art, and I often find myself in rabbit holes on Instagram or Youtube with jazz drummers. Learning to drum for me was just based on being a fan and figuring stuff out through clunky trial and error, trying to faintly emulate someone like Travis Barker or Jimmy Chamberlin and perhaps never getting to the art, but rhythmically there and hopefully keeping in time.
It is because of these past interests that the algo magically led me to the wonders of Drumeo’s Youtube channel. They have genre-specific drummers hear a track one time and then play it back based on nothing but ear in their own style.
Here’s the Megadeath Drummer playing Mr. Brightside (after hearing it for the first time):
He meticulously maps out the structure to plot out accents and other elements of the song.
Obviously, there’s beauty in the incongruency of genres and artists. And this is part of the charm. But there’s also something deeper.
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Why is this interesting?
I’ve seen super-talented musicians play songs by ear on the piano or guitar. But it is a different kind of joy watching someone like Larnell Lewis play Enter Sandman for the first time. The facial expressions from the active listening are amazing! What is fun about watching these isn’t the playing. It is the on-the-fly decoding of the song—its energy and patterns. Watching the musician listen to the actual track that we all know super well, sans the drum parts. It’s fun watching things be deciphered live by people with their requisite tens of thousands of hours of playing. The cross-genre playfulness only adds to the appeal. Drumeo is a site for learning how to play drums faster. And their content strategy is absolutely locked onto the mission in a really delightful way. (CJN)
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Thanks for reading,
Noah (NRB) & Colin (CJN)
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