Your career is a business
If drumming is your business, it requires business solutions
Perfecting Equilibrium Volume Three, Issue 15
Drumming is my madness,
Drumming is my business.
Drumming is my pleasure,
Drumming makes me happy.
Drumming makes me lose control,
Drumming makes me rock and roll, yeah
The Sunday Reader, August 4, 2024
No one oo’s and ah’s over my sniper anymore.
For years people expressed amazement over the way I focused on the sniper’s eye. That wasn’t easy with a Pentax LX loaded with 35mm Ektachrome film and a manual focus SMC Pentax M 200mm F4 telephoto lens.
Any camera you can buy today has better auto eye focus built in. Most cell phones, too.
So no one is amazed by the sniper’s eye anymore. And that is a good thing. The point of the photo was not supposed be the photographer’s focus on the sniper’s eye. The point was meant to be the focus of the sniper’s eye on you, the viewer.
Craftsmanship is a blade that cuts two ways. Skilled crafters can create amazing things, and great works of art. But those same skills are a barrier to entry that keep everyday people out of the profession.
You can see that with photography as a profession. Photographers lament that there simply isn’t the money in portraiture, weddings, and school and stock photos that made photography a lucrative profession throughout the 20th Century.
And yet more people are taking more photos and making more money from photography than at any other point in history. The automation of basic photography craft skills such as exposure and focus removed the barriers keeping non-specialists out. That put the specialists out of business. But it let everyone else in.
Ask yourself the question a different way: Why are there still drummers?
There’s an estimated 2.5 million drummers in the US alone; they buy 250,000 drum sets sold in the U.S. annually.
Why are there any drummers at all when there are drum machines?
Consider Ringo Starr. An interviewer once asked John Lennon what kind of clicker – metronome – the Beatles use. We don’t need a clicker; we’ve got Ringo Lennon answered.
Here’s a contrarian opinion: The Beatles are never The Beatles without Ringo.
As their music got more and more complex – Revolver, Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, the White Album – The Beatles began doing more and more takes, then cutting them together into songs. Some songs were built out of more than 100 takes. Ringo’s uncanny sense of time meant any track from any take – George Harrison’s guitar from take 79, Paul McCartney’s bassline from take 102 – could be cut together seamlessly into the final song mix. There was no real other way to do this in the analog 1960s; changing a recording’s tempo meant messing with tape recorder motors, an in-exact science at best.
But now we have drum machines that keep absolutely perfect time. So why are there still drummers?
Because while Ringo’s uncanny sense of time was the foundation of The Beatles, Ringo did much, much more for the group. For example, Ringo kept the same time during a hundred takes or more – while playing different riffs and fills, providing Lennon and McCartney a veritable percussion smorgasbord to build songs.
Then there’s Ringo’s right foot.
During the rock and pop era musical groups began shrinking from the large ensembles of the Big Band era. Horn sections dropped down to a sax or two; classical strings went away and keyboards went by the wayside. The most stripped down bands got it down to a rhythm section – a drummer and a bass player – plus a melodic instrument. So ZZ Top and Nirvana were a rhythm section and a guitar; Emerson, Lake and Palmer was a rhythm section and infinite keyboards played by that madman Keith Emerson.
At first glance this template seems to fit The Beatles; you’ve got Ringo on drums, McCartney on bass, plus Harrison and Lennon on guitars. Except McCartney didn’t play traditional rhythm bass; he practically invented melodic bass playing.
But if McCartney was off working the melody with the guitars, who was laying down the foundations of the music?
Ringo was doing all of it. Who drummer Keith Moon – a legend in his own right – said Ringo had the fastest foot in the business. With that wicked bass drum, his devotion to serving the song – he famously refused to play drum solos – and his uncanny sense of time he freed the other three Beatles to focus on their melodies.
The fact that both a clicker and Ringo keep perfect time didn’t mean Beatles didn’t need Ringo. It meant they didn’t need a clicker.
No clicker can take Ringo’s job. If a clicker can put a drummer out of business, it says something about that business.
If autofocus and autoexposure can put a photographer out of business, that says something about that business.
If spell check and grammar check and ChatGPT can put a writer out of business, it says something about that business.
It doesn’t say much about that writer or photographer or drummer. No drummer can wake up one day and suddenly say WAIT a MINUTE...I should be RINGO.
There’s only one Ringo. And you cannot just decide to be genius. Though that would be nice!
So what’s the solution then? Just give up? Roll over and die?
No. The solution is to understand that business is business, whether you are a multinational corporation or a freelance drummer, and the same rules apply.
And for individuals, the answer to those rules is simple:
Become a Venn master, grasshopper.
You remember Venn Diagrams, don’t you? Venn Diagrams were those three intersecting circles that illustrated set theory during all those math classes back in the day.
Becoming a Venn Master means working your way from the crowd in those big circles into the oh so exclusive groups in those tiny intersections.
Here’s an example: The number of journalists in the world is huge. The number of information technology professionals is enormous. And there are a goodly number of data architects on the market.
But the number of people in the intersection of those groups? The number of people who are professional journalists, professional information technology management, and have patents on data architecture?
Like Tigger, I’m the only one, as far as I know.
We’ll look at how to become a Venn Master next week. The good news is all that’s required is to reach a professional level at two or more things; genius is not required.
Speaking of genius, what if you have a band and you don’t happen to have access to Ringo? Can pop music be created with just a drum and a bass machine.
Yes. We called it Disco.