(jazz music)
- Hey, how's it goin' everyone?
We're sittin' here with Dennis Chambers,
and I wanted to pick your brain a bit Dennis if you can
and we have a lot of beginner drummers that watch
our channel and they're tryin' to learn the drums,
so I wanted to ask you what is your number one tip
for young drummers getting started behind the kit?
- Just listening, you know, you have to listen to
the drummer play.
If you're listening to somebody on record,
if you do any research on that drummer,
you find out what his setup is,
but when you listen to him, you can actually,
once you find out how this drum's set up
or the setup of his kit is,
and you listen to him, you can pretty much imagine
when you hear him hit, you can see him pretty much
hitting the drum.
You know, after you get the visual of that setup.
But when you listen to 'em play,
if he's playin'...
(drumming)
Okay, so a beginner wouldn't be able to know
how to do that.
So, you have to sit there and get your hands together,
separate the left from the right.
(drumming)
Then the nightmare comes in,
when you add your bottom half,
which is your hi-hat and your pedal.
So you start with one at a time.
Bring in one at a time with that groove,
with the top half.
(drumming)
Then bring in the hi-hat.
(drumming)
And then once you figure that out,
then you try to put like a 16th note on the right hand.
(drumming)
That's more advanced.
- Yeah, that's a little more advanced,
but so overall, just listen.
- Yeah, just listen.
- So in terms of that, do you just load your iPod
with a bunch of music to listen to?
- Yeah, yeah, yeah.
But I would start off with somethin' simple to listen to,
and there again, that's that whole thing of like
learnin' how to crawl before you learn how to run.
When I first learned how to play, it was just like I said,
just listenin' to James Brown and fatback's.
(drumming)
This is at it's basic form.
(drumming)
Right.
- Very cool.
Hopefully that helps all you young drummers out there.
Start listening.
Do you find that a lot of drummers who are starting,
especially the younger ones, they're not listening,
is that what you're seeing?
- They're listening but see, they're listening
to guys who are, more advanced, tellin' them how
to do all this crazy stuff that have nothin' to do
with keeping gigs.
And the reason being is because
they wanna learn the flash
before they learn how to play a groove,
and if you can't play the groove then you won't
have that opportunity to play the flash,
'cause nobody's gonna call you to play the grooves,
if you don't know how to do that and all you do is flash.
You could sit home - So keep it simple.
and do flashes all day,
but you'll be a broke guy, sittin' home (laughs).
- Waiting for your phone to ring.
- Waitin' for your phone to ring and it ain't gon' happen.
- Right, right.
- Until you learn how to play music.
And let's break music down.
It all depends on what kind of music it is.
If you're playin' metal music then
there's a different kind of groove with metal music.
It's a lot of flash!
You know, and that's why my hat is off to those guys
because first of all when you listen to these guys play,
they sound like athletes,
and they didn't force that style of playing
on any other style of music other than
what they created which is metal.
So, my hat's off to them.
- [Interviewer] Yeah.
- There's a guy up in Canada, I'm here, in fact.
He's in Canada, Flo Mounier. - Yeah.
Mounier - Mounier.
- Please forgive me if I'm sayin' his name wrong,
but he played with this group called Cryptopsy.
- Yep.
- And I mean, I love that guy to death.
I sat there and watched him play (laughs),
like there's no way that I'm gonna do that.
Forget it. - Yeah.
You know, that's a lot of dedication,
but I know what it takes to do it.
- Yeah.
- It's a lot of dedication and, you know,
when I sit there and watch him play,
I mean, he's playin' that like 80,000 miles an hour,
- So he was able to find a way to focus on the groove
but use the flash in there,
and that's what you said talking
about the metal styles of music.
And we've had Flo out on Drumeo.
We also have a bunch more lessons from Dennis
inside of Drumeo, so if you guys wanna check out more,
head on over to Drumeo.com
We gotta lot of great tips for beginner drummers
all the way to advanced drummers.
Thank you very much!
- Thank you!
- See you guys later!
(jazz music)