| Hell yes. I'm a "drummer" first. I don't mention this because drumming is rarely thought as musical. It does make you reflect on different part of the musical continuum. To summarize my years twirling sticks: - drumming often lead to learning things slow. Focusing on minute details that are ignored, also meditative (you have to be slow and low energy but it's dense, you pay attention at the 10th of a second so you're constantly mentally and physically active) - limb independance is akin to meditation for me, playing patterns involving all limbs massages my brain. It's like trying to balance on a virtual wire. It's a game of doing more with less and abstracting the motion of each limb into another form of data. You must not think of one limb in particular. You feel rhythm and accents, and you distribute to some limbs... I feel like a live compiler. - oddly technique also required revisiting my understanding of physics. It's all about angular momentum, shifting gravity center and inertia. Also doing less with more by distributing the effort on every possible muscle. Makes you reflect on a global basis about each hit.
Oh and I forgot, to do lengthy single hand rolls with accents, you don't rotate your wrist, you wave your forearm, hand and stick (it has to be smooth like low basketball dribbling, you'll see if you look for moeller technique later) accents are just a blip in amplitude at the forearm wave; the hand wave will keeps as it is so you'll keep time and won't feel tired because waving doesn't require much energy (half the energy comes from sensitivity and reusing the response of the skin to let the stick go up). It was through this that I started to "see" music. I played bass too, and along the way melody and harmony started to make sense at the intuitive level (I only took 1 year of accelerated formal theory training on piano as a teen, taught me approximately nothing about "music") All in all, I'm a brainiac (for better or worse) .. different people will see other things in drumming. ps: One last thing, at first drumming felt like an immense beast to tame. Famous drummers did things I could barely see, even less understand. My mind skipped to conclusion thinking to reach that level I had to do more and play like a fighter jet. It's the other way around, it changed your view about your perception and interpretation of the world through your senses. As I told before it's all a game of economy, but you have to experience each cymbal, skin, sticks, subtle space and time placement to finally see that just a few strokes well placed are enough to recreate that "complex" thing. It's a bit like when you finally understand a software architecture, you realize how small it is, but you connected the dots and see how much it can do. |