Adam Silverman : Nashville Session and Touring Drummer

Another really concept I’ve learned recently came from an amazing drummed named John Riley. He’s a monster Jazz drummer and a true hero of mine. He talked about this in a video, so I thought I’d share it with anyone who’s bored enough to be reading this :)

The concept of headroom applies to many things, but can really be compared best to an automobile. Why are BMWs so cool? Well I think their engines are so amazing because they were created to run at 150mph on roads with no speed limits in Germany and other places in Europe. So when they are running at 70mph on our roads here in the states, they have a ton of headroom left in the engine. So they are running at a low capacity compared to what they can run at if you push them.

Musicians really need to work to be the same way. Why do I spend 2 hours a day working on just coordination? Because ,though I won’t really play the Jazz exercises or ostinado patterns that I work on, they create a lot of coordination which really becomes headroom in my playing. So when I am doing a show with 33Miles, or working in the studio, I am running only at like 40% of what I am capable of doing. That’s how guys play amazing things and make it look so dang easy, because they are well rehearsed, and they are only running at less than half of what they are capable of doing.

The moral… the more headroom you have in a playing situation the better. The closer you get to running at 100% in a gig, the more practice you need to do to keep up and push ahead of the curve. Having that room really comes in handy because you can focus on the show, the songs, or the performance and not worry about the limbs that are carrying out the musicality.

Hope this helps someone. I love this concept and I am working really hard to gain more headroom in the Jazz world. If you’re working on something you don’t think you’ll ever use, you’re heading down the right path in my book.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 16th, 2010 at 9:04 pm and is filed under Music/Drumming. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.