Drum Sausage

Now there’s two words you don’t see in juxtaposition every day!

I just got a peek into the sausage factory of drumming, but first a word on “sausage factory.” In my years of job-hopping I came to use the expression as not just limited to legislative bodies, but business operations as well. Case in point, if you don’t work in insurance, stop for a moment and imagine a day in the life at an insurance firm. A big one. A small agency. If you only knew. If you could be a fly on the wall, you might be surprised, sometime pleasantly, sometimes not, by what you’d hear going on behind the scenes. After all, you’d be listening in on people interacting in the context of their work. Get down in the trenches, and listen in to a conversation between a claims agent and their co-workers. They just got off a call with an insured who’s calling about a grisly vehicle accident involving a death. How do you think that call goes down? What’s the demeanor of the agent if the client is dispassionate and calm? If they’re distraught and can’t keep it together? Is this a regular part of a regular day for that agent? What’s the after-call coworker conversation like? Is it stolid, professional gravitas? Is it gallows humor? How should the work get done? How does it actually get done? Is it always a cutting of corners, or is it sometimes not quite by the book but more efficient? Perhaps the client hit a nerve and the agent is calling in a favor in a way they wouldn’t be obligated to do ordinarily. How much of their forward-facing operations, what you experience as a client, is actually based on a shit list? How much influence do their gatekeepers actually have on quality of service?

How much is that like work pretty much anywhere? Surely, wherever you’ve worked (or whatever circles you’ve moved in) has a way of doing things that occasionally makes you think, “whoo, if people only knew!”

In this case, I stumbled into a reaction video at Drumeo’s YouTube channel. The algorithm worked well this time. A professional drummer, Frank Belluci (Are there any Franks in the audience? Shout out! We’re a rare breed.) having never heard Rob Zombie’s Dragula before, gets just a whiff of it, takes down notes on a thing called a lead sheet that I’d never heard of before, then proceeds to kick ass. I link the video to right where he’s about to play. For not having even heard the whole song, he just crushes it. What manner of fuckery is this? That’s some friggin’ elven magic, that is.

It’s not enough that Frank is just really damned good at what he does. I don’t want to say talented or untalented, because I don’t know how much is talent versus skill. I know precious little drum theory myself. It’s on the wishlist. I’m just passingly familiar with the idea that inside of “music theory” generically speaking, there’s subsets like guitar theory and piano theory and even drum theory. I know of rudiments, without knowing them or even quite how many there are or how much progressive difficulty there is in using them. I have an ephemerally thin awareness that in a sense, those rudiments are kind of modular.

I had no earthly idea that with a sound knowledge of theory and the chops to pull of a set of rudiments that one could hear listen to just a bit of song and do what Frank did as though he were a pianist who had just said, “hum a few bars.”

I find this realization empowering rather than daunting. I could listen to Dragula a thousand times at my current skill level (approaching zilch, but I can hold down a basic 4:4 on a kit) and not only never get it, but feel like it’ll always be beyond me.

Then I got this peak into the sausage factory of drumming. As with the insurance company above, I don’t need to know the contents of the shelves of references and manuals because it’s enough to know that places like that, or a doctor’s office, or that of a surveyor, or police chief have them, and a behind-the-scenes way of dealing with things that we probably just can’t or don’t bother to imagine. I just need to suppose that shelf is there to get a deeper view.

Turns out that for pro drummers like Frank, that shelf has tons of blisters and callouses from countless hours of practice and playing, but also his work experience (in the video, he says something that lets the viewer surmise that he plays his fair share of restaurant gigs). I can assure you that he has some stories. Between venues, management, sound engineers, roadies, your own band members, other acts, and the audience, things can get interesting. On top of all that is the theory he’s mastered to be able to sit down, hear moments from a song, and literally jot down a few notes based on his knowledge of that theory to fully map out what he’s about to accomplish with his enviable skills. This is my reminder that technical proficiency in itself is not enough. It’s incentive to double down on the rules of the game, whatever the game happens to be.