Don't Learn to Play Like Someone Else

I’ve been watching some of the 80/20 Drummer recently. It took me a while, because I’m quick like that, to realise that he’s primarily a hip-hop drummer.


He’s interesting and not a techno-flash kit-banger. Oddly, he admires techno-flash kit bangers.


In one of his lessons, he was talking about drumming like Tony Williams.

Whoa.

Nobody can drum like Tony Williams. Tony Williams was playing with Miles Davis when he was seventeen years old. We’re all way older than seventeen already.

Here’s my question: did Tony Williams got that good and original at seventeen by spending hours trying to sound like Elvin Jones? Or learning Philly Jo Jones licks? No. He could probably listen to both the Jones’s and hear what they were doing, but then he went away and did it his way. I’m sure Williams could play a flam triplet as well as any military drummer, but why would he want to, when he could play his version of a flam triplet.

I realised what had been niggling at me while watching a lot of You Tube music videos.

They are all about how to sound like someone else. Or play chord-scale, which makes everyone sound like everyone else.

There’s nothing wrong with learning a couple of Larry Carlton licks, so you can throw them in now and then as a joke: the great jazz saxophone players all did that. There is everything wrong with spending days of hours trying to play like Larry Carlton.

(And no, Steve Vai didn’t spend hours learning to play Frank Zappa guitar solos. He has better ears than you and me: surely he had to work on the really tricky bits, but mostly, I bet he listened and played right off. The old-school jazz world had many musicians who could hear a solo, and play it right back at you.)

What you’re supposed to be doing is learning to play like yourself. Part of that is listening to a lot of music until you hear someone doing something, and you get a direction in an instant as Miles said. Or maybe you just find yourself doing it. Who do you think Stevie Winwood was copying? Nobody. That guitar playing on Medicated Goo is all him. No stories about it being some jazz session guitarist.

What happens if you don’t have a self to play like? That’s the whole point of playing, dummy. So you develop a personality. That’s why jazz fans can listen to five bars of a track they’ve never heard before and rattle off the names of the players. Because back then, everyone developed their own sound. One reason was that the damn jazz degree didn’t beat it out of them. The player’s sound was what we would now call their brand. You want that sound, you hire that man.

But shouldn’t a professional musician be able to read the charts, play in a neutral style, or however the bandleader wants, and vamp the changes behind the soloist? As well as solo as the song, genre and audience require?

You know anyone who’s making a living as a selfless professional musician? Outside a couple of dozen orchestras? Aren’t many of those gigs left now. The people who make money have voices of their own, because their audience wants that voice, because the other members of the band heard ten other guys before this one, who just had the sound they wanted.

Maybe all those You Tube music videos are for nerds who don’t want to think about the responsibility of developing a musical personality. Maybe they think it’s silly, given that they play, like me, hobby guitar and will never play in public, and they just want to sound like one of their heroes for ten bars.

To the contrary, I would say. For those of us with day jobs, spending a lot of time in shut-down mode travelling and dealing with the outside world, that hour or so of hobby guitar may be the only time we get to be ourselves.