I should have written about this in my blog as soon as I started my drum classes - right from the very first lesson. It is not that, I did not think about it. After each lesson, I thought about it. But I think, I know myself sufficiently well and in my mind I am glad that I did not start blogging. In retrospection, I think that my mind must have considered two most possible outcomes before deciding not to write - Outcome one - I knew that although I was starting drum lessons, I was not sure that I was going to continue those lessons so long. Outcome two - Although I had continued my drum lessons, I might have got bored to write about each class in the blog. Well, that is me. No reason is ever bad enough for me to take up something new suddenly and no reason is ever bad enough for me to stop it suddenly. Nevertheless, right now I am happy that I am writing my blog about the drum lessons.
The first thing that strikes me is that I have been taking drum lessons for more than a year now. I have thoroughly surprised myself with that. I don't remember being regular about anything in the past few years. During this full period, I assure you, that I did not miss any class because I forgot or I did not have enthu. I missed a class only when I was not in Monterrey. I remember not missing the class even when I slept at 3-4 o'clock in the morning on the night before. That certainly qualifies me to have a pat on the back.
There is another thing that equally surprises me about myself - my ability to learn and ability to learn a musical instrument, that too as foreign as a drum. I started with my drum lessons purely for emotional and mental detoxing. It worked also well for me. But look at the progress I have made - starting from Boogie to Rock to Latin to Swing! And I don't think I play bad - my teacher will not teach new lesson unless I play previous one to his level of satisfaction. That too qualifies me to have a pat on the back.
As I just mentioned, I was searching for an avenue to detox myself from my weekly pileup of emotional and mental junk. I tried, partying which is as per the tradition of Monterrey. It worked but it was too much tiring and felt that it was not constructive.
Like any other instrument, this one is an amazing instrument to me. As an Indian, I always looked down upon drums as - "Oh, what our Zakir Hussain can do with just two pieces in Tabla, this instrument needs to have so many parts!" Never looked at other instruments in this manner because those have already been adopted and mastered by by Indian musicians very well. In fact, those instruments have become so much part of the Indian classical music that violin, mandolin, clarinet, saxophone, guitar - all of these appear in the front row of Indian Music along with Sitar, Shehnai, Santoor, Flute and Veena. The exception to this kist is - percussion instruments. I don't see it, no, can't even imagine, an Indian Classical Music event where Pt. Jasraj will sing and be accompanied by Shivmani on drums!
Anyways...for me it was not just the curiosity of learning a new instrument, but I was looking for something that will help me to take away accumulates tensions, frustrations - in short take away negativities. To be honest, it worked very well for me.
First of all, when it comes to musical instruments, drums certainly is a different animal altogether. The minimum configuration has 8 pieces - hi hats, crash cymbal, left cymbal, base drum, snare drum, hi-tom, mid-tom, floor tom. You need to use 2 hands and 2 legs independently to play with these - which means an entire complexity of hand, legs and head coordination.
This may sound as if it is an difficult instrument to play. But not really. Human mind and body is an amazing automaton. The moment you take those sticks in your hand and start beating the drums, trust me, just follow what your teacher says and next you know is that you are playing the drums.
Another interesting observation is that - it depends a lot on the teacher. I have seen that at least in 2 instances. When I started learning Mandolin, I was in 8th grade. The teacher was running award winning classes for various instruments. It was indeed an experience to be in his classes. In fact - I was quite old as compared to many other kids who used to play brilliantly in his classes. He himself used to play various instruments well and knew how to teach them well. He had a method to teach to elders as well as kids. Then for a long time, from the end of 9th grade (1982-83) till 2003, I didn't learn under any teacher. I played mandolin on my own. Well, whenever I could play - that means whenever I could go to kolhapur and had a mood to play. Taking Mandolin to hostel was strictly prohibited. Reason? It was almost assumed that if I take mandolin to hostel, I will let everyone else play it except me and others will not take proper care of it. Looking back, I don't know, if that was right or no, but for sure I lost a my prime years of practicing mandolin and music and lost my interest in playing it. Coming back, meanwhile I moved to VJTI and there I started learning flute on my own. Ramprasad Joshi used to play flute and he was kind to give me a couple of them to try. With a great difficulty for a long time - to myself, to my fellow roommate and residents of the nearby rooms, I was able to play something on flute. Flute is an amazing instrument. Just 6 holes in a hollow pipe. But the amazing music it can make is like a magic. I continued blowing air into flute for quite some time, never going beyond a certain level. Then in 1995, I fulfilled by long desire of buying a violin. I thought I will be able to play it on my own. But no. The moment, I tried to play it first time, I knew that it is not that simple and I need someone to teach me. That took 8 more years. I finally could find a teacher to teach me violin. He was a great violin player - both western and indian classical. I started learning with him. But - here is what the difference was - he was a professional violin player and not much of a teacher. It was not easy to learn with him. After 6 months, I stopped the lessons with him. It was not working well. Then in 2008 August, I was driving around my house and in front of a house just a few blocks away from my home, I saw the board of 'Academia de bateria'. I took the number and called. I spoke in my broken Spanish to him and could explain that I am interested in learning drums and that I have never touched drums in my life till then. Hopefully, he understood and asked me to come to his classes next Saturday. At 10 AM, I went there with Anusha (my daughter). He was an old man of around 55-60 years, heavy built, white hairs and big moustache. He greeted me and shook hands. Went in his class room. All the walls in the room were covered with the foam blocks that is used as packing in the boxes so that it abosrbs all the sound. It was filled with many percussion instruments, a computer running DOS (yeah the one with which Microsoft started), a keyboard, big speakers and two drum sets. The one in the center was of brand Pearl, fully configured with around 10 cymbals, 4 toms, double peddle and all other accesories. The other one was also Pearl and moderately configured with high hat, ride cymbal, left crash and right crash, 3 toms, snare, base drum with double peddle, cow bell, plastic box. It was certainly the first drum set that I saw so closely. I was sure that the fully configured one will be the one that he will use and the other one will be for me. Narno (my drum teacher) then asked the same questions again that he asked me on the phone - (yes, in spanish. Narno Casasus does not speak a bit of English except those words which are necessary for the drums - like left, right and alright etc). Have I played drums earlier? Do I play any other instruments? What do I play? Where did I learn? etc. Then he asked me what do I want to learn to play. I answered, I would like to play solos and Jazz. He seemed impressed with my answer. Then he asked, what style do I want to adopt for holding my sticks? Well, that was tricky. It was like asking a 10th grade student - In which style would you prefer to solve the simultaneous equations? Well, first of all tell me which styles are there? I ased Narno. He then demonstrated two styles - Matched and Traditional. In matched, you hold the sticks in each hand in identical way. In traditional, you hold the stick between thumb and the first finger and rest of the fingers just surrounding the stick and you hold the left stick using the joint between thumb and first finger as fulcrum and ring finger as support, first, middle and little finger do not touch the stick. To me, traditional looked cool and I adopted for it. He then put two 5A drum sticks in front of me and told me the technic to hold and use those in the tanditional style. With preliminaries done, he asked me to sit on the throne, (yeah, no mistake, thats the right word) and as I had thought earlier, I moved towards the modelrately configured drum, He stopped me and directed me to the fully configured one. I sat on the throne and he asked me hit the snare drum with my right hand. Then with the left hand. "Right, left, right left, Pe, Pe, Pe, Pe.... alright, ya pegas el snare drum right, left, right, right, left, right, mu, si, ca, mu, si, ca, mu, si, ca....alright, ya cuatro golpes, right left, right, left, right, left, right, left, co, me, te, lo, co, me, te, lo....." He asked me to practice these strokes for next few minutes and he was watching. In between came couple of time, once correcting my left hand stick and once telling me that I should hit the drums harder. By the next 15 minutes, I was hitting drum hard, I was playing PePe, MuSiCa and CoMeTeLo without any problems to the satisfaction of Narno. There ended my first class and I was back into learning music.
