Bury the Beat
How the Drummer For Billy Idol Gave Me the Key to My Music & Life
Day one of “rock drumming” class at Los Angeles Music Academy, where I was studying percussion. I’m sitting in the first row of about 80 drummers feeling a bit out of place - being a hand percussionist, I knew the conga, the djembe, pandero, but not the drumset. So I figured what better way to get into it than by putting myself front and center. Little did I know that this would be the day that lead to the single most important discovery of my life ...
The door opens to my left, and I see a guy with yellow-spiked hair, piercings, tattoos, and a beaming intensity bouncing up the aisle. I knew it was our teacher, Mark Schulman who’s toured with the likes of Billy Idol, Stevie Nicks, Sheryl Crow, and Foreigner.He walks up to the front of the class, puts his sticks down, turns around, and looks right at me(!) and says,
“Dude, bury the beat.” He puts a metronome (”clicker”) on my desk, turns it on ….. click … click … click … click…
“There’s your beat. Now, go ahead, clap with the clicker and try to match the two up. Since the clapping is louder, when you clap at the same time as the click, the click sound will disappear, and you’ll only hear your hands clapping (hence, ‘bury the beat’).”
So I went ahead and started clapping. I tried to clap at the same time as the click, but I found it pretty difficult. I hit my hands together sometimes a little early and sometimes a little late. Clap, click …. clap, click …. click, clap. A few times I managed to get it perfectly on top of the click and I’d get a single clap!
After watching me struggle for a while, he said, “Stop. Ok, dude, just relax, close your eyes, breath, stick out your hands, and just let the sound of the click draw your hands together.”
Ok, so I closed my eyes, let out a long breath to relax my body, allowed myself to get absorbed by the sound of the click, and stuck out my hands…
I started clapping, allowing the click to do all the work. Eventually, my hands starting clapping closer and closer to the click, and then…… clap. I buried the beat… and then another … and another ! clap, clap, clap, clap. I was somehow able to bury the beat for 30 seconds straight! It felt as though my hands were doing the clapping on its own, and I just had to get out the way and let it happen.
“Dude! That’s it! You got it! You just demonstrated a force found in nature and science known as entrainment.
“Entrainment is where one rhythm gets pulled into another.”
“Once you let it, your hands naturally entrained with the beat. It’s like when you tap your foot or move your body to the music; you don’t have to think about it; it just happens.”
“You don’t have to work hard at finding the groove of the song. As the drummer, you’re the ‘clock’ of the whole band. You need to be able to lock on and stay with the beat. To do that, you just have to create the right environment, and entrainment will do the work for you.”
“You mean, if I get out of the way, the beat will find me?”
“Yep. The Law of Entrainment says so. Cool, huh?”
“And it’s not just with the beat. Entrainment affects all aspects of the music. The rhythm, melody, harmony, even the emotions that you feel as the player as well as listener are all driven through entrainment.”
“The key is to let entrainment take over. And sometimes, that’s not so easy! You know how sometimes when you’re playing a gig, the pressure’s on, you feel nervous? You end up trying too hard, and what happens? You get off tempo, you make a mistake, you rush the beat, or your playing ends up sounding rigid. This is what can happen when you’ve broken out of entrainment with the music.”
“It takes practice to be able to stay entrained. Learn how to entrain really well, and your music will never be the same …”
Entrainment is a big deal ... as we shall see ...
