(jazz music) – Hey, how's it goin' everyone? We're sittin' here
with Dennis Chambers, and I wanted to pick your
brain a bit Dennis if you can and we have a lot of
beginner drummers that watch our channel and they're
tryin' to learn the drums, so I wanted to ask you
what is your number one tip for young drummers getting
started behind the kit? – Just listening, you
know, you have to listen to the drummer play. If you're listening
to somebody on record, if you do any research
on that drummer, you find out what his setup is, but when you listen to
him, you can actually, once you find out how
this drum's set up or the setup of his kit is, and you listen to him, you
can pretty much imagine when you hear him hit, you
can see him pretty much hitting the drum. You know, after you get the
visual of that setup. But when you listen to 'em play, if he's playin'… (drumming) Okay, so a beginner
wouldn't be able to know how to do that. So, you have to sit there
and get your hands together, separate the left
from the right.
(drumming) Then the nightmare comes in, when you add your bottom half, which is your hi-hat
and your pedal. So you start with one at a time. Bring in one at a
time with that groove, with the top half. (drumming) Then bring in the hi-hat. (drumming) And then once you
figure that out, then you try to put like a
16th note on the right hand. (drumming) That's more advanced. – Yeah, that's a
little more advanced, but so overall, just listen. – Yeah, just listen. – So in terms of that, do
you just load your iPod with a bunch of
music to listen to? – Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I would start off with
somethin' simple to listen to, and there again, that's
that whole thing of like learnin' how to crawl
before you learn how to run. When I first learned how to
play, it was just like I said, just listenin' to James
Brown and fatback's. (drumming) This is at it's basic form. (drumming) Right. – Very cool. Hopefully that helps all you
young drummers out there. Start listening. Do you find that a lot of
drummers who are starting, especially the younger
ones, they're not listening, is that what you're seeing? – They're listening but
see, they're listening to guys who are, more
advanced, tellin' them how to do all this crazy stuff
that have nothin' to do with keeping gigs.
And the reason being is because they wanna learn the flash before they learn
how to play a groove, and if you can't play
the groove then you won't have that opportunity
to play the flash, 'cause nobody's gonna call
you to play the grooves, if you don't know how to do
that and all you do is flash. You could sit home
– So keep it simple. and do flashes all day, but you'll be a broke guy,
sittin' home (laughs). – Waiting for your
phone to ring.
– Waitin' for your phone to
ring and it ain't gon' happen. – Right, right. – Until you learn
how to play music. And let's break music down. It all depends on what
kind of music it is. If you're playin'
metal music then there's a different kind
of groove with metal music. It's a lot of flash! You know, and that's why
my hat is off to those guys because first of all when you
listen to these guys play, they sound like athletes, and they didn't force
that style of playing on any other style
of music other than what they created
which is metal.
So, my hat's off to them. – [Interviewer] Yeah. – There's a guy up in
Canada, I'm here, in fact. He's in Canada, Flo Mounier.
– Yeah. Mounier
– Mounier. – Please forgive me if
I'm sayin' his name wrong, but he played with this
group called Cryptopsy. – Yep. – And I mean, I love
that guy to death. I sat there and watched
him play (laughs), like there's no way
that I'm gonna do that. Forget it.
– Yeah. You know, that's a
lot of dedication, but I know what
it takes to do it. – Yeah. – It's a lot of
dedication and, you know, when I sit there
and watch him play, I mean, he's playin' that
like 80,000 miles an hour, – So he was able to find a
way to focus on the groove but use the flash in there, and that's what you said talking about the metal styles of music. And we've had Flo out on Drumeo. We also have a bunch
more lessons from Dennis inside of Drumeo, so if you
guys wanna check out more, head on over to Drumeo.com We gotta lot of great
tips for beginner drummers all the way to
advanced drummers.
Thank you very much! – Thank you! – See you guys later! (jazz music).