How to Build Your Drumming — Concept by Concept
You're sitting behind the drum kit. In front of you is a jumble of instruments, hands and feet that all have to do something different at the same time. Where do you actually begin? Almost thirty years ago, Lage Børresen tried to answer exactly this in an article in Slagverknytt, drawn from a book he was working on at the time. His ideas still hold water, and they deserve a new audience.
The foundation of it all is coordination. Børresen divides it into five levels, from one-way, where you play the same thing in both hands, up to five-way, where the ride, snare, bass drum, hi-hat foot and even your own singing voice work independently of one another. The point is not to count ways for the sake of counting, but to build flexibility. He uses an image most people will recognise: the shift from classic cross-country skiing to skating. Suddenly the whole body had to learn a new balance, a new distribution of weight, a new pattern of movement. It's the same with drums. If you can only play the snare on 2 and 4, you're stuck there. Practise consciously on 1 and 3, and you break the pattern and give yourself a choice. Flexibility, he calls it — and it is the very key to making what you hear inside your head actually come out through your hands.
The next move he borrows from the composers: orchestration, or instrumentation. Two rhythms can look completely identical on the page, but move the same figure from the hi-hat to the floor tom, and you transform a pop song into rock'n'roll. It's the same melody, but a completely different expression. Playing around with where on the kit you place the notes is one of the fastest routes to getting to know the sound of your instrument.
Then comes balance — how the different sounds relate to each other in strength. Here Børresen points to a crucial stylistic difference: in pop and rock the bass drum and snare carry the weight, while the cymbals are to be played softly. In jazz it's the opposite — the ride cymbal drives the entire sound. Same coordination, entirely different weighting.
He then goes on to sticking and paradiddles, those combinations of right and left hand that let you move smoothly across the kit and create phrases. He reminds us that the word "pa-ra-di-ddle" actually sounds like what it describes, and shows how the double paradiddle extends the principle to six strokes. Steve Gadd's famous groove in "Late in the Evening" is precisely paradiddles orchestrated out across the toms.
Two related ideas deserve attention: complementary rhythm and ghost notes. Take a melody and fill in the sixteenth notes that are missing — but play them more softly — and you get the underlying pulse that makes grooves come alive. Børresen names Bernard Purdie and Jeff Porcaro as masters of this, players who build the entire feel of a song on almost inaudible ghost notes.
He also clears up the terms monophonic and polyphonic — one sound at a time versus several at once — and connects it to ostinatos and linear drumming. Here he draws lines to educators such as Gary Chester, Gary Chaffee and Alan Dawson, and explains how Chaffee's system divided phrases into numbers instead of notes, so that even those without knowledge of notation could learn.
Perhaps the most thought-provoking part is the ending: role-play. Just as an actor interprets a role, the drummer interprets a style. Børresen asks you to imagine the same sentence spoken by a doorman, a young ticket seller and an American exchange student — and to carry that same empathy over into your drumming. Straight, shuffle or gruff doorman: you have a soundscape in your head and try to imitate it. It's mental training put into practice, a reminder that technique, in the end, is about expression.
If you want to dive into the note figures and the whole line of reasoning, you'll find the original in the Slagverknytt archive. It's worth revisiting.