There is no single perfect answer to achieve world-class musicality.
Each player brings his or her own talent, personality, and life experiences to the table and in some cases, it’s as simple as knowing the proper entry point of the cymbal technique or breathing techniques to perform a song.
I will talk about how to improve and become better.
Lesson 1: An introduction to music
Some of the fundamentals of music that most musicians learn are listening to and understanding the texture of sound that the human ear can perceive, the concepts of time and meter, looking at the rhythm section’s harmonic structure, the importance of technique, and a notation/to-tone reading.
How many people today actually take the time to learn and understand these fundamentals?
If you want to be a great drummer then you need to understand what’s going on in the music.
You don’t need to be an instant expert on music.
Rather, you should know how the instruments and the timbres you are playing are put together and how to interpret them by just listening to music.
As an example, most students begin playing the drums by hitting a snare drum.
They do not learn about the different timbres or how the different sounds you hear on the snare drum are like a symphony orchestra.
So even if you are an amazing drummer, you might not understand the music that is a sophisticated and complex arrangement.
I’m sure you know a snare drum but you will understand it more if you take the time to hear it as a symphony orchestra rather than a single instrument.
Lesson 2: Visual sound and rhythm
When you hear a percussion instrument, such as a snare drum, you don’t just hear the sound that the instrument makes.
You also hear the reverberations that it makes in the room. This reflection or reverberation of sound makes you hear the timbre of the sound.
This sound quality changes as you’re moving away from the sound source. Therefore, if you want to learn what type of sound that the instrument produces or how the sound is made, listen to it.
Listen to the timbre of each instrument and the tone that they produce.
This type of sound is called timbre. You also hear the ambiance or tone that the instruments produce.
When a very soft sound enters your ears, you perceive it as a very soft tone. When you’re next to a concert hall you hear the concert hall’s symphony orchestra’s timbre.
Timbre is a specific sound that can be used to describe the quality of sound in music.
For example, let’s say that you are listening to a song in the back seat of a car on your commute to work.
The song is in a lower octave than when you listen to it in the office. If you have one of those air-conditioning-type engines in the car, it sounds muffled.
The song is made up of several different instruments and you are listening to it in mono.
When you open your windows, the sound becomes loud. This type of stereo effect is known as spatial separation.
This makes it difficult to hear the instruments. You also hear the driver’s stereo in the background.
All these sonic differences add up and you are not able to hear the details of the song.
Knowing this, we can talk about the quality of the music. The singer is always singing from the center and the instruments are surrounding her.
She can feel the energy in the room, but she can’t feel the atmosphere.
Imagine there’s a forest, there’s a swamp, and there’s a mountain. The wind comes from the mountain and the wind from the forest.
If the wind is flowing to the right, then you will feel the breeze from the mountain. The wind is moving more toward the forest, so you feel the breeze from the swamp.
But if you stand in the same place, you can feel the wind from all three places. All three places are contributing to the wind’s movement and energy.
When we listen to music, we use the same principle.
If you listen to a symphony orchestra concert, you are hearing the timbre of the orchestra and the ambiance of the room.
All these aspects are helping the music.
Lesson 3: Concert chairs
At a concert, you’ll see lots of people sitting on the floor. You will see many instruments on the floor or stands, including drums, cymbals, and orchestras.
You also see people sit on the floor when they are drumming, playing acoustic guitar, singing, or playing other instruments.
It’s not because they’re poor musicians but it’s because the seat is too far away from the sound.
Sitting on the floor adds distance between your ears and the sound. This distance is known as the ear bandwidth.
Most people in the room have bad ear-bounciness. This means that the ear-bounciness in the room will make it difficult to hear the room’s ambiance.
However, if the person is sitting on a seat, then the ear-bounciness will not contribute to the room’s sound.
People sitting on the floor are more comfortable but they are more distracted because their attention is focused on the floor.
They are not giving their full attention to the music.
The lesson is simple: If you want to experience the symphony orchestra concert and you want to experience the songs without the sound-bending environment, you should sit on a chair.
Lesson 4: Music streaming
We use the word streaming because we’re talking about music streaming, not music downloading.
Music is always downloaded. Once we get it, we can listen to it at any time.
But in streaming music, the music will be available the moment you are ready to listen to it.
When you listen to music through a CD, we may get the music a few days after the concert.
With streaming music, we don’t have to wait a few days because the music is always there.
Streaming music is a trend that is growing. The growth in streaming music is largely driven by the Internet.
Not only do we have iPods and CD players, but now we also have streaming music.
We’re also now streaming video. The difference between streaming music and video streaming is that streaming music is always there, but the video is on-demand.
We may like the video but we may not like the video at that time. If we want to watch it, we have to wait.
