“We as a band need to practice messing up.”

This was the statement my friend and I landed on over coffee the other day. He’s the worship leader at my church, and we were talking about ways for us to grow musically as a worship band.

The best bands are not the best because they never mess up. They’re the best because they know how to handle and hide mistakes. Sometimes we fear mistakes so much that our primary goal is avoiding them, rather than learning how to recover from them. You can try and try and try to never mess up, but it’s going to happen. The key in no longer fearing the mistakes is knowing how you’ll handle them. So we were brainstorming ways to actually practice doing this in rehearsal.

Believe it or not, Sunday rolled around and we didn’t have to intentionally practice messing up in order for a good old-fashioned, accidental mess-up to happen.

Now I want you to think about something for a moment… What’s the...

Time to get real with you guys. The last several emails I’ve sent out have been about dealing with failure - overcoming it and using it to learn. The truth that I’ve tried to reiterate is that you’re never going to avoid failure, no matter how good you are at something. However, you can use the failure to learn and to overcome.

I failed at being a good drummer the other day at a rehearsal, and I’d like to share this story with you since I think it might help you out.

Speaking of avoiding mistakes, check out this video while you're here about the "5 toxic drummer habits you MUST avoid at all cost."

Ok on with today's story!

We were rehearsing this moderate-tempo, four-on-the-floor song that was very long and repetitive. The tune also didn’t have a lot of dynamic contrast throughout…It built up after a minute or so then stayed up the rest of the song. I launched into the first chorus, enjoying the rock ’n roll, driving feel. When the second...

Back in February I was on a gig that I was really excited about. This was basically a weekend event gig where we played a few different sessions throughout the weekend, pulling from a master setlist of 10-15 songs. Everything about this gig was perfect, and I knew everything was going to be great. The bandleader was a good friend I loved, and I was super excited about the keyboard player who would be joining us. He was one of those guys who just makes any group sound and groove better. That’s a rare thing with keys players, and this guy’s ability was definitely something to be excited about. This was shaping up to be a great gig, then something happened.

I got sick.

Now this was weeks before the COVID lockdowns began, so this took place in the “olden days” when we were still allowed to show up to work sick. ;) It’s interesting to think how this kind of thing will be forever different now! Anyways, I came down with a bad cold just two days before this...

I was playing a church gig years ago with a bass player I’d played with a bunch. He was one of those guys who was a lot of fun to play with, and he had a keen interest in my personal growth on the drums, skill-wise and career-wise. That day he happened to mention a drummer friend of his he’d like me to meet…

Now this drummer-friend wasn’t just any drummer. He was a monster-player who was currently touring with a major act, and who had toured with several nationally-renowned bands in the past few years. He had played on several records I listened to a bunch in high school, so I felt like I already knew him. The realization that I could meet him had the introvert inside of me very nervous. But of course, I couldn’t resist.

I was able to get in touch with this drummer, and we set up a time to just hang out and chat. It’s amazing the power of a mutual friend!

As we conversed and got to know each other, I got the feeling that this guy already...

I recently played a gig in the most “live” room I’ve ever played in. When I say live, I mean that the room is very loud, reverberant, and there’s nothing in it to absorb sound. The opposite of this would be playing in a closet where all the clothes make the room extremely dead. You get the picture.

The problem, though, wasn’t just that this room was very live. It was also very small. While I was setting up I placed my foot on my hihat stand to close the hats, and the hihat chick echoed right back to me off the back wall. I was also set up in a cube-shaped nook in the corner of this venue, so the drums sounded a little like they were in a bathroom. If you know anything about room acoustics, you know that a cube-shaped room is the absolute worst shape a room could be. Weird things happen to the low end, and the high end gets slapped around in annoying ways. Basically this setup was becoming the perfect storm of everything you...

I felt the stress completely crushing me, weighing down on my shoulders and paralyzing me. I had no idea what to do or what decision to make, and every option felt equally discouraging. I was at a crossroads, having to decide whether or not to pursue a major life path…. and it was only Wednesday of my first week of school.

I was crazy enough to go to music school in college and major in percussion performance. I had no actual percussion experience, I’d never played in band or orchestra, and I’d never played drumset in jazz band. But I wanted to take on a challenge and do it all for the first time since I knew I wanted to do music for a living after school.

Monday afternoon of that first week of school was wind ensemble rehearsal. I went to a school that had what you could probably call a “regionally renowned” wind ensemble. The group played very well, performed at prestigious events, and put on fantastic concerts every semester. The group’s...

On a gig a couple of months ago, I made one of those “drummer mistakes” where the drummer goes one direction in the song and the lead singer goes another. Looking back, it’s pretty hilarious. There are really only two ways you can handle this type of situation, so I’ll share with you my example…

I was playing with three other guys I’ve played with pretty regularly over the last 7 years. We’ve played all sorts of cover gigs together since college, and we’ve learned to play very well together. Most of the time we’re good about catching each other’s signals and knowing where the other is going musically…But I happened to miss one of these signals on this particular night.

We were playing something sort of funky, and we were jamming on it while the electric guitar player soloed. I remembered a few times in the past that we had launched into a double time feel on a jam section like this, so I prepared mentally for our...

"Stephen, they need you to play drums Sunday."

My mom’s words smacked me in the face then echoed back and forth in my 15-year-old head. They what?? I laughed to myself. How do they even know that I play drums? No one’s supposed to know that! I just started lessons two months ago! This is crazy.

But somehow word had gotten out and I was getting dragged into the high school student worship band at church. Turns out their regular drummer had graduated high school and the replacement hadn't worked out. Little had I known 5 minutes before this moment that I was about to play my very first gig with just two months of drum lessons under my belt. I didn’t even own a real drumset at the time.

I was totally unprepared, terrified, and looking for a way out of this. I remember laying in bed that night praying about it, saying “God if you want me to go way out of my comfort zone to do this, you have to go with me and somehow enable me to do what...

On a recent gig, something out of the band’s control went terribly wrong and shut the entire show down an hour early. In all of our combined years of gigging, none of us on stage had ever had this happen to us before...

This was a typical Friday-night, 8-12 type of cover gig, and we were approaching the 11pm mark. The club was getting busy, and the dance floor was getting crowded. It was almost time for the final set - the set with all the upbeat top 40 hits everybody loves - to finish off the evening. A few of us in the band were hanging out at the back door to the venue, chatting with one of the bouncers as our set break wound down.

To our surprise, it was pouring down rain outside. Looking out across the parking deck you could see a blinding wall of rain coming down out on the street. “I hope this doesn’t keep folks away tonight,” worried the bouncer. “We’re coming up on what’s usually our busiest time of night.” The wind started to...

Don’t tick off the sound guy.

I recently saw what happened when a band made this fatal error.

I was playing a show with an original band I play with often, and we were opening for another band traveling through from out of town.

The venue asked us to arrive at 2pm for sound check for a 7pm show. This kind of schedule definitely isn’t ideal, but we’d scheduled our day around it and it wasn’t a big deal. We arrived, set up our gear, and we started soundcheck. We have a good relationship with the front-of-house engineer at this particular venue, and he’s always done his job well and gone out of his way to make sure everything’s working well for us. We checked every instrument, got monitor mixes fine-tuned, and we played through a tune. This was a super thorough sound check, and we were glad. Everything sounded and felt great, and we were pumped for the show that night.

Something seemed weird though... Where was the headlining band? Where was...