Your first gig is coming up, and you’ve probably noticed that you don’t feel prepared and you just know you’re going to you’re gonna make a ton of mistakes and otherwise embarrass yourself.
Good! This is exactly how you’re supposed to feel!
Now, how to best prepare for making a fool of yourself? I think I can help you, because I have some experience with that. So I’m gonna tell you about my first gig, which happened to me last weekend.
I say ‘happened to me’, because it came out of the blue: on Wednesday, a friend left a voice message saying that in 3 days, a friend of his would need a drummer/percussionist for a low-pressure gig at a local dive bar.
I ignored my internal monologue, which screamed “THREE DAYS TO PREPARE!? But I’m not ready!!! Do these players even know I’m still just a beginner?” I said “yes”, instead, knowing it’d be good for me.
So I connected with his friend, who gave me a list of 45 songs (their complete set list) to learn in 3 days. The morning of the gig, they had whittled it down to about 25 songs (but of course, I didn’t know which 25 they were going to pick when they sent me the 45…)
You might think: “WAIT! WHAT!? 45 songs in 3 days? That’s impossible.” Yeah, I’m a beginner, I can’t learn 45 songs in 3 days! But here’s how I managed to flub my way through AND get invited back…HOPEFULLY you’ll have more time to prepare for your first gig.
Preparing for the gig
Make a Checklist
A checklist of items to bring is going to help you relax. You Once you have that, come up with a game-plan for how you’re going to transport everything. Here’s mine – I was really worried about forgetting my throne.
Notice as well that there’s ‘RUG’ on there. I completely lucked out and had a random memory of the one time I had been to the venue before…speaking to the drummer after the show, hadn’t I seen him rolling up a rug?
Yes, it turned out that the venue had no rug, and I’d need to bring my own to avoid my bass drum scooting around the stage!
Decide what to play for each song
Keep it SIMPLE. A good rule of thumb is that it takes 3 weeks to really learn a new groove. So if you have less than 3 weeks to prepare for the gig, pick only grooves you already know.
A drummer once told me “If you’re thinking, you’re stinking.” I say, if you’re having to think about the groove, it means you’re practicing. You shouldn’t be practicing on the gig.
So every groove you play at your gig is something that should take absolutely zero concentration. Your job as a beginner drummer is to provide a solid backbone for the other musicians to rest on.
So most of what I did for each song was to just figure out simple grooves that would be appropriate! If there were crucial breaks in the drums that would sound really bad for me to groove straight through, I tried to make a note of them and practice them ~10 times or so before moving on to the next song. I accepted the fact that I would probably still plow through them, anyway (again, 45 songs in 3 days…).
It turns out that for this (light-rock) gig, I only needed to know a handful of bass drum patterns.
This is fortunate, because those are the only grooves I’m really good at!
I do have one advantage over a more ‘beginner’ beginner, though. After a year of dedicated practice swinging and shuffling, I have that in my bag of tricks. This brings up the next issue, which is how to deal with grooves that you just can’t play yet.
If you can’t actually play the groove, make it simpler
A lot of the songs had simple grooves, but not all of them. Obviously, I’m not going to be able to replicate the world-class drumming that helped make a lot of these songs famous, so here are my tips for making things simpler:
- If the groove has triplets on the high-hat at 110 bpm, maybe just play quarter notes with a slightly loose high-hat to fill in the space.
- If the groove has swung 16th notes and you don’t have a steady swing yet, play 8th notes. If you want, you can add a swung ‘ghost’ note on the ‘uh’ of 2 (think ‘2-ee-and-uh’, except you’re counting with a lilt). That’s the cheater’s way to give a song a swing feel when you can’t swing.
- If the groove is a shuffle and your shuffle is stiff and unreliable, play quarter notes! “1, 2, 3, 4”
- If the groove has 8th notes on the high-hat at 190 bpm and you’re not sure you’re capable (I wouldn’t even try), play quarter notes.
- If the groove has 16th notes in the bass line and you haven’t practiced 16th note bass drum grooves a METRIC TON yet, simplify it. There is NOTHING wrong with playing 1 and 3 on the bass drum. Or even 1, 2, 3, 4.
Quarter notes on the high-hat/ride are always your friend
i.e. tap out 1, 2, 3, 4. I’m not going to give specific dynamic advice other than this, which REALLY helped me out during the gig.
If you have time, practice every groove you’re gonna play using only quarter notes with your lead hand. That is, the hand that’s ticking on the high-hat or ride cymbal.
Why? You’re gonna be playing a long time. You should take every musically appropriate opportunity to play quarter notes to conserve your energy.
Quarter notes are also really nice because they give you dynamic “head room”. They’re very low energy, dynamically speaking, so they give you plenty of room to grow. Just make sure you know how to slip into 8th notes when the spirit moves you, and you’ve instantly doubled the energy. So practice switching back and forth between quarter notes and eighth notes.
Oh, by the way, playing quarter notes with your lead hand can actually be harder than 8th notes. So if you think you don’t need to practice this, you’re either wrong or you’re a much better drummer than I am.
Write out notes for each song
A real pro would “chart” each of the songs he or she didn’t have memorized. This means to basically make a map of the song form, along with important rhythms, breaks, etc.
No WAY I had time to do that, nor did I trust myself to have the presence of mind to simultaneously *read* a chart while paying close attention to everything happening around me.
So what I did was I just hand-wrote my notes in a binder in alphabetical order. You might have a more high-tech solution, but I’m still on dot-matrix paper from the 80’s.
Here are my “S” songs. Notice that I hardly wrote anything – I (correctly) assumed I would have just a few seconds to glance at my notes and try to summon up the feel of the song in my head. These notes may or may not be helpful to other players, but ‘swung fills, very lazy’ and ‘straight rock’ call to mind the feel of the song to ME, and that’s all I needed.
I actually wrote out the groove for Sunny afternoon, because I thought it was important enough to only play quarter notes. Its one I would know at a glance and had practiced plenty.
Notice the complete lack of fills, structure notes, etc. No time for that!
Beyond that, I knew I would have to rely on the other players to count me in and I would have to just trust my gut and LISTEN. The other players might end up playing a completely different version of the song, after all! Perhaps my notes would be complete inappropriate?
Write out the set list, in order
On the morning of the gig, I got a text message with a list of about 25 songs. After I got over the initial grumbling of wishing I had gotten the shorter list sooner, I wrote them down so that I’d be able to turn to the song in my notes as quickly as possible during the gig.
Tune your drums!
Make sure they sound as good as they should sound. If you can’t get them to sound right because, say, you’re a beginner and tuning is REALLY confusing, invite a friend to help.
I actually took my drums over to my teacher’s house the day before the gig, and he got my drums sounding a lot better than before, just by tuning them lower to make them more ‘boingy’, which I had never tried.
Day of the Gig
You’ve thought through what’s going to happen the day of, but you still don’t know exactly what to expect.
But you’re as prepared as you’re gonna be, and now it’s time to load up. You may have noticed at this point that you’re already fantasizing about having a smaller kit. This is completely normal and healthy feeling, and it will never go away.
Here are a few other eternals I noticed that might help you out.
Get there early
I was glad I was able to come early. It gave the band plenty of time to set up their equipment around the drums and enjoy a relaxed meal before we played.
Because I was meeting these musicians for the first time, it made me feel good to know that their first impression of me was going to be that I was professional and that I respected the work they all put into preparing for the gig by doing my part to make sure things went smoothly. As they say, “If you want respect, you’ve got to give respect.”
Prepare to tweak your drums’ tuning with background noise
Your drums may detune a bit during transport, so prepare to tweak the tuning while you’re setting up. This is doubly true if your heads aren’t properly ‘seated’ (say, if you’re like me and you’re afraid of damaging your heads).
If you’re playing at a bar or restaurant, there’s probably going to background music and a crowd while you tune. It would have been great if I had practiced tuning with background music, but I hadn’t. Fortunately, I only had to make minor adjustments!
Trust your gut, or regret it!
If your song notes turn out to be wildly inappropriate, ignore them and just do what needs to be done.
If they’re playing a different version of the song than you’re used to, or they give you directions you don’t expect, just roll with it. Keep time! Keep that backbeat strong!
If the singer says she’ll cue you in, keep in mind she might *forget* to cue you in. Come in when the music starts tugging on you.
The only time you shouldn’t trust your gut is when the singer makes a throat-slicing gesture at you. If she’s very good at it, like my gig’s singer was, she’ll convince you she wants you dead. But actually, that’s just her way of cueing a break. I think.
Follow the bass player, except when….
There’s going to be a lot going on while you’re playing, rhythmically speaking. Let that bass player be your guiding star, tempo-wise.
Usually, the bass player is going to think they’re following you, and you’re going to think you’re following the bass player. You guys are in synch when you both think the other is easy to follow.
What happened at my gig, though, was that my bass player sang a few songs. I noticed he became a bit hard to follow when he sang – since I was the beginner, I just assumed it was MY beat that was off.
But he told me after the fact that he needed me NOT to follow him during the songs he sang, because he had a tendency to drag when he sang. He said that we dragged on one song because I had followed his tempo.
Personally, I hadn’t even noticed we were dragging! I mean, whenever I play, I treat the bass player’s tempo like the word of god – THAT’S the tempo! I don’t even know what it feels like to guide a bass player’s tempo.
But it’s just something to be aware of. Even though these are all great, experienced musicians I got to play with, it doesn’t mean they’re perfect and don’t occasionally need a self-assured drummer to whack them back into place.
Have fun, but don’t blow out early
It’s really common for everyone in the band to start to get a bit fatigued (mentally, physically, whatever) somewhere in the middle of the second set. The players I was with actually took a short break in the middle of their second set!
Most of this exhaustion is not going to be physical, at least not for me – I just don’t play that crazy. It’s mental. It’s hard to CONCENTRATE that long.
To stave off exhaustion as long as possible:
- Eat beforehand, but don’t eat too much. You’re an adult by now and should know at this point what foods/quantities are going to make you sleepy and dull your concentration. At my gig, they gave me a free meal, but I knew that if I ate all my french fries, I’d pay for it by getting dopey and stupid. So I just ate a couple.
- Sweating costs your body energy. That’s energy that could go to your brain, so keep as cool as you can. Wear layers so you can peel them off as you need.
- Drink plenty of ice water whenever you can.
- Avoid drugs and alcohol – concentrating for 2-3 hours is hard enough SOBER!
- Don’t waste your physical energy playing harder than you need to – this will hurt your concentration on later songs, too!
- Most importantly, relax! Remember that you’re playing. As in, this is all just for fun! So smile and enjoy the music.
I hope this gave you some food for thought. You’re gonna do great!