“There’s been times when I was fired from gigs because, lets say I had the ability to get my foot in the door, but wasn’t living up to the expectations that people had. In that process I’d go through a lot of reassessment and then address my weak points and make them strong points. That’s a situation that happens to a lot of musicians.
Psychologically you can’t let that get you down. You have to use those situations as learning opportunities, not to develop attitudes about people, but to develop a perspective of your strengths and weaknesses. At those times I did a lot of deep analysis of my playing and tried to be as objective as possible. I’ve tried to address my weaknesses and really work hard to develop them into strengths.
Over the years I’ve been let go for not having good time, not being able to play with a click track, not being a real asset as a guy on the road that has a good attitude, you know any number of things which I’ve learned from and developed my playing and developed my personality to be easy to work with and professional as a musician on tour and in the studio.”
– Steve Smith in The Psychology of Drumming by Chris Peacock
You can download a pdf of the book on Scribd— though I don’t know if it was posted with the consent of the author. I believe Peacock is the author of the Drum Ninja site, so maybe you can get it through him, or at least make a donation for pirating his book.
Can you recommend this book?
The title sounds appealing.
Who else is in it?
Maybe we should make a list of recommended books about drumming that are not directly related to drumming itself.
There's some interesting stuff out there, but it took me years to find it.
And I'm still looking.
Hey Michael!
I was looking around for an official link to it, and couldn't find one. I probably got it off of Scribd. It's listed on Amazon, but out of stock. Seems to be connected with the Drum Ninja site, I couldn't find a link on there.
The book is OK. The interviews are really a questionnaire– questions are the same for all interviewees, no follow up. Interviewees include Mike Clark, Jimmy Cobb, Peter Erskine, Airto, Lenny White, Ed Thigpen, and a number of trendy individuals.
There are some "exercises" that aren't really exercises; they've summarized some conclusions based on the questionnaire answers, filtered through a goal-oriented self-betterment / self-help mindset. It's all mundane stuff, be confident, advance your career, be focused, take action! type of thing.
I'll put the Scribd link in the post– unless somebody can find an official way to buy it, or download it.