In the summer of 1998 I attended a music academy in Los Angeles for a week. I had met some of the teachers at the Percussive Arts Society Festival in Iowa earlier that year and impressed them, so they offered me a free ride. I just had to pay to get there and for a place to stay. My uncle lived in Los Angeles, so I stayed with him for a couple days before the camp started, which was quite fun. I remember we went to the La Brea Tar Pits and also to the beach for some boogey boarding. He was also quite a good musician himself, and made a career out of sound editing for tv and movies.
The camp included singers, guitarists, bassists, and drummers. There were many more drummers than anything else, which meant that we had to wait our turn a lot. Some sessions were split up by instrument, but there was also some sessions where we were all together, and practiced learning songs. One day the song was Roxanne, by the Police. While people were waiting for their turn to practice on stage, many people were talking, noodling on their instruments quietly or just relaxing, but not really paying attention to what was going on on the stage. I decided to pay attention though. I watched one person after another make the same mistakes as the last person. It is frequently the job of the drummer to count off a song, so that everyone starts at the same time. Usually this is done by clicking your sticks and counting out loud. One drummer after another lazily said “uh, two, uh, two, three four”, clicking their sticks on beats two and four, and then the band started very weakly. The instructor immediately stopped the song and told the drummer that they needed to count off the song in a stronger fashion, clicking the sticks loudly on every beat and loudly and clearly counting off the song. I was probably drummer number 20 out of 25 to get my turn on the stage. Since I had been paying attention, I didn’t make the same mistake. I also didn’t make a lot of the other mistakes that other drummers had made. Roxanne is a fairly challenging song for drummers, so even though there were guitarists and bassists making mistakes too, the instructors really focused on the drummers for this song. I am pretty sure I also made some mistakes, but I did much better than most of the other drummers, not because I was a better drummer, but because I paid attention. There is a saying that one should learn from his mistakes. That’s true, but it is even better to learn from other people’s mistakes. If you do that, then you won’t have to put out the red light.