Mike Mangini interview

Mike Mangini: Drumming, to me, is a way of taking sound waves and hacking up time. That’s it. That’s what you’re doing, is you’re pounding things. It’s percussion by definition. When I get into stuff too deeply, I lose the sense of the job that has to be done and the reality of it, ‘cause you can study the philosophy and the breakdown and the physics and get all deep, which is great and which we should do, but then I lose touch with, wait a minute, I’m behind a bunch of guys that got to look at their rear ends and play music and hit drums, and I have a job to do. I’m just trying to keep it simple. That’s what I do, and I change how I feel. Drums is not about any one thing. It’s not about the feel, man, and this and that. It can be, but my feelings change when I learn something new. My opinions change when I learn something. My actual feeling changes, so it’s not just about the feeling at that point. But when it comes to actually doing the job, after I’ve put the chops in, after I’ve put the knowledge in, then it’s about the feeling. Then it’s all about the feeling.

On the path to pro-drumming...

MM: I do it because there was a calling to it when I was a child, and when I say there was a calling to it, it means that my feelings and my thoughts were affected when my older brother and sister would play music. They always played music in the house. I would look at the albums and see the drum sets on some of them, and for me, I was able to connect to the music and perceive the music by seeing the shapes on the drum set. I just knew how to connect the shape and sound of what was being hit with what I was hearing. I have always known, since the age of about two that I can remember, that I gravitated towards the drums, that I would take tuna fish cans and different cans out of the lower cupboard in our kitchen and get pencils and set them up and play along to the albums that my brother would play or that my older sister would play.

But as a path, I’ve always played music, and I’ve always just been able to play the drums, but I didn’t perceive it at a very young age. I didn’t have the intellect or whatever you need to know to know, oh, that’s who I am and what I want and what – I could just do it, and I enjoyed it, and it was fun. But I really wanted to play hockey, and I would practice so much, shooting different weighted pucks, finally I asked for a goalie net for Christmas – not a drum thing – and I would put plywood up in front of it and aim to different parts. I would practice shooting different hockey projectiles for hours. My poor dad – I broke the siding on the house numerous times, missing the net and just drilling.

But at one point in a person’s growth stage, other kids start to grow really big, and if they’re going to be tall and big and strong, but I realized when I was a freshman, being asked to play on the varsity ice hockey team in a town that’s dead serious about sports around Boston – I mean, we bleed our sports teams. Don’t say anything about any of my sports teams, and I’m going to go at it with you. I’m going to drop the gloves and go. That’s what we do – that’s how I was brought up. But that’s what I wanted to be. And I remember seeing the guys on the varsity team, and I was behind the glass, about three feet tall, but I was always making the all-star team for people my age and practicing and loving it. But when I saw those guys, I thought to myself, if those three guys are just as crazy as me, practice as hard as me, and are literally 40% bigger than me, I lose. That’s all there was to it.

This is when I began to play the drums 8 or 10 hours a day, from 1:00 in the afternoon until 11:00 at night, five days a week, and I made sure I got all my homework done and that I was on the honor roll so that my parents would not get me off the drum set. I mean, I wanted to be able to play, and I wasn’t out setting fires and throwing rocks and doing whatever, getting in trouble, but I was focused on that one thing and not focused on just hanging with people and killing time. I made the decision to start practicing drums day and night when I realized that I might not be cut out to play ice hockey and make the NHL, so I’m hitting drums instead of people.

On the drum stool’s perspective...

MM: What you perceive from the drum stool as to the reality of what’s happening in that room is that you are trying to get the full picture, and there are a lot of components that make that whole environment what it is. There are ways that those components interact. There are ways that people react with each other. There are ways that the sound waves react. There’s stuff going on in every environment that you’re in. It’s not just about sitting on the drum stool and what’s happening in here; it’s how you operate what’s happening in here in conjunction with and relative and relating to what’s happening around you and how that whole thing’s perceived. If you want the whole picture, you have to have the whole picture. You can’t just have a part of it. Dealing with being on the drum stool, unable to perceive the way that you sound from 10 ft. away or on the other side of the glass, the only way to do it is to connect to that with technology – your microphones and mixer and headphones and cameras – it takes technology to get over that hurdle of having your perception be just one thing, just yours, as opposed to including that with what everyone else perceives. That’s what it takes to be successful with other people. You can’t be successful with other people really, if you just are in your own thing, doing your own way, and you don’t really see what they see or hear what they hear, and the worst thing is if you don’t even care. So it takes a lot of technology to help see that and perceive that.

On the worst thing...

MM: I think the worst thing that you can do as a musician is to fall for the lie of prejudice through ignorance and not acknowledge what it takes to play other styles or what work it takes just to begin to perceive music. Meaning, how can you say something is musical or not when you can’t process it first, when you don’t even know what it is? You don’t really have a right to judge it – if it’s musical or not. You can’t make music with it, ‘cause you don’t know what it is. This guy that plays brushes – brushes can be the most musical thing ever in a proper setting. Playing the bass drums and cymbals as loud as can humanly and as fast can be can be the most musical thing in the world in a proper setting.

There’s a prejudice towards let’s say a jazz musician. The worst thing a jazz musician can do is to say that “speed death metal has no feeling, no groove.” Well, that person has probably never stood in front of a PA system with somebody who worked their butt off to get their feet to move at 15 beats a second or something and those bass drums are flying through a PA system. Don’t tell me that that doesn’t have any feeling, because it practically makes me go to the bathroom – that’s how much feeling that has. And then when you see the big picture of all that there is to do, you have respect for other people, you have respect for the work that they’ve done. And you might not like the music, you might not spend time with the music, but at least you have a respect for it, and it changes you, it changes how you view your own music.

I would have students that wanted to work on their feet, and in order to do that, you have to practice all the time and put hours in and sweat and sacrifice and suffer. And inevitably, a handful of those students came to me saying that a jazz student took the time – they actually took time out of their life – to knock on their door, to open the door and to say to that kid, “Why are you doing that all day? It’s so unmusical, man.”

That’s what a musician shouldn’t do – put himself into that narrow-vision world where they ultimately get negative toward things that they don’t know. Whereas that jazz kid could have learned something from that student practicing the same thing twenty hours a week; he could have learned how to repeat and practice. So maybe when he goes to an audition and he’s having a bad day, he can call upon himself and at least be this good. You practice ‘till you’re that good but at least when it counts, you can be that good. So the metal guy can learn something from the jazz guy, and the jazz guy can learn something from the Latin guy, and the Latin guy can learn something from the steel drum player.

So the worst thing you can do is choose to be ignorant, because you don’t wanna look at what’s available and what’s out there. You don’t have to like it, you don’t have to practice it, you don’t have to eat it, sleep it and drink it, but it’s good to just know about it, so that you ultimately end up being at peace with who you are. You’re at peace with the path that you’ve chosen, and you let other people be at peace with the path that they’ve chosen, and you respect it.

It’s an important thing to say. I wish that I would have heard something like that. But the bottom line is that’s a prejudice thing, and I know that I wasn’t chosen as a teacher while I was at Berklee because other students told me, “Well, he thinks that you don’t groove, you don’t play this, you don’t have that.” And that person doesn’t even know me; they don’t know my history. They didn’t even look at my resume. They don’t know anything about me except what they think that someone else said. So there’s a prejudice there because they choose to be ignorant of the information by not taking the time to research and learn about it, so that’s the worst thing a person can do, never mind a musician.

On coordination...

MM: Let’s say there are 3 zillion, 500 gazillion things that could be played. This many of them cannot be played unless you have the means to do it. So for me, the reason why I practice those combinations is because I intuitively get that those things exist, and it upsets me that I can’t connect to them, that I can’t feel them. It’s like my feet – they just don’t do this thing, and I want them to do this thing because I like that joy of just reaching that thing that I know is possible, and I have to practice hard to do it. That’s the reason I do it, is so that I can express more ideas, and I also will have more facility to be able to audition for different kinds of work or get hired because I have the capability of expressing those ideas. If I don’t practice those things, I cannot express those things. It doesn’t make them good or bad; it just makes them exist or not exist in me, and I would like them to exist because my mind sees all things that anybody could do involving limbs, dynamics, style, pulses, subdivisions of a pulse, phrasing, and I just see it all, and I want as much of it as I can get. It brings to me joy.

I’m at peace when I know I can play at a certain level or do a certain thing because then I can improvise within the boundaries of those things. In other words, I can go for stuff, not worrying that I’m like, “Oh no, that’s a mistake I got to live with forever.” If I had a choice, I would rather make less than more of them, but at times, going for something that you don’t necessarily know you have together is where some beauty is sometimes, and it’s worth it, so you make some mistakes. So? You went for this thing, and who knows, somehow the energy of it worked, and that’s what was good about it. But I practice these multiple things in order to train the human attribute of coordination. I want to wire myself as much as I can within reason, ‘cause I don’t want to spend all my time doing that.

On perceiving polyrhythms...

MM: The way that I perceive multiple patterns happening at the same time, or one pattern happening at one time, I see it through the language of the universe, which is binary: on or off. Something is or something isn’t. It’s as simple as it gets, so I break everything down into either odd or even, and I have learned that the feeling of all odd groupings is similar and that the feeling of all even groupings is similar. So what happens is that I eventually feel one of two feelings. So something is on a main pulse or it is in between, and if it’s in between, does it shift? Does the in between now become the down? And I just keep it as simple as that, and that’s how I perceive it. That way, there’s nothing that’s too complicated to go outside of that boundary. Anything that can be played will fit within those two boundaries – it’s one or the other, even if it’s not played evenly. They still all boil down to where is the beat: is it on or is it in between? And if it is in between, does the in between ever become then the on? That’s it, and I will count and perceive the down every possible way. I will practice perceiving the in-betweens as downs and the downs as downs, too. I just try both sides.

On learning as a teacher...

MM: What I’ve learned through teaching is to actually learn how to answer a question and to learn how to answer a question that’s asked of me as far as a drummer. Like, a drummer asks me a question: I want to be able to do this, show me that, or how do I do that? As a teacher, I learned that I could not answer certain questions unless I knew certain things about how a human person works. In other words, you can’t just show somebody something because they might not have the processor to perceive or the information put in there to actually perceive what they need to take from it to then go home and use that to become better.

So as a teacher, I learned, wait a minute, this person needs to actually know what I’m feeling in this muscle group. Because if I’m asked, “Oh, I would like my hands to move like yours” – well, then the way I answer that question evolved as I taught for more years because I couldn’t just show somebody something, not realizing that I have developed my thumb muscles to the point that they’re strong and can hold the stick, so I don’t even realize my strength there, that I’m actually putting more pressure on the stick than I think I am. So if I’m not a good teacher, I might say, “Oh, just hold the stick like this, make sure it’s loose”, and blah blah blah blah, but the reality is that it’s really not that loose. The reality is that there’s a lot of strength here actually holding that stick in place, and to be a better teacher, I need to say, “All right, this is what I think you should feel, this is what I think you should see, and then based on what you hear, you can then change what you feel by manipulating the stick in a certain way.” So as a teacher, that’s taught me how to analyze things, and it’s taught me how to answer questions better for people in terms of what they’re supposed to be thinking, when they’re supposed to think it, and what they are actually supposed to feel so that they have an opportunity to see what I see, to feel what I feel, and to experience what I experience. Then they can do what they want with it, ‘cause now they can do it.

But if I’m a teacher that just says, “Do what you want, man, do what you feel like”, OK, but a person might not achieve what they want, then I’m not doing my job. If I just show somebody something, they might not know that they should have been asking me what I feel in these muscles – they might not know that. So as a teacher, early on, I didn’t know to tell people, “Oh, by the way, you gotta use these muscles to do that”, or if I get asked a question about my hand technique, and let’s say online there’s slow-motion footage of me and my hands, and most comments are like, “Oh, he’s playing with fingers; he says he doesn’t use fingers, but he is, he’s a liar, or he’s a this or that”, or it’s so funny to me because you have to learn how to understand things and understand what people say, and I’m sitting here saying I never use my fingers to propel the stick; it comes from the bigger muscle groups, and my fingers control the stick. Do I use them to strike a drum? Now, of course I do now and then, but I don’t use them to play my fastest speeds – that comes from the bigger muscle groups, and the fingers are just a mechanism so I don’t drop the drumstick. And although it looks like I am using them, I am using them to hold on to the stick, but I am not using them to move the stick. Yes, my fingers are moving, but it is a derivative motion – it’s a derivative from flexing my lat muscles, my tricep, and the bigger muscle groups. Then my fingers react to that, and then they move. But as a teacher, I’ve learned that I can’t just sit there and say I don’t use my fingers – I can’t say that, ‘cause it’s not true. I have to say my fingers are used in this way, for this reason, in this context, and you learn to explain yourself that way the more that you teach. It’s like, wait a minute, I can’t just say that – I have to explain the whole thing.

On the latest lesson learned...

MM: The latest thing that I’ve been learning is to get feet to play single strokes at a certain speed and a certain velocity. Once the speed increases, the velocity goes down. Now, I cannot play the way that George Kollias moves his feet with this motion and that speed that accurately, that well – I cannot do that. But you go on YouTube, find a video of myself in 1994 – my feet were moving at 230 and 240 beats a minute, single strokes, sometimes with Nuno of Extreme; I was able to do that back then. Today, I can’t do it. I didn’t practice for what must have been 12 or 13 years, so I lost all those chops, and I had to relearn all over again.

But the way I’m relearning is with velocity. I mean, I’m in a recording studio – I’ve turned the bass drum beater around to the felt side to get more of the wood in the drum shell to resonate, to get more of a “oomph” in the drum, and the faster I go, the less oomph I get. So this is an impossible situation there, to play at those speeds and get that sound without getting some electronic help, like the triggering. I’m learning more about that world of using technology to help get the sound and the velocity along with the speed, but my problem is that I have told my body to play, to use my feet a certain way, and I’ve not taught them to play with these motions, so I would like to be able to learn that at some point, but life keeps hitting – and I’m doing an interview, I’ve got to travel, I got to do a show, I have family responsibilities, there’s life happening, there’s stuff I gotta do, there’s income that needs to be made so I can survive, and spending my time doing that the way I want to cannot happen the way I would like it to, so I just chip away a little bit, a little bit here and there. But I realize that I can’t do the impossible – I can’t make something happen before it’s time. I can’t force my body to do what it wasn’t taught and told to do, even though I could do it pretty well 20 years ago – literally 20 years ago. But that was 20 years ago, and you don’t practice something for over a decade, you lose it, and now I’m a harder hitter, so I almost have to find a new way.