An Introductory Blog
Alrighty. It's time to throw this out into cyberspace after I put my name on it.
I'm Spencer Ericksen, and I will be regularly blogging about music. I am trying not to discount any ideas that I'll have in the future, but my main interest for this platform is in the drumming aspect of music making. I want to talk about the production side of music, as well as share tunes that I enjoy. I will share bios and interviews, and hopefully find the means to get into that on my own as well. I will make playlists of my favorite songs, and put together some "how-to" videos about drumming.
I'm a student at Southern Utah University, which is located in Cedar City, Utah. I'm studying Communications, but I am also thinking a lot about music. I live in an apartment here in college town with my wife, Shelby. We met in a newspaper writing class at SNOW College a little over two years ago.
While serving a two year Mormon mission in Lima, Peru, I grew to admire people who I felt were super well rounded. I observed Latinos and fellow American missionaries alike who had a sense of balance in their lives. It seemed so elusive to me. I admired people who seemed to have a lot of skills. They were good public speakers, good scholars, talented athletes, had a sharp wit, and got along well with others. I wanted to be like that. But I felt that my one constant goal (preaching and baptizing people in Peru) hindered that aspect of self-development. So after I returned home in Utah, I started working on new things. I read more than I had before. I took up skateboarding. Occasionally I would shoot hoops in the chapel parking lot. I got to know people better, and became more extroverted. I threw myself into my studies, and started working out. I kept practicing soccer, even though I had no one to play with. I still admire the well-rounded people, but I see myself as one of them. The idea of constant self-development was something I had to shed in the months after my mission in order to preserve my sanity. I like other things, too, and try hard to not just be a music guy, but at my core I know that's my jam. I love drumming! I love singing too. I like hearing the nuances in live performances, and especially my music library at home.
As a percussionist (drummers just play drums but percussionists try to learn it all), you pick up a lot of influences over the years. You have heroes, and mentors. You make friends who play drums or other instruments. You take lessons. You learn to read complicated rhythms, and with time learn how to give your brain adequate time to process what's written on the paper. You tap on almost everything. You try to become a sort of "drummer-sponge" who can learn from anyone. You learn to spell the word "rhythm," and then you forget. You need your big boy pants on to do all that, but it's also very fun. Even so, it can look very overwhelming. You have to take it in manageable chunks. Sometimes it can help having a solid self-perception of your skills and what you enjoy most.
As a drummer, I've always found it confining to define my style. My musical taste varies, and I think that's a trait that many musicians share. One week I love love love jazz, and the next I'm all about rock and roll. Some days I focus on finding new music, while others I enjoy listening to the same groups that I've always liked. I like what I like, you know? The first drummer who I ever idolized was Chad Smith, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I would listen to their album "Stadium Arcadium," and try to break down what I was hearing in the rhythm section. I must have spent hours playing along. Playing along to music was always my favorite way to practice. This all happened when I was about fifteen as a high school student in Payson, UT, but my beginnings in music came from a simple task my mom assigned me all the way over in Germany.
At the age of thirteen, as the son of two band teachers, I was given a simple task: to choose an instrument that I would learn to play. I remember my mom telling me this one day in her band room at Ansbach Middle High School in Germany. It wasn't a question of it music was my thing, or whether I could choose between music and something else, it was which instrument. I didn't consider it for very long; the only real options that was thinking of were trumpet, or drums. Trumpet seemed tempting to me in a sort of abstract way, but there was something so raw and appealing about drums. There just seemed to be a huge cool-factor when it came to drums. You had cymbals, a bass drum, a snare, and those boom-of-doom-and-out-of-tune tom toms. It just had to be drums.
I remember the first song I ever tried to play along to. Back when the "That's What I Call Music" series was a thing in the early 2000's, I had decided to play along to the song "Clint Eastwood" by Gorillaz. I put the CD in. I turned the stereo up to eleven, and got ready to press play. The song opened with the sound of four crash cymbal hits, none of which I was not prepared for. I probably got in to about four bars of the song before I realized that I was in over my head. I hadn't learned the beats. I didn't know when the raps would turn over to the choruses.
None of this was particularly discouraging, but I realized from the beginning that something about drumming could be overwhelmingly tricky. Later I would learn from Kenny Aronoff that even the simplest beats can be deceiving. I still find that to be true at times while I practice.
As a listener, you just say "hey I could do that in my sleep. You just tap the beat out on the drums and it'll sound so great." But when you get down to the minutia of it all, there is a lot to consider. How do you hold your sticks? How do you hit the cymbals? Do the notes hit right onto the beat, or is there a slight lag each time you play? How hard do you hit, and what are you supposed to do with your feet?
It must be agonizing for non-drummers to listen to a kit player practice, because so much about improvement is mental juggling. Your left foot needs to line up with your other limbs, on every beat of a four-four bar. Ditto on the other three limbs- it all needs to line up in real, audible time, and with a good balance of tones. If your snare is too loud, then you are compromising the sounds of the bass drum and your cymbals. You wouldn't want it the other way either- no one wants to just hear the ride, or just hear the bass drum. So in that first year of practice, I struggled with the idea of a unified sound. My four limbs seemed to move with individual brains, instead of me feeling in charge of them.
Fast-forward years ahead to twenty-four year old Spencer, and there are a lot of drumming experiences that I have to ponder upon. Just last spring I was taking drum lessons from Gavin Ryan at Utah Valley University in Orem. Before that, I had four performances with the UVU orchestra, and a big one with their percussion ensemble. This was all after four semesters of regular performance in SNOW College. High school performances and gigs with my jazz trio preceded that.
As I look back on these experiences, I tend to gravitate towards the good times. I had great experiences like playing with my bros, nailing tricky parts after hours of practice, or performing in Costa Rica for people who never had the chance to hear a live concert band nail a march piece. Before these performances I had to practice a lot. As I practiced and practiced, alone and sometimes anxious, I often wondered what it all meant to me. Why did I do it? Would hours of practice help me in the future? Well, now I can easily see the correlation between preparation and performance. I could nail tricky parts because I knew them. I could calm my nerves because I was prepared. I could put ten minutes or so into percussion solos for musical jurors because the songs were all familiar to me. It all worked out. Even now, practicing much less than I used to, it all seems to come back after I have played for twenty minutes. That is because of those lonely hours at SNOW College when I often had to play the same four bars of a piece over and over again. I grew a lot as a person because of all that.
So this is why I feel like a music blog is my thing: I've actually done it. I've played with rock bands and jazz bands and orchestras. I've shared the stage with trumpets and baritones, and flutes, and tried to balance my sound within theirs as a percussionist. I've played cymbals in a Sousa march. I've played the timpani part in a dramatic and complicated Brahms piece. I've played percussion ensemble music with my bros. And, I've also spent hours listening to David Bowie.
I want to cultivate an interest in music, and encourage people to be an active listener. So much of American entertainment seems to be a fleeting experience. "Oh yeah, James Bond's car blew up and he saved England, it was great. Let's go get a burger." "I listened to this pop song five times and now I can't stand it." "I tried to read a book, but I couldn't make it past the first chapter." I am writing this with the hope that music can turn into a more lasting experience for people. I hope people will go hear music live, and be curious about how it's made. I hope people will learn more about drummers, and their role in the "big picture" of music as creative minded contributors to their bands. I want to share what excites me as a listener and participant in music.
My perspective on life will always be seen through the imaginary "Spencer lens," so I won't hide that as I write about music. I will write about what I think is awesome, creative, or innovative. I will share clips that I think are informative about what makes drumming cool. For now I will blog in a kind of rotary fashion: playlists, gnarly videos, drummer biographies, and the occasional interview or "how to" video.
Here we go.
It's a picture of me on a bicycle
I'm Spencer Ericksen, and I will be regularly blogging about music. I am trying not to discount any ideas that I'll have in the future, but my main interest for this platform is in the drumming aspect of music making. I want to talk about the production side of music, as well as share tunes that I enjoy. I will share bios and interviews, and hopefully find the means to get into that on my own as well. I will make playlists of my favorite songs, and put together some "how-to" videos about drumming.
I'm a student at Southern Utah University, which is located in Cedar City, Utah. I'm studying Communications, but I am also thinking a lot about music. I live in an apartment here in college town with my wife, Shelby. We met in a newspaper writing class at SNOW College a little over two years ago.
While serving a two year Mormon mission in Lima, Peru, I grew to admire people who I felt were super well rounded. I observed Latinos and fellow American missionaries alike who had a sense of balance in their lives. It seemed so elusive to me. I admired people who seemed to have a lot of skills. They were good public speakers, good scholars, talented athletes, had a sharp wit, and got along well with others. I wanted to be like that. But I felt that my one constant goal (preaching and baptizing people in Peru) hindered that aspect of self-development. So after I returned home in Utah, I started working on new things. I read more than I had before. I took up skateboarding. Occasionally I would shoot hoops in the chapel parking lot. I got to know people better, and became more extroverted. I threw myself into my studies, and started working out. I kept practicing soccer, even though I had no one to play with. I still admire the well-rounded people, but I see myself as one of them. The idea of constant self-development was something I had to shed in the months after my mission in order to preserve my sanity. I like other things, too, and try hard to not just be a music guy, but at my core I know that's my jam. I love drumming! I love singing too. I like hearing the nuances in live performances, and especially my music library at home.
As a percussionist (drummers just play drums but percussionists try to learn it all), you pick up a lot of influences over the years. You have heroes, and mentors. You make friends who play drums or other instruments. You take lessons. You learn to read complicated rhythms, and with time learn how to give your brain adequate time to process what's written on the paper. You tap on almost everything. You try to become a sort of "drummer-sponge" who can learn from anyone. You learn to spell the word "rhythm," and then you forget. You need your big boy pants on to do all that, but it's also very fun. Even so, it can look very overwhelming. You have to take it in manageable chunks. Sometimes it can help having a solid self-perception of your skills and what you enjoy most.
As a drummer, I've always found it confining to define my style. My musical taste varies, and I think that's a trait that many musicians share. One week I love love love jazz, and the next I'm all about rock and roll. Some days I focus on finding new music, while others I enjoy listening to the same groups that I've always liked. I like what I like, you know? The first drummer who I ever idolized was Chad Smith, from the Red Hot Chili Peppers. I would listen to their album "Stadium Arcadium," and try to break down what I was hearing in the rhythm section. I must have spent hours playing along. Playing along to music was always my favorite way to practice. This all happened when I was about fifteen as a high school student in Payson, UT, but my beginnings in music came from a simple task my mom assigned me all the way over in Germany.
At the age of thirteen, as the son of two band teachers, I was given a simple task: to choose an instrument that I would learn to play. I remember my mom telling me this one day in her band room at Ansbach Middle High School in Germany. It wasn't a question of it music was my thing, or whether I could choose between music and something else, it was which instrument. I didn't consider it for very long; the only real options that was thinking of were trumpet, or drums. Trumpet seemed tempting to me in a sort of abstract way, but there was something so raw and appealing about drums. There just seemed to be a huge cool-factor when it came to drums. You had cymbals, a bass drum, a snare, and those boom-of-doom-and-out-of-tune tom toms. It just had to be drums.
I remember the first song I ever tried to play along to. Back when the "That's What I Call Music" series was a thing in the early 2000's, I had decided to play along to the song "Clint Eastwood" by Gorillaz. I put the CD in. I turned the stereo up to eleven, and got ready to press play. The song opened with the sound of four crash cymbal hits, none of which I was not prepared for. I probably got in to about four bars of the song before I realized that I was in over my head. I hadn't learned the beats. I didn't know when the raps would turn over to the choruses.
None of this was particularly discouraging, but I realized from the beginning that something about drumming could be overwhelmingly tricky. Later I would learn from Kenny Aronoff that even the simplest beats can be deceiving. I still find that to be true at times while I practice.
As a listener, you just say "hey I could do that in my sleep. You just tap the beat out on the drums and it'll sound so great." But when you get down to the minutia of it all, there is a lot to consider. How do you hold your sticks? How do you hit the cymbals? Do the notes hit right onto the beat, or is there a slight lag each time you play? How hard do you hit, and what are you supposed to do with your feet?
It must be agonizing for non-drummers to listen to a kit player practice, because so much about improvement is mental juggling. Your left foot needs to line up with your other limbs, on every beat of a four-four bar. Ditto on the other three limbs- it all needs to line up in real, audible time, and with a good balance of tones. If your snare is too loud, then you are compromising the sounds of the bass drum and your cymbals. You wouldn't want it the other way either- no one wants to just hear the ride, or just hear the bass drum. So in that first year of practice, I struggled with the idea of a unified sound. My four limbs seemed to move with individual brains, instead of me feeling in charge of them.
Fast-forward years ahead to twenty-four year old Spencer, and there are a lot of drumming experiences that I have to ponder upon. Just last spring I was taking drum lessons from Gavin Ryan at Utah Valley University in Orem. Before that, I had four performances with the UVU orchestra, and a big one with their percussion ensemble. This was all after four semesters of regular performance in SNOW College. High school performances and gigs with my jazz trio preceded that.
As I look back on these experiences, I tend to gravitate towards the good times. I had great experiences like playing with my bros, nailing tricky parts after hours of practice, or performing in Costa Rica for people who never had the chance to hear a live concert band nail a march piece. Before these performances I had to practice a lot. As I practiced and practiced, alone and sometimes anxious, I often wondered what it all meant to me. Why did I do it? Would hours of practice help me in the future? Well, now I can easily see the correlation between preparation and performance. I could nail tricky parts because I knew them. I could calm my nerves because I was prepared. I could put ten minutes or so into percussion solos for musical jurors because the songs were all familiar to me. It all worked out. Even now, practicing much less than I used to, it all seems to come back after I have played for twenty minutes. That is because of those lonely hours at SNOW College when I often had to play the same four bars of a piece over and over again. I grew a lot as a person because of all that.
So this is why I feel like a music blog is my thing: I've actually done it. I've played with rock bands and jazz bands and orchestras. I've shared the stage with trumpets and baritones, and flutes, and tried to balance my sound within theirs as a percussionist. I've played cymbals in a Sousa march. I've played the timpani part in a dramatic and complicated Brahms piece. I've played percussion ensemble music with my bros. And, I've also spent hours listening to David Bowie.
I want to cultivate an interest in music, and encourage people to be an active listener. So much of American entertainment seems to be a fleeting experience. "Oh yeah, James Bond's car blew up and he saved England, it was great. Let's go get a burger." "I listened to this pop song five times and now I can't stand it." "I tried to read a book, but I couldn't make it past the first chapter." I am writing this with the hope that music can turn into a more lasting experience for people. I hope people will go hear music live, and be curious about how it's made. I hope people will learn more about drummers, and their role in the "big picture" of music as creative minded contributors to their bands. I want to share what excites me as a listener and participant in music.
My perspective on life will always be seen through the imaginary "Spencer lens," so I won't hide that as I write about music. I will write about what I think is awesome, creative, or innovative. I will share clips that I think are informative about what makes drumming cool. For now I will blog in a kind of rotary fashion: playlists, gnarly videos, drummer biographies, and the occasional interview or "how to" video.
Here we go.
It's a picture of me on a bicycle
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