Reggae: listen first, play second

Most styles let you fake your way in from a diagram. Reggae does not. A drummer can play every note in the right place and still have people in the room look at them sideways, because the notes were never the point.

Brian played his way toward it the long way round.

Brian says: "I moved on from basic rock and roll to progressive rock, like Rush ... and then from there into heavy metal ... and then from there into jazz fusion and reggae."

And when he is asked what it takes to play it correctly, he does not answer with a pattern.

Brian says: "To play reggae correctly, you almost need to live the lifestyle for a minute at least. Really dig into the culture and listen."

Brian says: "Most importantly, just listen to a bunch of the music."

That is the whole method, and it is genuinely unusual advice from a working drummer. Everything below is how to take it seriously.

Why listening is the practice, not the warm-up

In most music you learn, the drums are the floor: they mark the beat and everyone stands on them. In reggae the drums are one voice inside a conversation with the bass, and a lot of the time the interesting thing is what nobody plays. Space is an instrument. The bass carries weight that a rock drummer expects to be carrying themselves.

You cannot get that from notation. You get it the way you got your first language, by hearing enough of it that wrong sounds wrong before you can explain why. That is what "listen to a bunch of the music" means in practice: not background music, but hours of paying attention.

Where to start listening

Consider this the site's suggestion rather than Brian's list. Anywhere in the foundations works, and going deep on a few records beats skimming a hundred.

• Bob Marley and the Wailers. Carlton Barrett's drumming behind those songs is where most drummers begin, and there is a lifetime in it.
• Toots and the Maytals. Older, rawer, closer to the soul and ska roots the music grew out of.
• Burning Spear. Slower, heavier, more hypnotic. Good for hearing what space does.
• Dub. The same songs stripped and rebuilt in the mix. Dub teaches you what each part was doing, because you hear each part alone.

A useful exercise while you listen: pick one element and follow it for a whole song. The hi-hat only. Then the bass drum only. Then the bass guitar, and where it sits against the kick.

What to listen for in the first ten hours

Where the weight lands. In a lot of the music you already know, the emphasis falls in a predictable place. In reggae it very often does not, and the whole feel comes from that displacement. Do not read about it. Find it by ear.

The space between. Notice how much is not played, and how the groove gets stronger rather than weaker for it.

The kick and the bass together. They are locked in a way that is closer to two hands on one instrument than two players. Follow one and you are hearing the other.

Feel. The most important and the least describable. Two drummers can play identical notes and only one of them sounds like reggae. That difference is where the culture lives, and it is why Brian talks about the lifestyle and not the sheet music.

Why metal and rock drummers struggle with it

Loud styles reward force, density and drive - all the habits that make reggae sound wrong. The correction is uncomfortable: play less, play softer, let the bass be the loud thing, and resist the urge to fill the gaps. Drummers who arrive from a heavy background usually need somebody sitting beside them saying "less" for an hour before it clicks.

Then learn the patterns from a person

Reggae is not one groove; it is a family of them, and Brian teaches it as a small set of core beats rather than a single pattern.

Brian says: "From there, I probably teach them reggae, which is basically three different beats that make up most reggae music."

Which beats those are, and how he teaches them, is what an hour with him is for. Come with the listening already done and that hour goes a great deal further.

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Want to play it rather than read about it? Brian teaches in Austin, outdoors, and reggae is one of the styles he came up through: book a first lesson.