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Mike Mangini: In Depth Rhythm Knowledge

(60% of published article)

If you were asked to imagine the fastest drummer in the world at work on the kit, the first image that might come to mind is one of a whirlwind, with arms and feet flailing away and nothing visible but a blur. I have seen many of the worlds very fast players, and to some degree this can be true, so I confess that when I was asked to interview Mike Mangini, current holder of the only official title of ‘World’s Fastest Drummer’, my initial mental picture was something along the lines of the aforementioned whirlwind. As I researched a little in preparation, I got to hear some of Mike’s playing with the band ‘Extreme’, and also with Steve Vai’s band, and, more importantly, I got my hands on his two volume ‘Rhythm Knowledge’ books. To say that they are a little different from most books I have seen and used is an understatement. For a start there is little notation, and little specific advice about which patterns to practise, which rudiments work best in what styles, or similar material.  What there is however is a detailed approach to how you learn, and how you should practise to get maximum results. Both books are detailed, but the detail is in explanations of how your brain works, how best to understand your physiology, your psychology and even your emotional states, all with a view to better preparing you to develop your skills as drummers and musicians. Whilst a lot of the ideas in ‘Rhythm Knowledge’ are not new (focusing, visualisation, counting, working to schedules), what is original is the methodology Mike uses to establish a mental framework within which drummers, or any musician for that matter,  can systematically approach the mental frontiers of co-ordination. Involving the mind in as many aspects of your practise as you can, will produce better results, and Mike goes to great lengths to explain different aspects of how your mind and body work best together. A lot of the ideas involve organising your practise into set routines, with specific tempos, numbers of repetitions, and a counting system. Some of it is about visualising shapes, and seeing rhythms and patterns in terms of shapes. Some of it is about sheer endurance, and grinding out hours of concentrated practise. All of it is challenging!

Mike and I finally met at a clinic held at Federation Square in Melbourne last November, one which also included memorable performances from Darryn Farrugia and Pete Drummond. Mike demonstrated the technique that had him win the coveted title of ‘Fastest Drummer in the World’ for the past two years! (you need to play three rolls – all single strokes, but once with sticks using matched grip, once with traditional grip, once with just the hands. Each repeat is for one minute, and the idea is to get as many hits on an electronic pad as you can. The competition is held annually in Los Angeles) If you are still picturing a whirlwind, forget it; Mike played on the rim of his small tom, and the sticks moved barely three or four centimetres up and down. Clean, precise and fast. So we got past the speed thing pretty quickly, and moved to Mike demonstrating his ideas on the kit, both improvised and with musical backing.

Mike has a set up he describes as symmetrical, and his kit is designed to have a left and a right side, with each side having its counterpart on the other side. It looks very symmetrical, especially from the driver’s seat; hi-hats right and left, ride cymbals right and left, toms descending from the middle to the left then the right, crash cymbals left and right, and china type cymbals left and right. Mike has a reputation as a hard working drummer, one who has put in countless hours of practise, and the results are very visibly evident in his playing! Given the symmetrical set-up, Mike is able to switch from a left hand lead to a right hand lead and still access essentially the same sounds. For example,  he may be playing open handed on the left hi-hat in the intro to a piece, then immediately and seamlessly switch to open handed on the right side for the verse, with a slightly different hi-hat sound (He might also be controlling the right hand hi-hats with his left foot, and vice versa!). Watching him play was entrancing simply because of the ease with which he made any and every movement around the kit. Keep in mind that Mike plays some pretty complex music at times – he mentioned playing unison melodic runs of nineteen notes with Steve Vai – and you get the sense of the depth of his ideas. Great groove, obvious speed and fantastic dynamic control, strong melodic and rhythmic ideas; the movements even had a sense of logic to them, organised and co-ordinated in a way that made perfect sense. Interviewed in Modern Drummer, the author, M. Haid described Mike and his system thus:“To come up with an innovative new learning method is highly commendable. To develop a unique drum setup is admirable. But to have the ability to immediately create ambidextrous drum parts in any time signature and be able to poly-rhythmically subdivide those time signatures is just not fair – it’s scary.”

And just to prove the he is anything but a one-dimensional drummer, Mike spent his college years studying physics and philosophy, using his computer skills whilst working as a programmer on the patriot missile development team!

         Mike’s presentation at the workshop was very articulate, full of humour and interesting anecdotes, as well as a lot of fantastic playing. We met briefly before Mike’s performance, and I was able to get some inside information from one of the most original players I have seen.

PM: Can you give us a brief precis of your early history on drumset?

MM:  “I don’t know if it was before I could walk, but I was told, and I have seen family pictures, that show that I was banging on pots to music. Apparently whenever I heard music from a very early age I would sit up and listen, and then go looking for some pots to play with, using pencils or something for sticks. When I was about three and a half I got this paper skinned toy kit, and then shortly after, my uncle bought me a ‘proper kit’, albeit a child’s scaled down one. So by my fourth birthday I was already able to sit down and play to records. When I was five, having had a year on my drumset, my family took me to a big Italian family wedding, with about two hundred guests. I was made to play in front of this audience, much against my will at the time I might add – I was in tears for days over it, very apprehensive indeed!

I kept practising to records, slowing the turntable down to half speed when needed, and I kept that up til I was ten, when I started formal lessons, which lasted for eight years. It was percussion playing that I studied too, lots of mallet work on keyboards and timpani as well as drumset work. Like a lot of young drummers, I hated the mallet work at first, but I stuck with it for a while. My teacher kept telling me that I wouldn’t regret it later on, which was of course correct. In fact the most amount of money I have earned on one project was for song writing, which I couldn’t have done without those tuned skills and the knowledge of melody and harmony that I got from that study. You don’t make as much money from playing as you do for writing songs or music, so the smart move is to get a keyboard or something and learn to write good music! When I was 23 I joined the most popular Boston band at the time, and that was when I started to switch my kit around to left handed, or part left handed. This was in 1987. It wasn’t until I joined ‘Extreme’ in 1994 that I did the full symmetrical thing with my kit.”

PM:  Can you tell me a little about how you developed the ‘Rhythm Knowledge’ system?

MM: “The concept that the books cover is about the mechanical part of the human body, including the brain; I used to be uncomfortable with answers I would get from various people as to what to practise to develop my playing  - do this paradiddle combination, or try this Latin ostinato. What was missing for me, was how to think about what I was playing, what to focus my mind on when I was practicing. You know the sort of things that are often missing from instruction manuals, how should I practise this, for how long, at what tempo, what dynamic. That was the part I couldn’t get a handle on. Then I started talking to various biomechanics, and studying the actual mechanics of muscle memory and all that. I read a lot of layman’s books on the subject and found a lot of answers there. So the Rhythm Knowledge system is based on the mechanics of the body and it’s also based on the mechanics of rhythm, which is essentially mathematical. It’s those two things put together. Really it’s not a totally new concept, more that it is just an organized approach to these two aspects. I broke it all down into two-minute exercises, utilizing various coordination permutations – pairs of limbs for example. It’s not based on a musical format, it has more to do with exercising various muscles, and combinations of muscles, in order to let the brain accommodate itself to the ‘how’ of doing things on the kit. The material consists essentially of a series of clockwise and counterclockwise motions, coordinating various limbs and combinations of limbs. For example, you might want to play something that goes from your hands then to your feet, and you might want to use this to play something specific in musical terms – a particular lick for example. If your brain doesn’t know how to assemble the instructions to tell your hands, then your feet what to do, you will probably struggle to execute what it is you are thinking. By practicing various exercises that teach your brain how to combine your limbs in a bio-mechanical sense, you are training it to be more capable of executing the ideas you might have, to get it all into your muscle memory.

Another aspect of the system that I developed is the method of counting. I used to work, like we all do, on combinations of even and odd note groups; 2 ,4 , 8, 16, then 3, 6, 9, 12, then 5, 7, 11. By the time I got to 11, there were just so many combinations that the whole approach was becoming tedious, and I wasn’t enjoying it at all! I felt like joining the ranks of ‘those who don’t practise’! I would rather have had my eyes pulled out with ice-cream scoopers than look at this stuff. Anyway, I started to address why this was all so intimidating for me, so needlessly complex. The first thing I discovered was that all the odd numbers have the same basic mechanical feel to them where you switch from right hand to left hand –  RlrlrLrlrl for example. All uneven groups have this same feel. In my case I was able to relate all of this essentially mathematical material to the computer programming training that I had done, working with computer languages. Binary code as you know is simply a system of combining two switches, a zero or off switch and a one or on switch. Odd numbers then become like binary numbers, and they have a pattern to them that you can learn and that the body can assimilate, if you approach it with the mechanics of the body in mind. They feel like an on beat going to an off beat. You can apply a logic to it all that is realistic, based on what the body can do, not on what you simply dream of it doing. It involves counting too, out loud, using what I call the not–quite-double counting system. For example, again using a five. I count these not as 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, but as 1 an 2 an 3, 1 an 2 an 3. Halving the count, and leaving out an ‘an’ allowed me to flow more, to express the feel of the rhythm without choking on numbers. Remember the eleven I mentioned? 1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9,10,11 is cumbersome, and in my case unworkable. I gagged trying to get that out. But 1 an 2 an 3 an 4 an 5 an 6 gets me there, double time! I did some serious teaching for a while in Boston, and tried this out with a bunch of students and it worked wonders for them too, which is where I really started to think I was on to something.  ‘Rhythm Knowledge’ exists as a confirmation of the things that helped me, based on a lot of personal research, and a lot of work. I want it to provide an avenue of hope for all musicians, hope that, with a better understanding of how their brain and body interact, together with a little discipline and application, they can put their minds to learning any skill they choose to. When I was learning for example, I wanted my legs to go fast, and suffered through all the frustration of not succeeding.  Noone showed me how to make it happen, so I lived with the lack of success for a few years, til I finally found out that my speed was limited by the way my leg was moving – turned out my knees were lifting too high. The point being that it was only when I really thought about it, and investigated the biomechanics of my movements that I got somewhere.”

PM: Your first book is about getting your thinking right, learning to concentrate on what you are practising and why, together with some information on how the mind and the body works. There are no specific exercises for drumset playing, only information on how to better understand and prepare for improving your mental approach to the tasks at hand, whatever the instrument you play.

MM: ... there is so much stuff that you might have naturally, and so much stuff that you can and need to learn. Hopefully, ‘Rhythm Knowledge’ can help with that learning process.

PM: It still comes down to work though doesn’t it? The acquisition of skills is a function of the work you do, and your system is aimed at improving and shortening the time taken to achieve a positive result, through being mentally organised and disciplined. Is that a fair summary of how you see it?

MM: “Yes. That’s what the second book is all about. As immense as it is as far as its possibilities, it’s simple as far as it’s a systematic approach, one where you have to develop from the inside out, from the mind to the body, and if you do, it will save you time. That is the shortcut. You have to develop your internal clock first to understand time, and you have to be able to train your muscles to smoothly execute things. This is best done through counting, whether you use the number system I have shown or any verbal rendition you like. It’s the simplicity of this process, one that involves both the mind and the body that gives the best results. The same with the co-ordination exercises, where you systematically develop co-ordination through all 12 limb pairs; once more, it’s simple and effective, but almost infinitely expandable, giving you a method, a process for building skills in this area. You can then take, for example, some combinations using prime numbers such as 5, 7, 11, 13…up to say 19, which is where I go in the book, and master these using the twelve pairs exercise. By the time you add a few specific sticking patterns to the list, you have a body of work that you can systematically work on. When you then hear something that you might want to play, you have so many more choices as to how to play it, not just the one.”

PM:  What is the rationale behind your symmetrical set up?

MM: “It has to do with the shapes that I see. The design of the kit has a  certain geometry to it, with triangular shapes, circles, squares whatever built in. I mean here that I see these shapes on my kit in terms of the motions that I can utilise. It helps me come up with new patterns all the time, and it helps me play a cohesive solo where I don’t mix too many sounds and ostinatos that can clutter up the music. The shapes that I ‘see’ and ‘hear’ on my kit keep me playing more musically.”

PM: I understand what you mean here; the ‘shape’ of your set up allows for a wider range of motions, which allows for a wider range of playing possibilities. I think of a small Rock kit, with only two or three toms, descending left to right, and I can see why the history of Rock drumming is littered with fills that have a descending pitch pattern to accommodate that basic simple set up.

MM: “Right. Change the shape and you change the music. In my case I am thinking with purpose; there is a reason for the shape of my set up, and it has to do with limitlessness, allowing me as many possibilities as I might need. I might need to hit a china or some kind of white noise sound, and my right hand is otherwise occupied and unavailable, so I have one on my left as well. I might need to play single note runs on the toms to follow the melodic line of a Steve Vai phrase. Steve plays these very fast, and if I am to play them too, then I need to do this effortlessly, and my set up is purposely put together to help me cover all these options. I can still play the traditional sorts of runs up and down the drums that I need too, but there are just so many more possibilities on my kit.”

PM:  Do you assign certain shapes to certain musical patterns, like circular shapes when playing triplets, and squarer shapes when playing even notes like eighth and sixteenth notes?

MM:  “Yes I do, and the reason is that it helps so much with the counting. Let me give an example. If I have to play a pattern of eleven notes say, and there are three pitches involved in this pattern, then I might think triangles to come up with ways of playing the pattern. This can get very complicated of course, with lots of possibilities, and thinking shapes is one way to help learn things and to catalogue them in my mind. If you are working in multi-layered polyrhythms, you have to be able to see and feel all of this on top of whatever base you are working with. Another name for base here is pulse of course. To do this successfully is not easy, but I find that the shapes I see and work with help me keep a strong mental picture in my mind.”

PM:  Practise is such a necessary part of learning and developing any skill, and entails hours of repetitive work. For the average student particularly, it can seem very daunting.

MM: So I start by looking at the potential first, start by seeing what’s possible and aiming for that, and then methodically working on achieving that potential. It brings purpose to the students work, and it’s great fun! One more thing I would say here too, the more things you can think about when you practise the better will be the result. What I mean here is this – let’s say you are practising many repeats of a paradiddle with your hands. In order to alleviate the sheer repetitiveness of this, give your feet something to do, like playing down beats, or different ostinatos, and give your mind something to do by counting it all. When you practise this way, time will fly.”

Many thanks to all at Pearl and Zildjian for organising Mike’s clinic tour and for helping with my interview.