Steve Smith’s thesis, which he and I have discussed a lot, is that starting in the 1960s and ’70s, as rock and roll took over and studio technology improved, drummers no longer had to take responsibility for the sound of their instrument or how they played it.
For starters, the industry created double ply heads and larger drums that ate up all of the overtones. We were encouraged to remove our bottom tom heads and front bass drum head and heavily muffle everything to remove all tone.
With the advent of close miking, an engineer could really control everything. They could make you sound huge by dialing in reverb and echo after the fact. Now, drummers didn’t have to know how to tune or strike a drum properly anymore, because however you hit the drum, the engineer could “create” your sound after the fact.
And that is essentially the world we live in today.
Over those decades, the engineer has become more important than the drummer. Essentially, the message is “You just worry about playing the drums and we’ll get a good sound out of it.” And to a large degree the technology allowed them to do that.
While there is no lack of great drummers in the world today, as a species in some ways we have lost a primal connection to our instrument.
A big part of what I learned from Freddie Gruber, and what I teach my students today is reconnecting to what I call “the dark arts,” older (ancient, even?) methods of approaching drumming and the drum set where we are more deeply connected to our instrument.