Paul Marangoni wrote:This is why the drummers who are everywhere on YouTube and Facebook are usually mediocre at best.
I think this is true to a degree. But I've also seen some highly skilled youtube guys that do some great stuff, and have picked up things from them. I didn't find out about Steve Holmes or Louie Palmer by buying records and checking them out. I found them online, and they both post vids of their playing often (although Steve not as often as before but that's cool too). They both also play with what I would consider to be a fairly high degree of musicianship... not just skill.
I think it can also be a trap for a player to spend a lot of time trying to sort out topics like this in their heads. "Am I truly great or merely skilled?" Who cares? Get out there and practice and play music with people. If you find satisfaction with it, keep doing it as your life allows you to. If you love it enough, you'll find ways to make more time for it and chase excellence, however that might be. Don't worry about whether you're going to be great or not or whether you'll just be "skilled"... and for that matter, don't worry about whether or not anybody else is. If it makes you happy, if you get a certain sense of creative or artistic stimulation from it, chances are you'll keep working at it. If you're
overly (I said overly, so I'm not saying anybody here is an idiot, okay? This IS a good discussion topic!) worried about what separates great from skilled and things like that, you might be getting distracted.
Don't get me wrong, it's a good forum topic and generates some good discussion as to the difference between greatness and skill. It's good to be aware that there is a difference and there is always room to grow as a musician. I just think that we are all likely to define greatness differently at different points in our own musical development so we're dealing with a sliding scale at the outset of a conversation like this. I think we decide for ourselves what greatness means to us and find our own paths to pursue it.
So what separates the greatness and skill to me, at this point in my life; are commitment, desire, a healthy dose of creative curiosity, and enough humility to constantly grow. The word talent has a role in this too, but it depends on how you define it. In my mind, talent is a level of natural aptitude towards something. In varying degrees, it plays a role in how fast we're able to learn and assimilate knowledge or skills (inputs) and translate them creatively (outputs). Everybody has to put the time in. It's just that some guys can move faster through the development and engage more complex knowledge and skill faster. A person can have a ton of talent for something but no commitment or desire towards it, but a person can also have little talent but a ton of commitment and desire and reach a level where they can make meaningful music for many as well.
