Small Pond, Bad Fish

I love the drums. I spend what free time I have immersed in music, playing the drums, and often shopping for drum equipment. I have been bitten by the gear bug, and I just can't seem to stop buying more and more stuff. I already own two drumsets. I have more cymbals than I have stands. I am running out of room to store them all.

Not only is drumming an important part of my life, so is drum education. Being a teacher, I feel that I should have as many drum-related educational resources at my disposal. This includes books, videos, and relevant websites.

Chris McCaig runs a teaching studio in Australia. In addition to his busy teaching schedule, he maintains his own drum education website. There are scores of drum transcriptions available on this site -- one site of a select few that offer transcriptions of popular recordings. This is an excellent resource for any student of the drums.

While discussing great drum-related sites, I must also include DrumBum. In addition to t-shirts and other drum-related paraphernalia, DrumBum offers the internet's largest drum lesson database. There are lessons on nearly every drum-related subject imaginable, ranging in difficulty from the very simple to the very challenging.

Though DrumBum is an excellent resource, like much of the internet, it suffers from lack of maintenance. The biggest critique I have for DrumBum, is that their database only provides links to third-parties; they do not maintain the quality of submissions. Herein lies the problem. There are several broken links. Many lessons have gone off-line. The quality control factor is absent, so we do not always know if the person submitting the lesson is a Ph.D., or some novice trying to pass for a teacher. Basically, what you search for on DrumBum may or may not meet your expectations.

Even though there is much work needed in order to make DrumBum an indispensable resource for all drummers, it is still worthy of mention. I have managed to find some excellent material within the database, but I had to dig pretty deep. I also appreciate files available for viewing in Adobe Acrobat format, though only a select few sites offer this privilege.

I severely doubt that DrumBum would have the resources to pay a qualified person a salary to re-build and maintain the database to achieve a higher standard in the material they host on the site. My guess is what little revenue DrumBum generates is from the sale of merchandise. It's too bad that there is little money in the dot-com economic sector anymore. People are afraid to invest in fledging dot-com companies anymore, and those that still exist are barely scraping by, unless you are one of the top one-percent (probably the top one-hundredth of a percent, be a little more realistic).

I admire those people who have had an original idea, and managed to successfully market it on the web. Sometimes, global marketing is the way to make your money. Sometimes, the competition is too fierce, and you are better off going after the small market. There are a lot of people out there who prefer to be the big fish in the small pond, rather than being an average fish in the ocean. This not only goes for entrepreneurs; it goes for athletes, musicians, and journalists, just to name a few.

Having spent my life living in cities with populations under 100 000, I sure know what it is like to witness the behaviors of big fish in small ponds. Most of these people are perceived to be "the best" at their craft at the local level, but refuse to go anywhere else at a crack at becoming very successful. In other words, they are quite happy making a modest living in the small center, because if they actually did move to the large market, they would be eaten alive. These people, whom I will not mention names (not like it would really matter anyway), are so incredibly self-absorbed and egocentric that they don't realize just how average they really are at their crafts. I often wish these people would get a humbling experience, and then the can realize that what they need most of all, is an attitude adjustment.

Being a musician in a small center is very difficult. It is not unlike the cliques in high school. Either you are "in" or you're "out" -- and it doesn't matter if you are "in" or "out", because they are all going to stab you in the back the moment you are out of earshot. How fickle. I have to put up with this crap all the time.