King Crimson - Lament

Listening back, I think I was a slow-comer to the art of dynamics. My loud tended to be too loud and my quiet too quiet, at both the micro-level of the accented / unaccented notes within a single phrase, or the macro level of the whole drumkit through a whole song. I was either whispering or shouting. When shouting, playing with me was, in Fripp’s analogy, ‘’a bit like playing with a flying brick wall; you either go with it or duck’’. It took me a while to move smoothly up and down within a comfortable dynamic range, somewhere between moderately loud (‘mezzo-forte’ to classicists) and moderately quiet (‘mezzo-piano’ to the same people). Plenty of poor guys have to shout on their instrument for their entire professional lives.