Dave Mattacks

Now based in Boston, where he moved in 2000, DM is still as focused and busy as ever touring, recording, teaching and producing. Recent and regular live work includes home town club gigs with his Boston rock band Super Genius, world concert tours backing Rosanne Cash and Mary Chapin Carpenter, and annual UK tours with Feast Of Fiddles, who bring together six of the country's finest fiddlers backed by a rock rhythm section.

"I think this FOF tour is the 15th year we've done," DM says. "The first one started off with just a couple of dates and it's just grown over the years. It's the only time the band get together and we've built up quite a following. It's really enjoyable and it's as much the people as the music. And with people like Hugh Crabtree, the melodeon player and singer, who organises the whole thing, and Peter Knight, Steeleye's fiddle player, it's very much a meeting of friends who enjoy playing music — a bit of a cliché, but it works."

"There were two circuits in England," DM explains. "They were ballroom circuits. There was the Top Rank circuit and there was the Mecca circuit, and each circuit had ballrooms in most major towns and cities. And I got approached by this bandleader who said, 'I've got a contract with Mecca and I'm putting a big band together. Would you be interested in playing? We have to play strict-tempo dance music for ballroom dancers during the middle of the week, and then we have to play pop music at the weekends.' I excitedly said yes and we got sent to Belfast. I was there for nine months and then word came in that we were getting moved. We got posted to Glasgow and I stayed there for three or four years, playing the Locarno Ballroom in Sauchiehall Street!"

DM affirms that it was the four or five years of constant playing with the Mecca big band that allowed him to slowly move to the next level in terms of both his awareness of what made for good live performance and also the key techniques he needed to apply to his drumming.

"At that stage, you start to become aware of your technique, sound and time," says DM, "but those things didn't really get to an acceptable level until quite a bit later for me. I think for most musicians in my peer group, no matter the instrument you play, the things that become important are the sound, your time and touch. In other words, the sound that you make becomes increasingly important to you, and it's closely followed by things like time-keeping and note selection. There's a lot of experienced players who have OK timing and maybe they've got OK technique, but their note selection is questionable."

DM's first years as a member of Fairport would provide him with just the kind of 'light bulb moment' he needed in his own personal musical development. "When I joined Fairport in '69, I understood the music — the songs, jigs and reels — in a literal way, but not from an aesthetic viewpoint," says DM. "I didn't really understand what was taking place. But around a year into my tenure, a light bulb went on and I really got what they were doing on a deeper level, beyond playing the notes. It had a quite profound effect on how I wanted to play, how I heard music, what I wanted to do, what my priorities were. It really changed me!

From that point onward, my actual technique on the instrument somewhat took second place to really trying to hear and play the song and play good time. I started to listen to and appreciate music; not so much for its cleverness and how many notes you could play or how many notes were in a piece, but what the piece said, how the piece spoke to me. You could say that had a considerable effect on how I heard music. It was a little like the difference between Oscar Peterson and Bill Evans — let's just say it opened up the Bill Evans side of my aesthetic appreciation of music. Before that point, I'd been very much technique-based: 'Gosh, listen to the fast beat, listen to the chops of that particular player.' Other analogies would be the difference between Maynard Ferguson and Miles Davis, between Vaughan Williams and Wagner. I just headed, arguably, full force in the other direction, whereas before it was, 'Listen to how many notes this guy can play!'"

"The piano came first," DM explains. "And again, it's a bit of a cliché, but I think I've always tried to approach the drums in a musical way. I mean trying to play musically, understanding chord changes and chord sequences, hearing a piece of music from start to finish and not as a collection of drum beats.

Then we get to the mechanics of the kit; the nerdy appreciation for the nuts and bolts of the instrument. "I just took a big interest in the drums themselves and that particularly came about through Johnnie Richardson, a wonderful drummer who was my boss at Drum City. I was extremely green and he helped me to understand the basics of how drum shells and hardware works, about ergonomics, setting up and playing. I had a natural curiosity about the instrument itself and it just went from there. Since then, I've always tried experimenting with different heads on different drums and this, that and the other. It's rooted in trying to make a good sound, trying to get the sound out of the instrument, what to look for in a cymbal, all that stuff. I could probably bore your readers shitless because I could go on for days just about cymbals!"

"Amongst my gear, I have a set that I use for going out and doing club gigs back in Boston. Then there's a set that's more suitable for larger concert work and also a set that's more suitable for studio work," says DM. "They're tuned differently, but, let's put it this way, if somebody swapped kits on me as a cruel joke, it wouldn't take me long to get any of them where they needed to be. So tuning's one thing and then cymbal selection is another, and that depends on the size of the venue you're playing and the musical situation you're in.

The kit I use for the Feast Of Fiddles tour lives here in England and my good friend Hugh Crabtree looks after it for me — it's an 11-piece line-up, which is pretty noisy. I'm always looking for a drum tuning and a cymbal selection that's going to be appropriate for the music and the size of band I'm playing with. When I guested at the Fairport 40th Anniversary Festival [Cropredy] last year, I used that kit and it worked well in that environment, which was on a big stage playing to 25,000 people. You wouldn't put that kit in a tiny club with a singer-songwriter with an upright acoustic bass. If I did, then hopefully I would have sufficient musicality to make it work. But basically, it's a pretty large-sounding drum kit, so if you were in said tiny club in a musically quiet situation, you'd have to pull everything back."

Sometimes, however, DM doesn't have the luxury of selecting every element of the kit himself. He explains to me that with rental sets, even if he prescribes what he wants — such as particular tom size with certain heads — it's never going to be guaranteed that that's exactly what the promoter will be able to deliver when he arrives at the venue.

"Well, as I'm fortunate to have a fair amount of equipment, I try to select the appropriate drums and cymbals for the given situation," says DM. "But sometimes, for example when I do concerts with Rosanne [Cash], the popular phrase is 'drums du jour'. In other words, you roll up at the concert, maybe you've got your own snare drum and cymbals, and you're then presented with the rest of the kit, which you have to lick into shape before the concert. Now that has become a little bit easier for me over the last 10 or 15 years. I used to be super-finicky about having my own gear, and whilst that's ideal, I have learnt to live with equipment that sometimes isn't exactly to my liking. I've learned how to try and get a sound out of it — that's something that comes with age. There's so many stories of great players just approaching an instrument for the first time: they've never seen it before, they walk into a club and get presented with a terrible set of beaten up old drums or amps, and they tune up, plug in, and it sounds like a million bucks! They bring their sound to it, and that's what I'm getting a little better at doing."

"I typically use two or three tom-toms these days," says DM. "And if I'm using three, then one's in the middle, one is really low and the other is really high, and that's not just by tuning. If, for example, I were to use a 12-inch, a 13-inch and a 14-inch tom, to get them sufficiently far apart so they'd 'speak' clearly, you'd have to employ a medium tension on the 13-inch, a really low tension on the 14-inch and an almost bebop high tension on the 12-inch. But then if you do that, they don't sound like they belong to the same family. One sounds like a jazz drum and another one sounds like a sort of sluggish rock drum. Now, some guys can do that and get away with it, but I've always thought, in particular with toms, that if I'm trying to make them sound like they belong to the same family you have to pick your sizes carefully. Every drum has a natural resonance point, so by going 12-inch, 14-inch, 16-inch you're making sufficient jumps size-wise, so the tension of the heads can be similar and the drums will naturally speak with sufficient disparity from each other. Whereas that 12-inch, 13-inch, 14-inch example for me, that's too close together. Other good combinations are: 10-inch, 12-inch, 14-inch; or 10-inch, 12-inch, 15-inch; or 10-inch, 13-inch, 16-inch. All those have got sufficient gaps between them, so when you play a fill you can really hear the difference. But the whole 12-inch, 13-inch, 14-inch, 15-inch thing unless you've got a lot of toms and you're doing Billy Cobham-esque fills where it's not quite but close to chromatic, then it works, but if you're only going to use three or four toms, then you really have to exaggerate those differences."

When it comes to cymbal selection, DM also looks for as much exaggeration as possible, again particularly for the bigger rock gigs. These are some of the philosophies behind the kit that he recently used on the Feast Of Fiddles tour.

"Another thing I've found about live performance is that the bigger the venue you're playing, the bigger strokes you have to make. I don't mean louder, just more exact," says DM. "Making an analogy to painting, you really have to use big strokes when you play large venues. You can save the really subtle in-between-the-beats and the finesse stuff for studio work or playing small venues, but when you start playing big venues, you just have to paint with big strokes. And I've found it's beneficial to exaggerate the differences between your cymbals and between your drums. Whether you have few or a lot, they should all be discernibly different. With this FOF set, I'm just using a couple of crash cymbals, and the ride cymbal is a crash/ride. If things aren't sounding sufficiently disparate, once the band get going small disparities between drums and/or cymbals pretty much get lost. That's one of the things I've gleaned specifically working in larger venues. You really have to exaggerate those differences to make them stand out."

"Here's something I always bring up with the students that come to me when we start talking about tuning. I try to emphasise to them that when you sit behind a drum kit, tune it and pick your cymbals, that's only part of the deal," explains DM. "You have to be aware of what happens when you're six feet away, when you get 100ft away, when you bring mics into the equation. The whole thing about tuning drums is to literally and metaphysically get beyond tuning them just from the playing position, because if you only listen from that one place, that's not giving you the big picture. You have to understand what happens as the instrument projects, and this is one of the things that I always tell students. You have to dial that in when you're tuning."

DM actively demonstrates this effect in his drumming workshops. "I just did a masterclass in a Cambridge recording studio immediately before the FOF tour started," he says. "I sat down, tuned the drums up and said, 'Right, I've now got these drums to where I think they're going to work, and what I want you to do is to come and sit down behind the drums, then go out in front while someone else plays them.' You can literally hear the difference as you go from the playing position to the front of the set and then to the back of the room. That kind of stuff is common sense for a lot of pro players, but for a lot of younger, inexperienced players, it doesn't start to resonate until you get a bit older."

"I once said to one of my students, 'What's the first thing that an audience becomes aware of when you sit down to play, apart from your groovy haircut and that kind of stuff?'" says DM. "The answer is the sound you make. Before they realise how great your blistering technique is or any bullshit like that, the first thing that they're aware of is your sound. Making a good sound is all about touch and about understanding the instrument. If you start off by making a good sound, then if you want to make a really shocking sound or a particularly bad sound for impact, then you've got somewhere to go and something to reference back to.

Your drums should have a ring to them, but there's good ring and bad ring, and that's all to do with overtones and tension and trying to get a sound out of the instrument. There's a harmonious and there's an unharmonious ring, and what I try to strive for is, rather obviously, the harmonious ring — although, of course, sometimes you don't want that. With the snare drum on a track, you maybe don't want those even harmonies. You may want something clangy or weird that's going to stand out. It comes down to a rather ancient adage: if you know the rules, then you know how to break them. If you understand what's going on, how cymbal selection works, how to tune and get a sound out of a drum, if you really know how to do that, then you can start to break the rules."

"Well, the main thing is to make sure that your instrument sounds as good as it possibly can and there's no squeaks and rattles," he explains. "Bear in mind that thing I said about exaggerating the differences to make things stand out clearly. One of the descriptions that I always use, whether in the studio or live, is that you should try to imagine the world's best, most expensive mic right behind your head — just that one mic! Always try to make sure your kit is in balance — that's really important. To over-exaggerate how it shouldn't work if you're using the latest 24-inch, mega-bell 300lb ride cymbal and you've got gaffer-taped, low-tuned Remo pin stripes on your toms, all that mic is going to hear is ride cymbal; it's not going to hear any drums. There's also a tendency for inexperienced players to have hi-hats that are way too heavy and loud in relation to the snare drum and the rest of the cymbals."

Once you feel personally confident that your kit is in balance, then you need to collaborate closely with the sound engineer to make sure he gets the balance right on the board.

"Be prepared just to play simple quarter notes on everything so that he can actually hear the drums," DM explains. "In other words, the sound guy doesn't want to hear you doing a drum solo! You're not there to show how clever you are, just give him quarter notes at a reasonable tempo. One of the things I do, which I think helps, is after you've got the toms together, especially if you're using three or four, just to play quarter notes on each drum, one at a time. Go top to bottom and then bottom to top because that gives him a chance to make sure he's got the balance right between them. Then play the whole kit. This is where it begins to get a little more complex. If the sound guy says, 'I'm getting too much ring on this or that tom-tom, then you've got to know how to take care of that. He might say, 'The snare drum's a bit too dead-sounding,' or, 'This is too loud,' or, 'That's too noisy,' or, 'There's a strange ring on this.' Then you have to be collaborative. You can't say, 'You fix it,' because that's just not productive. You have to say, 'OK, this tom's ringing a bit too much. Is it a tuning thing or should I use a little bit of Moongel on the edge just to take a little bit of the ring out?' Just do whatever you have to do."

The other thing that I try to do, especially if I'm working in a group situation and the sound guy is unknown, is say, 'How about if somebody played the drums so I can listen out front?' I'll get whoever the next best drummer in the band is to play them, then go and listen out front. That's frequently illuminating. You have to take into account the touch of the person you've just got to play your drums, but at least that can give you an overview of how the drums sound. You may then say, 'Now I see what the sound guy means by the ring on this tom-tom.' The engineer could say, 'Your toms are really ringing a bit too much', or, 'The kick drum's ringing a bit too much.' And depending on your level of confidence, sometimes it's good to say, 'Well, OK, would you mind leaving it like this so we can hear it with the whole band?' You may find that that ring is absorbed by the rest of the band and consequently the drums will then sound a little bigger, but if the sound guy says, 'No, I really think they're ringing too much!' then it's your responsibility to do something about it."

For DM, there's no substitute for just getting out there and playing. "It's just a continuous learning curve really," he says. "There are no real short cuts. There's only so much info you can read and absorb, then after that you just have to get out there and do loads of gigs. I know in the current climate that's not an answer that comes easy because there perhaps aren't the amount of gigs around as when I started, but there's no substitute for playing. You can read all you want and you can theorise all you want, and you can become the greatest, the fastest drummer sitting in your bedroom at home, but what's really going to make you into a musician is collaborating with other musicians. Just getting out there and doing it."

"A couple of months ago, I saw a couple of great concerts in Boston that really knocked me out. One was Toots Thielemans with the Kenny Werner trio, in a downtown club, quite early. I was with a friend of mine and he said, 'You do know who's on down the road don't you? Bill Frisell with his trio!' and I went, 'Oh wow, do you think we can get in?' We got there for Bill's second set. So in one evening I saw Toots and then Frisell and his trio. It was just fantastic. Those are among the best concerts I've seen. Life beyond chops — that's what moves me!"

The second album, Heel Thyself, by Dave Mattacks's Boston rock band Super Genius is out now on Track Records. www.trackrecords.co.uk.  0