What the Snare Drum Knew Before I Did

Before I could write a line of code I could play a paradiddle. Right left right right, left right left left, at whatever tempo the metronome was set to, for as long as the metronome was willing to run. I did not know what a paradiddle was for. I did not know it was called an alphabet. I knew it was a thing my hands did, and that doing it correctly felt like a small bell ringing somewhere below my sternum, and that doing it incorrectly felt like static.

I spent the majority of fifteen-plus years of drumming on one drum. Not the full kit, which came later. The snare. A single tensioned head, two sticks, and a catalog of rudiments—single strokes, double strokes, flams, drags, ratamacues, the full Percussive Arts Society list—drilled slow, then faster, then slow again, in a way anyone who has practiced an instrument seriously will recognize as a form of religious devotion. It is. It just isn't usually named that way.

I don't really play anymore, which is part of the reason I'm writing this. A practice you've put down still teaches you, and sometimes more clearly from the distance of not doing it.

The Alphabet Before the Language

A rudiment is not a song. It is a shape your hands learn to make so cleanly that, eventually, you stop having to think about making it. A double-stroke roll is the same motion, repeated, executed with enough precision that the two strokes sound identical—same volume, same timbre, same placement in the grid. Practice it long enough and you begin to understand that the roll isn't really about the hands. It's about the forearms, and before that the shoulders, and before that the breath, and before that the willingness to do an extremely boring thing for an extremely long time without needing it to mean anything.

This is preverbal competence. Knowledge that lives beneath language. You can't explain a good double-stroke roll to someone who hasn't played one any more than you can explain the color red to someone who hasn't seen it. You can describe technique—fulcrum, rebound, wrist versus finger—but the description is a finger pointing at the moon. The moon is in the muscle.

Code does not work this way. Code is language all the way down. Even the parts that feel intuitive to an experienced programmer—the shape of a clean API, the smell of a function about to grow into a problem—resolve, under examination, into things you could in principle explain. There is nothing in programming that is truly beneath words. There is only stuff you haven't bothered to put into words yet.

The snare taught me there are forms of competence that the mind cannot author, only witness. The body does the learning. The mind gets to watch, and later, much later, get some of the credit.

Jazz, or: Listening as a First-Class Operation

Jazz drumming came first, and it was almost embarrassing how long it took me to understand what it was asking of me.

I came in thinking drumming was about execution. Precision, repetition, fidelity to a written part. Jazz wanted none of that. Jazz wanted me to shut up and listen, and then, and only then, respond—and the response was supposed to be a contribution to a conversation already in progress, not a performance of something I had prepared in advance.

The brush on the ride cymbal. The soft two-and-four on the hi-hat, not because anyone wrote it down but because the pianist was pushing the beat and the bass needed somewhere to land. Hearing space as a thing you can offer rather than fill. Deciding not to play. Good jazz drummers are constantly deciding not to play, and the decisions are more musical than most of the playing.

Almost none of my professional habits reward listening in this way. Code rewards generation. AI chat rewards generation. The social web rewards generation. Jazz made me suspicious of a life lived entirely in the generative mode. There is a kind of thinking that is only available to people who are still. The drum kit, of all places, is where I learned that.

Marching Band, or: What a Keyboard Will Never Give You

Marching band came next, and with it a body inside a larger body.

Marching band is not subtle about this. You are one person in a field of people, all moving at the same tempo, all hitting the same subdivisions, performing a choreography so tightly specified that a half-step error two rows away is something you can feel in your own feet. The click is not in your ear. The click is the collective. You lock to the people around you and they lock to you, and if anyone drifts, the whole organism drifts with them until the drum major pulls it back.

There is no experience in software development remotely like this. None. In a drumline you are not collaborating with other people. You are temporarily a cell in a larger animal, and the animal has a heartbeat, and your job is to be that heartbeat in your particular location without losing track of the fact that the same heartbeat is happening thirty feet to your left.

This is a kind of intimacy that does not occur in front of a screen. The screen is a one-to-one interface; even on a call with four other engineers, you are four separate nervous systems politely taking turns. A drumline is twenty nervous systems temporarily fused at the tempo. You learn something about being a person in a group of people that the internet has, by its architecture, been actively training us to forget.

Metal, or: Holding Tempo Inside Chaos

And then there's the other end. Metal, punk, rock—the music I played when the marching field wasn't in front of me. John Dolmayan of System of a Down is the canonical example in my head: a player whose job is to hold a coherent pulse while the rest of the band does something structurally unhinged on top of it. Odd time signatures. Guitar parts that sound like they're in a different song. Vocals that swing from a whisper to a scream inside one bar. Through all of it, the drums—not just keeping time, but keeping the kind of time that makes the chaos legible.

Holding tempo inside chaos looks, from the outside, like the opposite of discipline. The music is loud and messy. But the drummer's job, inside that noise, is almost monastically precise. You have to be more internally quiet than the music is externally loud. You have to know where one is with such certainty that the band can drift fifteen degrees off-center and come back to find you exactly where they left you.

The software version of this skill is underrated. It's the senior engineer who stays calm during an outage. It's the maintainer whose release cadence doesn't change when Twitter is on fire about their project. It's the person who, in a meeting that has gone completely off the rails, still knows what the meeting is about. None of these people are performing discipline. They are being one, in a room that has forgotten what one is.

I didn't learn that in code. I learned it behind a kit, holding a half-time groove while the guitarist did something neither of us could have explained.

Djembe, or: Putting Down the Sticks

I put the kit away a while back. Moved to djembe after that—a West African hand drum, single instrument, goatskin head, played with bare hands. No sticks. No click. No kit. It predates written notation by thousands of years, which I mention because nothing about learning it required me to read.

The djembe took the tools away. The sticks were good tools, precise tools, but they were tools. Skin on skin is the closest a drum can get to not being an instrument at all. What I noticed, playing it, was that the direction I'd been moving this whole time was not toward more technique but toward less between my body and the drum. The rudiments were scaffolding. The kit was scaffolding. The djembe was what was left when you took them off.

The Keyboard and the Drum

Code lives entirely in abstraction and language. It is the most linguistic thing a human being can do that isn't literally writing prose. Every problem in software, followed all the way down, becomes a problem of naming, of structure, of saying what you mean with enough precision that a machine can act on it without asking follow-up questions. This is a magnificent discipline, and I do not regret a minute I've spent inside it. But it is one end of the nervous system.

Drumming lives at the other end. It is pre-linguistic, embodied, temporal in a way that no text can be. A paradiddle does not mean anything. A measure of time, once it passes, cannot be refactored. The drum head under the stick is not a metaphor for anything. It's a membrane, and it's right there, and when you hit it the sound happens in the same room as your body, and the sound and the body and the room are the same event.

I've come to think of the keyboard and the drum as the two terminals of a single nervous system. One end is pure symbol; the other is pure signal. One is timeless in the sense that you can always come back and edit it; the other is timeless in the sense that every instant is exactly itself and then gone. A person who only inhabits the symbolic end becomes, over time, strangely hollow—eloquent, productive, conceptually rich, and quietly out of contact with the part of themselves that knows things without saying them. I've watched friends live inside that.

The practical recommendation is smaller than the argument. Have something you practice that has nothing to do with your mind. It does not have to be drumming—running, climbing, woodworking, sparring, any physical discipline that rewards patient, preverbal, repeated attention to a thing the body is doing. The people I trust most, as thinkers, all have one of these. I don't think that's a coincidence.

The snare drum knew, before I did, that you can know something without being able to say it. I spent a long time after that learning to say things. The saying only really works when it is still, underneath, in contact with the drum.