Peter Szendofi Interview for BeatIt, Pt. 1

Here is drummer and educator Peter Szendofi in the first part of an in-depth interview for www.beatit.tv. http://en.beatit.tv/ "At my clinics, I usually try to demonstrate a couple of my most important goals, like, how to play drums for me. The first thing is to always make music on a drum set in any kind of situation and any musical style. This has to be the very first purpose. Even if you play a simple groove or solo stuff. The other thing is I try to demonstrate how to make music with an instrument which has no melodies and no chords. If I were a guitar player or a piano player, that’s easier because I would have absolute pitched notes. I would play real melodies and real chords but it’s not possible on the drum set. We do have a huge dynamic range, we can play different colours, a lot of rhythms, so we have a lot of other possibilities to make music. That’s what I usually try to communicate to the people. When I was 14, maybe 15, I saw a drum show on the national Hungarian TV, where two Hungarian drummers did a drum battle. I was in shock. I’d never checked this kind of thing at all. I’d listened to a lot of great music because my mother is a great classical piano player and conductor and my father was an instrument maker master. I was surrounded by great music like Ray Charles, Glenn Miller and this kind of music, but I’d never tried to play drums before. Like I said, I was in shock. After a couple of days I said to my parents: „Hey, I would like to be the best drummer in the world”. They went: „Ha ha!”. They thought it was a fad and I would grow out of it. After that, I started to play on anything I could get my hands on, so my mother decided to take me to one of her colleagues who was a great drummer and an amazing teacher. I started to take private lessons from him and I’m really thankful to that guy because I could see he was practicing every day. He was strict but also a great teacher. He would show me interesting stuff too, not only the old exercises on paper. Then, my parents said the best way to follow that would be to learn classical first. I went to a classical conservatory. At the time, there was no drum set department there. First, I started to do transcriptions from Billy Cobham, Dave Weckl and Dennis Chambers, and I would figure out how those guys play their things. This was in the mid 80s. There was no instructional videos, nothing. Only cassette tapes and one radio channel with a jazz show. I recorded some Mahavishnu, Return To Forever and Chick Corea with Steve Gadd from there. So I would do transcriptions and try to figure it out." http://en.beatit.tv/peter-szendofi-in...