I've learned that there are two main reasons this happens:
1. I don't know enough about music
2. They don't know enough about music
For a long time I blamed #1 most of the time. And perhaps that was valid. But over the last couple of years I've worked hard on correcting #1. Now I find #2 happening more. And I've begun to wonder if #2 wasn't happening all along and I just didn't know any better.
A few examples of things that were confusing to me that maybe would not have been if I'd been more fully musically educated:
The Bo-Diddley Beat
Loretta was supposed to have a "Bo Diddley Beat" but I gave it something else, which I now call "The Loretta Beat". Looking back, I recall that I was actually copying the beat from a demo that used a drum machine. The demo had the beat I ended up using, which wasn't a Bo Diddley beat. What I don't know is, if he wanted me to change what I was doing to a Bo Diddley beat, or if he was mistaken in what a Bo Diddley beat really was.
Actual Bo Diddley Beat explained here, but think I Want Candy by Bow Wow Wow or Faith by George Michael are good examples.
The Motown Beat
This may have been the most frustrating of these kinds of conversations, and perhaps lead to the beginning of the end for me in a certain band. Ultimately, the person who wanted me to play "a motown beat" couldn't explain to me what he meant by that.
My subsequent research:
Motown used a host of drummers who came to be known as "The Funk Brothers," the first of which was William “Benny” Benjamin. Another famous member of the drum crew was Uriel Jones.
My confusion about "the Motown Beat" seems reasonable now. There were several "Motown Beats". Motown took from jazz, soul, funk, latin, and other genres. In retrospect, knowing what I know about his song-writing style, I think that the person who asked me to play "a Motown Beat" really meant that he wanted a funk groove, which is related, but not strictly the same thing, and a little easier to classify.
A Shuffle
This one came up recently. Someone said they "really liked my shuffle" and I thought "I wasn't playing a shuffle." I think of a shuffle simply as being a beat that is swung strongly, either by playing eights notes with a triplet feel or by accenting a beat. I looked it up to verify today, and my read is correct.
The classic version using an accent instead of a triplet would be the "train beat" like on Fulsom Prison Blues or Radar Love. More on shuffles, including the Purdie Shuffle (shuffle with ghost notes, like in Rosanna, or Fool in the Rain) here.
Fool in the Rain
Rosanna
I have no idea what I was doing that this person thought was a shuffle. Maybe I was swinging the beat slightly, but it wasn't a shuffle.
So what's a drummer to do?
There's lots of trickiness to this whole topic. In a very basic way, it makes it hard to know what someone is asking of you. But it's easy to turn that into a defensive tone...or to make the person asking you feel worry that they don't know what they are talking about and that you are trying to call them out on it. My plan for the future is...smile and nod and take as many notes about what the person said as possible and tell them I'll work on it and get back to them. Then look it up. Figure out whether it's them or me that doesn't know what they are talking about. If it's me...try to learn what they want. If it's them...DROP IT.
Being in a band isn't really about music...it's about relationships and fragile egos.
Bottom line...be as well and broadly educated as you can...but don't ever make someone else feel stupid.
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