We caught up with Pete Lockett, first-call session man, multi-instrumental uber-percussionist and all-round Fine Feller for a chat. Here’s what the tattooed tea-fuelled Portsmouth FC-crazed drum deity had to say.

What are you up to at the moment?
It's good, I've got quite a lot on at the moment. There's a Trio with Amit Chatterjee of the Zawinal syndicate and Fazal Qureshi (Zakir Hussain's brother) - we're touring and there's a recording in progress. There's also a Quartet with Bikram Ghosh from Calcutta, British saxophonist Jesse Banister and Algerian violinist Djamel – we've just finished a recording. I've got multiple sessions going on, but predominantly I'm arranging and recording solo percussion on the new James Bond film. I became the first one to freeze the entire ProTools system at Air Studios with 96 simultaneous tracks of percussion! Bwahaha!

Also, I got the Best Percussionist vote on mikedolbear.com and in Rhythm magazine, my album "Taiko to Tabla" with Joji Hirota was included in the Top 55 rhythm albums of all time in the August 2006 Songlines magazine, and I'm recording for the Congo Square – the New Orleans Musician's Benefit with a whole host of amazing drummers. There's the Parallax Beat Brothers project with Scanner, an electronic/percussion duo: we released the album "Autek", with Jon Hassell on trumpet, and we toured that in the UK in May.  There's there's a duo with Steve Sidelnyk, Madonna's drummer, who's got an amazing list of credits. He's a really lovely guy, Bradford lad, lives in LA now. We've got a duo album about 90% recorded with some good guests: we got a mix done by Aid Sherwood/On-U-Sound, a track co-written with Craig Armstrong, the Moulin Rouge film composer; we've got high hopes for it. And I'm also doing quite a few solo gigs with samplers and triggering. Which is nice.

What sort of sessions are you doing at the moment?
I do a lot of my own recording at home, sessions as well, and send them the tracks by email, or FTP the stuff over. That’s clearly the way it’s going to go; already it’s more common than not. The album I did with Scanner, we were never in the same room! To me it’s no different from overdubbing onto something that’s been pre-recorded. What’s the difference? It doesn’t matter where or when everyone else did their stuff, unless you want that live feel and interactive situation. Most of my sessions, I go in alone. The stuff I did with The Players and Steve White was live takes, which was quite refreshing, but that’s the last time I can remember recording live for some while. It’s all overdubs with a click. And it’s not just percussionists working this way, I think it’s the same for everyone, drummers, guitarists – everything’s to a click because of the flexibility it gives you to edit stuff. Working without a click is fine if you’re doing something live and organic and you’re not going to do lots of electronica to it, but if you are, if you want to access all the potential of the editing software, it has to be to click.

How do you get better at playing to click?
Really it’s about the feeling, whether you’re feeling the track right, and people naturally feel time differently. I naturally play ahead, that’s my way, but it’s not about being behind or in front of the click, it’s about if it’s feeling right. If the track is in 6/8 or 12/8, a slow blues groove, you’re always going to be pulled backwards by it, it’s going to have that lazy, meandering feel to it, even if it’s got a click.  You also have to have control to be able to play behind and on the beat as well.

As for practice, there’s practicing with a click and practicing with grooves, and they’re two eminently different things. Sitting in the pocket of a groove is different from just metronomic click playing. The key to playing with a click is just massive repetition and concentration. I tend to so something continuously for a long period, an hour or so, with no interruptions, no answering the phone. Especially working on slow tempos, it’s good for building up stamina and it’s harder to play right. Of course, with a really slow click, you can just sing a higher subdivision in your head - if you’re playing 8th notes, you feel 16th notes. And working with syncopations is also really good practice. Play with syncopations, play dotted rhythms, don’t play what the click is playing, play with it, against it, over it. There’s more options than playing on the click itself. At the end of the day when you’re practicing and rehearsing you’ve got to be making music - feel, groove, whatever, you’ve got to be making something, not just clicking like a clock. It’s not an exercise, you’re not going to be playing an exercise when you go on stage, you try to play music. That’s got to be paramount, it’s got to be very the seed of your rehearsal and practice – making music.

How should people practice? Practice what you can already do?
Ah, now we can eradicate the word “should”. We can get rid of anything that the personal gremlins can latch on to, and be negative about. It’s about making your practice as productive as possible whilst still being enjoyable, and the way to do that is to make yourself feel good when you’re practicing. One way to make yourself feel good is to start out playing a few things you already know.  There has to be more than that though, you’ve got to have different sections of practice, divide it up into time units and tell yourself “if you don’t eat your main course, you can’t have your pudding”, reward yourself with it but then move on to areas of uncertainty. One thing that works for me is to find an awkward tempo, one where you’re not comfortable, one that nothing works at, not quite double time, not quite single time, where none of your chops and licks work, and really work on that.

A lot of Western players are intimidated by Indian Music: what’s it like going to India to play Indian music?
Oh, it’s from another planet. Going into Indian music, all you can hope to do is learn a little tiny bit of it. I took five or six years out and all I did was learn Indian music, not always playing, just learning. And the more you learn, the more you realize there is to learn: each doorway has fifty more doorways leading off it. And when you go out there, it’s just amazing. Some of these people, it’s literally superhuman what they do. Take the best, most technical kit player you can think of and times it by ten, they’re phenomenal. The best kit drummers in the world, your Steve Smiths, your Vinnie Colaiutas, they see these guys and just can’t believe what they’re doing. It’s not just the top guys either, there are all the hobby players just practicing in their home that are at a great level as well; the standard’s so high, at a very high level of virtuosity. The Western equivalent would be that even your postman can play like Dave Weckl. It’s like that.

Is it possible to play “Authentic” Indian or Afro-Cuban music, if you didn’t grow up there?
There’s a lot of nonsense talked about the correct way of doing things: it’s got to be like this, it’s got to be that like. You generally find that attitude outside of the actual country. For example in Britain, a lot of the Indian musicians have come via Africa or different places where their families have settled, they’re 4 or 5 generations away from India, but they still might hold onto hundred year old values. You go to India, and the tradition has moved on. I really find that as a positive thing when I go there. It’s the same with the Cuban musical mafia, you know, “it’s not in clave!”. Go to Cuba, and the musicians there feel to re-interpret the tradition all the time, still respecting the roots and formalities but developing. You’ve got to feel free to re-interpret. Otherwise you’re a craftsman but not an artist. Which is fine if you only play from the written score, that’s craftsmanship, not art, although of course there’s art in the interpretation of the conductor and the score.

That kind of limitation can be negative, that’s why I think it’s not productive for drummers and percussionists to be extremely derivative: you’ve got to nick people’s ideas of course at some point but move forward and develop your own ideas much more. Hear the methodology behind the music, the root, which you can then apply yourself, not just that specific iteration of that idea. Don’t just steal the lick, realize why it works and apply the understanding, not just those notes to a situation that might not be appropriate.

What advice would you give to players starting out?
You keep hearing that when you start out you should accept all the gigs you can, even if they don’t pay much. OK, maybe at the very beginning, but at some point you have to decide you want a bit more “right, this is my fee”. Then people start to see you at that new level and you start to get a different calibre of work. It takes a while but that is how it works.

We all love playing music but this can make us our own worst enemies when we come to selling ourselves. Don’t sell yourself short. You’ve got to try and root out the things that won’t advance your career and waste years of time, you’ve got to stop playing those gigs for very little money. You’ll have a lot of gigs, but at some point you have to decide if you want to keep on at that level, you’ve got to move onwards and upwards.  You have to believe that you can play the music you want and get paid well for it.  Because you love it dosen’t mean you have to starve.  To move up a level it’s not just a case of simply becoming a better player, it’s about adding to your product profile, making yourself a more attractive proposition to hire.  Change the way people see you by getting into developing your own writing, doing your own recording, getting into programming, developing and moving with the way the whole industry is going.

And that’s not just about economics or the job aspect of music, it’s about expression, if you can get something happening on the computer when you couldn’t before, that’s a valid presentation of what you do.  Of course. It is in no way a substitute for playing live but we are on the coal face here.  People simply expect players to offer all of these things nowadays and if you can’t then you’ll be miffed to see a slightly worse player than you with the gig.  It sounds a bit bread head but if you don’t get the financial side of your career right then it will become increasingly difficult to survive unless you hit on the next Oasis or Beatles of course.

In ten years time, a LOT more drummers will be savvy about doing their own computer based stuff and recording. At the moment, some producers think they can do it all programmed on the computer instead. It leads to a lot of sterile sounding drum and percussion tracks. That sound will be worn very quickly. Producers are going to want live players again and the character that live players bring. Go back to the 70’s and you’ve got character drummers like Bill Bruford and John Bonham. In the 80’s you start to get these immaculate, quantized, carbon-copy drummers. But people are going to want characterful players on their recordings, stuff they can’t do themselves, they want other people to contribute artistically, and with sessions increasingly internet based, I think the whole session scene will open up wide.

In about 10 years’ time, there’ll be a lot more work in sessions, but it won’t always be in studios as we know them now, it’ll be you recording in your own studio at home and sending the results on the internet, FTP, email, whatever. And you know, you don’t need a fancy setup: you can get really good results with just a few decent mics and an affordable audio application. If your instruments sound good and they’re tuned nicely, they’ll sound OK, seriously!

Most of all, believe and don’t let anyone make you think otherwise.

Check out Pete’s excellent website for tour dates, news updates, and an excellent tutorial section: www.petelockett.com