If you clicked on this article on purpose, it probably means that you’ve been dealing with some frustration with your progress on drums. You know exactly what you want to do, but you just can’t do it and you don’t know why. Or maybe you can do it under ideal circumstances, but not all the time.
You probably suspect that even though you’re working hard, there’s something more you should be doing with your practice time, and that you should be improving faster than you are.
This was a huge issue for me starting out, and I’m writing this so you can figure out if there actually is something more you shouldn’t be doing with your practice time, or if you’re just being too hard on yourself.
Here are the lessons it took me….too long to learn.
Lesson 1: All drummers have a story of something ‘crazy’ they did practicing
If you ask a veteran drummer for advice, a lot of times you’ll get some reasonable sounding advice: use Stick Control, listen to Tower of Power, use the Moises app, etc. But if you let them talk long enough, you’ll eventually hear a stories like:
What really helped my kick drum was playing to disco on the kick for 8 hours a day while I watched TV. But I’m crazy.
– Drummer I know who has an awesome right foot
or
It might sound a little crazy, but for 1 hour each day I worked on [this single motion] on the ride.
– Drummer on Youtube with an awesome right hand
or
When I wanted to learn to tune my drums, I detuned my drums after ever practice session and retuned them the next time I practiced. But I’m crazy.
– Drummer I know who can quickly tune his drums to sound awesome
I’ve got stories of my own! It turns out this ‘crazy’ stuff actually works!
The first time I ever felt ‘crazy’ was when I noticed that I basically could not operate the kick pedal. It was so bad, my teacher’s advice was “You have to feel it, Theresa”, as if I couldn’t feel it. No, I DID feel the beat, but my foot’s operation of the kick pedal was so poor that it kept my feelings a secret.
So I spent a month kicking out “one-ee-and-uh-2 (rest)” on repeat for 40 minutes a day at 60 bpm, working up to faster speeds (like 80bpm). After 1 month my foot went from sounding like I was having a seizure to sounding OK, at least at the slower speeds. Not great, but OK.
But the whole time I was doing that bass drum practice, I felt like a complete idiot because it seemed like there must be something wrong with me if I had to do that!
Lesson 2: Find the ‘crazy’ practice that works for you
I asked my teacher about it, if it was normal to struggle so much, and he would say things like “Do what works for you” and “Everyone’s different.”
At first, I didn’t know what to make of that advice. But after a number of similar experiences and hearing stories from other drummers, I realize that he means I should stop judging myself as defective (or ‘crazy’) if I need to do these ridiculous-sounding exercises to improve.
Everybody’s body is different. One time I opened up a Gray’s Anatomy on my sister’s bathroom floor, and I noticed that a lot of the smaller muscles described in this book were only found on *some* people, but not others. Some people have bones others don’t have, too.
Not only is it shaped differently, but it’s ‘wired’ differently. Some people have killer concentration and others are space cadets. Some people naturally are able to have isolated control over individual muscles, whereas others are going to have to work very hard to develop that.
So my teacher wasn’t willing to tell me what I needed to do because everyone is different, as in, everyone will need to do a different ‘crazy’ exercise in order to get the performance they want out of their own unique body.
My teacher would make suggestions though. My advice for you is to listen to these suggestions, but apply each for 3 weeks before you decide whether its good or bad for you
Lesson 3: Expect to practice a skill 20-30 min/day for 3 weeks
I do not claim you can learn every skill in 3 weeks. I mean to say this is the sort of time commitment you should expect to put in before you see reliable improvement in any skill. As in, after 3 weeks, your bad days will be better than your good days are now.
Or you can do something for 4 weeks for 10-15 min/day if that works better for you. Or for 5 minutes a day for 8-10 weeks (that’s also something that works for me). That point is that learning a new movement and getting it automatic is a significant time investment.
This is what I use as a rule of thumb, especially for anything to be used in a groove. When you’re playing out with people, if you have to concentrate on what your limbs are doing in order to hold the groove, you’ve lost the game. So if I want to learn a new groove that is different enough to require concentration, I will assume that this is the minimum time investment.
For example, when I told someone I would play Susan Tedeschi’s ‘Little by Little’ with them, I had to learn snare shuffle groove on the snare, which I’d never done before. So I spent about 30 minutes per day *just* practicing that shuffle with my left hand. Eventually, I got the hang of it, got it up to speed, and added in the kick and right hand.
But I spent 30 minutes a day with my left hand doing that shuffle, however I was doing it. This was on top of the time I spent learning the song structure and breaks. When it came to playing it with my friend, by that point my left hand knew what to do. I did not have to think about it. It even kept the groove when I got my right stick lodged underneath the kick pedal and had to extricate it while I was still playing.
Lesson 4: If an exercise doesn’t help in 3 weeks, you may need to reexamine it
It’s not as if the exercise is a complete waste of time, as I’m sure it has at least some subtle benefit (see the next Lesson), but if you can’t see a benefit in 3 weeks, you should reexamine the exercise. It could be that the exercise is too advanced for you and you need to make it simpler. Maybe you can revisit the original exercise at a later date.
For example, I wanted to learn Bill Wither’s Use Me, so I practiced the entire groove for it for a few weeks. Maybe not for 30 minutes, but I worked pretty hard on it. After a month or so, I realized that no matter what I did, it still sounded crappy. I just couldn’t that unison bass drum/high-hat bark at the end of a phrase without coming out of the measure dragging, at least not at the studio tempo.
So I thought about it and realized that the bass-drum/high-hat bark is just a really hard skill for me, and I should focus on that. In fact, I learned my left foot is very weak and unreliable, and so I’m building it up now.
Lesson 5: Some skills are going to take you a very long time to learn
This is probably the most frustrating thing for beginners. A veteran drummer is gonna respect the sheer quantity of work that goes into the technique of a good drummer, but the beginner is tempted to think that because they can understand what they hear, they should be able to do it, too. This is false.
For me, the single stroke roll was one of the biggest sources of frustration. I’ve worked on getting that smooth that on most days for the last year and a half (or longer), yet I’m still far from my dreams of being able to do fast fills and cool 16th note grooves like the high hat groove on Foo Fighter’s Everlong. I’m probably still about 30 bpm too slow, it’s bad!
I’ve even tried to simplify the single stroke roll by focusing in 8th notes in each hand, and 8th notes in both hands in unison. Actually, those both helped a lot. Yet, still no Everlong!
Oh well, the fact of the matter is I’m starting to be able to bust out short 16th note bursts at tempos I never could before, and to do it without tensing up and doing a bunch of flams instead. So I’m going to be happy with that improvement while I continue working on it.