My materials have gotten denser of late— more patterns on the page, more junk to play through. More things to feel bad and inadequate for not having worked out. I have my reasons for writing that way— several of my students are at the stage of needing to see some things written out. I also give them a lot of stuff. One teenager brings a giant bundle of stuff to every lesson.
Let’s talk about how to deal with that. This applies to everything in your practice life, because there has never not been an overwhelming amount of stuff to practice, and ways to practice it. There’s always a little bit of stress over am I doing enough of this / and doing it the right way / and at all the speeds I should be able to / and etc etc etc.
I write about this all the time. Half of my posts include an apology for their own existence. There’s a piece about it in my newest book, Rants, vol. 1, about the larger scheme— now I want to talk about how to handle it when you’re actually at your drums, looking at a stack of too much stuff.
From day one we’re indoctrinated into a method of ad nauseum repetition. In the introduction to Stick Control, we are told:
Actually it can. Or it can serve another legitimate purpose not intended by the author, of which there are many. And of course, if you applied that approach to everything you do, you’d never get off of page 1 of anything. Which most people never do, with that book. But he wrote some other pages. Unglue your eyes from that glorious first page and look at something else.
Read this line twenty times
How many times did you need to read that to understand that it is an instruction to read it twenty times? You can learn by comprehending a piece of information, there are “ideas” that you can “understand” without mechanically pounding them into your head.
Not a commandment
A written exercise is not a command that you play it for an hour. People see something written and it triggers a neurotic response like that— look at all the things I have to master totally. It’s a suggestion. All of my command-form instructions of YOU HAVE TO BLAH BLAH BLAH are just suggestions, invitations to see if X idea or thing has anything to offer you. You are not required to pursue all suggestions equally, and to their bitter, final conclusion.
No master plan
There also seems to be some feeling that drum books are some kind of rigorously field-proofed scientific roadmaps to awesomeness, any deviation from which is a crippling disruption of THE PLAN.
There is no plan. Drum authors are some guys, who, whatever their skill as players, are not all equally skilled as writers, or teachers, or formulizers/communicators of playing concepts, or planners of your personal entire drumming future.
Move on through
First just play through the page. See what they wrote. Play it a tempo you can play it, with a couple of repetitions, so you can cover most of it in a reasonable amount of time.
Seize the obvious
The things, patterns, exercises to focus on are the ones that are new to you, but fairly easy for you. You’ll know when you hit something like that. That’s the natural path to expanding your vocabulary, because you can mostly do the thing, and you have an ear for it, and you can already do something like it.
Expanding your baseline abilities and adding totally new things is a different question, that’s a different way of practicing. See “the hard stuff” below.
Expand and exploit
With those obvious things, you want to spend quite a bit of time playing with them, exploring their possibilities, variations, and learning to make an ongoing playing texture with them. This kind of exploration should be the main thing slowing you down getting all the way through a page of stuff, not simple meathead repetition, wearing yourself out repeating the first three things fifty times.
The hard stuff
Be clear on when you’re taking something you can basically do into your playing vocabulary, vs. working on something hard that you really can’t do yet. In the case of the latter, there may be some technical thing you have to develop to be able to do it, which is really a different kind of practicing.
The high performance people will tell you that you should be working on hard stuff all the time— things that are not fun, that repel you from practicing, but you do it anyway. I think there needs to be a balance, between becoming for fluent and expressive with what is easy for you, vs. actually developing new abilities. The better you are at the easy stuff, the fewer hard things you may even need.
Covering all bases all the time
Right on our first day of drum lessons Monsieur Stone also tells us:
And loud and soft and everything else. I personally don’t want to look at Stick Control for the amount of time it would take to do all that. I think there’s a more focused way of doing things to make them relevant to your immediate playing life, and near-term goals.
Like, play in same range of tempo as other things you’re currently practicing, or music you’re playing, or music you would like to be playing in the next five years. Do the same thing with your touch and dynamics.
The pretense of uncompromise
If you ask your school teacher, or professor, or friends, or online community about this, you will be met with at least a few convincing answers that, yes, you should be doing everything, all of it. As if they didn’t make any tradeoffs with their own playing. They certainly did not approach their own development that way. You do cover everything over time, but in the near term, you have to make choices and ration your time.
Repetition = cowardice
The unacknowledged subtext of this mind set:
The more time I spend repeating fine small variations of 8th note sticking patterns, the less time I have to fail at making any creative use of this instrument. I win!
We need to be a little more hostile towards pure demands on our time. Some things do take some repetition— usually they’re the things not advertised as such.
Time is non-negotiable
To initially learn a thing you may have to some amount of playing out of time, or playing without time as your main focus. But when you are drilling a thing you have basically learned, time is a major concern, maybe the major concern— how well am I stating time with this idea.
Not that much
Ultimately, there’s not that much stuff. On the drums, we’re looking to be fluent with the basics of rock, funk, jazz, and Latin playing— Brazilian and Caribbean. Each of those broad categories of drumming have a few major styles within them, within which you have the basic jobs of playing time, playing figures, and playing fills. That plus basic snare drum reading in different time signatures, plus mastery of maybe six different areas of snare drum technique. Once you can do them well enough to survive a performance of a tune in that style, then you’re in gravy land, and learning by playing more of that music, and picking and choosing what to work on in the practice room— whatever you want, or feel you need, to get better at.
Also: if you’re thinking about it in terms of those styles: you’re going to get there. You have the correct approach for becoming a musician. Most people, you may have noticed, are just trying to go fast doing singles, and trying to get better doing blast beats.
And, happily: all those things above overlap. Your funk playing helps your rock playing, and your Latin playing, your Latin playing helps your jazz playing, your jazz playing helps your overall musicianship, styles within those major areas, help similar styles in other areas. Your solo materials can mostly be used everywhere.
I can’t promise you the best possible absolute results in all of your practice endeavors by taking this approach, but neither can anyone else, with their own approach. Mainly let’s entertain the idea that living in a permanent state of neurotic panic about all the things left undone may not truly be the way to get good at the drums, or to live any kind of life.
I am happy to help you with any of the materials on the site, and with anything else drumming related— contact me for private lessons, online world wide, or in person in Portland, Oregon. All levels of players, and all people, are welcome.
Email Todd | Call or text +1(503)380-9259 | Chat on WhatsApp
