Left
[Or L]
The clock has started. Twenty-nine more days now until I give myself “permission” to buy a kit.
Yesterday I was in town and stopped off at the local music store. I picked up a Yamaha snare stand and a throne. The snare stand is a Yamaha Single-Braced SS-740A Snare Stand. My throne is a PDP by DW Gravity Series Lightweight Tractor Top Throne in gray.
I had downloaded “Stick Control”, but I snagged a hardcopy while I was at the music store as I didn’t want to stare at my laptop and I wanted to have an analog copy of the resource. I downloaded a metronome app. I’m using Pro Metronome as it came fairly highly recommended as a good metronome app for drummers. I had to perform an update on my phone last night too. An inconvenient time for an update, so I started practicing my rudiments using page one from “Stick Control” as my taskmaster while my phone was updating.
The way “Stick Control” works is he (author George Lawrence Stone) tasks you with performing each line (or rudiment) 20 times without stopping before moving on to the next line/rudiment.
I got through the first 3 or 4 lines of stick control before my phone finished updating. I say “got through” because I did stop. Often. it seems my left hand wants to roll each strike.
Rolling a drum strike with your weak hand is a pretty common malady for some drummers. I didn’t know this until I discovered I do it. To me, this is one of the benefits of critical listening while practicing rudiments. I think this is one of the bad habits that people mention that you don’t want to get into and that a live instructor (in-person or virtual) would help correct. I’m sure I’m doing other things sub-optimally, but I am admittedly proud of myself for catching this simple, and easily correctable, mistake before it becomes a habit.
I say ‘easily correctable’, most of my attempts to consciously correct it resulted in about 3 good strikes with my left hand then a double strike. I’d stop the rudiment and start over. I bet I worked on this simple correction over the course of 4 rudiments for over twenty minutes.
Then I fired up Pro Metronome and moved onto the fifth rudiment. I set the metronome on 60 bpm (beats per minute). Let me tell you: this is SLOW. It’s so slow it’s boring. It’s so boring that I found myself thinking of what I was going to do next. I was thinking of what I was doing next that I was wandering from ahead of the beat, then overcorrecting and being behind the beat. Then I would get confused as to where I was in the line and miss a beat completely. Bad drumming.
This problem of not being able to drum consistently on the beat, or consistently ahead of the beat, or consistently behind the beat (whichever you are striving for) is a fundamental problem for new drummers. I knew this intellectually, but nothing brings the point to light like hearing yourself wandering off the beat. It’s maddening. I was not prepared for how frustrating this is: my lack of ability to be a human metronome. Ha!
It’s so much easier to drum faster, but not too fast. Say around 80-90 bpm. But ‘easier’ doesn’t mark the side of the road where learning and growth happen.
This is why you practice slow. It sucks. I practiced as 60 bpm for 23 minutes according to my metronome app. Likely over 40 minutes of practice with over half of it trying to bring my weak hand to bear and the other half trying to stay on a beat that is equivalent to my resting heartrate. I started to go cross-eyed and felt some tension creeping in, so I called it a night.
These 2 lessons are a small glimpse of my potential road. Should I seriously -reconsider an instructor?
Thanks for reading.
