Your Everest / Breaking through the barrier

Dave_Major

Dave_Major

Silver Member
Hey guys, I was just wondering if anyone out there has something they just cannot get...no matter how much they practice it will not get to where you want it to be.

For me it is hand/foot singles.

My foot (single pedal) is pretty fast, my hands are pretty fast but combine them and they just don't want to work together.

I'm patient with my practice and I know the results will come but after a year of doing them everyday with various exercises and ideas I gained 20bpm.

I'll just keep on with them and they will get there but I was just wondering if anyone else has something that always eludes them

D
 
Clean hi hat barks while maintaining the back beat ala Any Way You Want It. I can pick several Steve Smith things.

Open handed

Clean fast Bonham triplets
 
clean left hand comping at 300 + bpm

I work on it every day and can execute the exercises .... but my goal is to be able to comp while playing a tune at that tempo without sounding like I am playing a damn exercise :)

funny thing is I am fine at 270 (right about where the "55" flattens out ), 280 ,290, even 295 .... but when cracking 300 I go into exercise mode and the comps quit feeling musical and feel clinical

thankfully tunes at 300+ don't get called all that often on the bandstand .... and when they do I stick to very minimal left hand action for fear of sounding like a drummer playing exercises .....because I hear drummers on bandstands all the time who sound like they are playing exercises and it has become a complete pet peeve of mine

I'll get there

good thread
 
Speed. Even basic levels of 'high speed' (ie. 180-200bpm) have always been a huge struggle of mine. I'd put the work in, and then get frustrated and lose my commitment to working on it due to no perceived gains.

Lately that's changed though. Witnessed Derek Roddy at Drumscene Live show in Sydney back in 2009, I think it was, and out of that got into a few specific bands that have made me addicted to fast metal and blast beats: Serpents Rise, Nile and Wintersun.

It wasn't until I finally forced myself to learn to play French Grip that I found I'd hit a turning point. My normal technique started feeling a lot better, more relaxed, and less awkward. I started doing things like George Kollias' 200 - 280bpm exercise (adapted to speeds I can play). Now I mix up doing 20 minute sets of continuous single strokes with the feet and hands playing simultaneously, and then working at the high speeds (200-210bpm at the moment) immediately afterwards. I make sure I'm correctly warmed up, smash out a couple of mid-tempo metal songs with lots of straight double kick, and on days when I'm having "good days" with regards to how I feel physically, I try and do as much fast music as I can, have a go at a couple of the slow songs with blast beats (they tend to be about 180bpm - 210bpm), and sometimes even make it to the end of the song without giving up!

I think the endurance work is what is generating the most obvious payoffs at the moment. I don't have the latent stamina to do it every day, but I'm working towards that. At the moment it's every 3rd day or so. Playing a 1 hour set is one thing, but playing continuous, non-stop singles even at only 155bpm is hard work when you're unaccustomed to it. The fact that I'm seeing an immediate increase in top speed even immediately after the end of the 20 minutes says quite a lot.

Oh, and I readjusted my slave pedal to match the master identically (turns out it was quite badly out), and now I'm smashing alternating double strokes at 200bpm after only about 2 weeks of working on doubles again. It's doing my head in. I've started working on heel-toe as well, just for the hell of it, but I'm definitely going to be putting some serious work into making those fast double strokes usable!

Sorry, I'm the sort of person who will talk for hours about drumming if you get me started, I will go away now :p
 
My kryptonite is reading and just having the patience to sit down with a book. It's just too easy for me to sit down and play.

Back when I was learning classical piano and trumpet, I would learn by ear much faster than I would trying to read the manuscript, so the notation was little more than a reminder.

It's caught up to me now, as I want to get into some new practice systems and most of the celebrated ones are in books. And I want to learn to sight read so that I can get work on a cruise ship this year. I've been putting it off for a while now.
 
I've not made the summit. Though, lots of little gains here and there.

Three things of late, however...

1) Learning PROPER limb independence by way of tricky drum tracks has been a great liberation. Being able to take my left arm away from the snare and accent by way of cymbal or otherwise at syncopated intervals. Something drummers like Matt Halpern does wonderfully.

2) Better technique and thus better, cleaner and faster hands. I've found Jojo Mayer a huge inspiration in this. I've only just opened the can on some of his techniques but it has been a real eye opener. I didn't realise some of that stuff was even a mechanically possible.

3) Linear patterns and fluidity. Once again, only just grazing the surface but it's added a whole new approach to fills and even drum patterns that didn't come naturally to me.

My everest is practice, I guess. I'm prone to complacency.
 
Yessss, I've just picked up how to do the Bonham triplets combo (obviously not like Bonham in Moby Dick or anything like that).

I was trying for weeks to try and do a snare / bass / tom repeadedly, I couldn't do them fast at all and would only do a couple before they all amalgomated together, sounding rather sloppy.

Then today at a jam session it just suddenly came together and I wasn't even thinking about it, even fitting it into a few songs.

Not only was I doing the snare / bass / tom triplet, I was doing a combination of a little solo of tom / bass / snare / tom / snare, then in reverse, doing a couple of double strokes and doing the triplets in different combinations of drums. And I did it fast for quite a while.

Big breakthrough for me, it's amazing how it just all comes together when you're not thinking about it.
 
Open handedness I guess you would call it.

I'd love it if my right hand could do what my left hand can and vice versa.

I feel like its the missing link in my playing. One day I'll switch my left hand to the hats and my right to the snare and maintain some feel and groove and nice ghost notes. At the moment when I switch I suddenly sound like a drum machine with every hit set to max!
 
iwearnohats said:
Speed. Even basic levels of 'high speed' (ie. 180-200bpm) have always been a huge struggle of mine. I'd put the work in, and then get frustrated and lose my commitment to working on it due to no perceived gains.

Lately that's changed though. Witnessed Derek Roddy at Drumscene Live show in Sydney back in 2009, I think it was, and out of that got into a few specific bands that have made me addicted to fast metal and blast beats: Serpents Rise, Nile and Wintersun.

It wasn't until I finally forced myself to learn to play French Grip that I found I'd hit a turning point. My normal technique started feeling a lot better, more relaxed, and less awkward. I started doing things like George Kollias' 200 - 280bpm exercise (adapted to speeds I can play). Now I mix up doing 20 minute sets of continuous single strokes with the feet and hands playing simultaneously, and then working at the high speeds (200-210bpm at the moment) immediately afterwards. I make sure I'm correctly warmed up, smash out a couple of mid-tempo metal songs with lots of straight double kick, and on days when I'm having "good days" with regards to how I feel physically, I try and do as much fast music as I can, have a go at a couple of the slow songs with blast beats (they tend to be about 180bpm - 210bpm), and sometimes even make it to the end of the song without giving up!

I think the endurance work is what is generating the most obvious payoffs at the moment. I don't have the latent stamina to do it every day, but I'm working towards that. At the moment it's every 3rd day or so. Playing a 1 hour set is one thing, but playing continuous, non-stop singles even at only 155bpm is hard work when you're unaccustomed to it. The fact that I'm seeing an immediate increase in top speed even immediately after the end of the 20 minutes says quite a lot.

Oh, and I readjusted my slave pedal to match the master identically (turns out it was quite badly out), and now I'm smashing alternating double strokes at 200bpm after only about 2 weeks of working on doubles again. It's doing my head in. I've started working on heel-toe as well, just for the hell of it, but I'm definitely going to be putting some serious work into making those fast double strokes usable!

Sorry, I'm the sort of person who will talk for hours about drumming if you get me started, I will go away now :p
Click to expand...

I'm going through that myself right now, trying to sustain 16 bars of 8th notes with one limb (because with 16ths I often can't tell if I'm lagging), talking to my Human Kinetics major buddy about what exercises I can do to increase my speed. I'll have to see if I can get some results over the next couple weeks.
 
WhoIsTony? said:
... fear of sounding like a drummer playing exercises .....because I hear drummers on bandstands all the time who sound like they are playing exercises and it has become a complete pet peeve of mine
Click to expand...

I know what you mean. I think it's natural, though. When we focus on something to learn it, we tend to want to apply it as well. It's on the top of your head because you've run it so many times in the last few days and it takes a lot of musical maturity to both realize this and to not play things from your exercises. As you highlight, that's especially difficult when the concept is something you have trouble with and aren't totally comfortable with yet.


My comping will be crap until I can kick my dumb rock drummer habits. I work at it a bit each day, but I still have a huge tendency to highlight the back beat instead of highlighting the other musicians which is what real "comping" should be.
 
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