Jonathan Curtis
Silver Member
I'm a big subscriber to what could be called the Mangini practice method: slow, deliberate, repetitive, focussed, thoroughly mastering an item before moving on. Those familiar with his Rhythm Knowledge series will know what I'm talking about.
However, I'm curious about the effectiveness of these so-called 'conditioner' exercises, a la Stick Control etc. A book like Stick Control, Chaffee's Patterns series, and Mangini's own Vol. 2 present all possible sticking and limb combinations of a particular rhythm group, phrase, sub-division, time signature etc. Of course, there are hundreds of possible combinations. Something like a setptuplet has 128 possible combinations using just the hands, let alone getting the feet involved.
Of course, with so much information, you can't practically dedicated hours and hours to each and every combination in the hope of, eventually, years and years and years down the line, mastering them all. Instead, these books prescribe conditoiners: run through the whole collection x number of times each. Stone, for instance, says do each exercise per page 20 times per day.
With Mangini's ATP (combinations for odd groupings), I do 20 per day of each limb pair.
What I'm wondering is, do these actually work? With Mangini himself talking so much about the brain's learning process, with repetition, repetition, slow repetition, can such small snippets of practice time for each combination actually reap any benefits.
If we took the first page of Stick Control, if would take a whole week to do each exercise 100 times. Yet Mangini prescribes spending 90 minutes per day, 4 times a week, for 6 weeks, to just master ONE thing. Can these conditioners really work?
So far, I haven't been doing these limb combinations long enough to tell myself yet, but I'm hoping that, so long as I'm regular, running through the combination conditioners every day, they will slowly absorb into my vocabulary.
What do you think?
However, I'm curious about the effectiveness of these so-called 'conditioner' exercises, a la Stick Control etc. A book like Stick Control, Chaffee's Patterns series, and Mangini's own Vol. 2 present all possible sticking and limb combinations of a particular rhythm group, phrase, sub-division, time signature etc. Of course, there are hundreds of possible combinations. Something like a setptuplet has 128 possible combinations using just the hands, let alone getting the feet involved.
Of course, with so much information, you can't practically dedicated hours and hours to each and every combination in the hope of, eventually, years and years and years down the line, mastering them all. Instead, these books prescribe conditoiners: run through the whole collection x number of times each. Stone, for instance, says do each exercise per page 20 times per day.
With Mangini's ATP (combinations for odd groupings), I do 20 per day of each limb pair.
What I'm wondering is, do these actually work? With Mangini himself talking so much about the brain's learning process, with repetition, repetition, slow repetition, can such small snippets of practice time for each combination actually reap any benefits.
If we took the first page of Stick Control, if would take a whole week to do each exercise 100 times. Yet Mangini prescribes spending 90 minutes per day, 4 times a week, for 6 weeks, to just master ONE thing. Can these conditioners really work?
So far, I haven't been doing these limb combinations long enough to tell myself yet, but I'm hoping that, so long as I'm regular, running through the combination conditioners every day, they will slowly absorb into my vocabulary.
What do you think?