What to practice for the most gains?

There is much to be said for taking a well-used idea and placing it in a new context. This is how almost all new musical developments occur, is it not?
 
I cant see the problem with learning licks as long as you recognise the technique/ device being used and then take this to make some fills/ licks of your own
Obviously it's not a great idea to just completely copy various fills (including the exact orchestration) from other players as this is their personality not yours, but it doesn't hurt to work out what they are doing then make it your own
As long as the device works at the tempo and feel of whatever you are playing then why not put it in? There is nothing worse than forcing something in just because you have put time into learning it though- I think everyone is guilty of this at some stage in their drumming life

Even the greats have "stock" fills which they often re-use or change slightly depending on the context. And as for the Mike Portnoy thing I have to disagree because RLFF is probably one of the most common fills around and works in a variety of settings.

As for "everything should be improvised" i dont think anything every really is improvised- all players are doing is regurgitating things they have previously learnt. You don't just get up in a solo and suddenly play quintuplets over an ostinato without first practising it
 
If you wanted to be the absolute best you could be, and had the luxury of infinite practice time, what would you "shed" to get the absolute most out of it?

Thoughts?

Thanks

I would spend at least half the time working on rudiments or sticking exercises like out of stick control, the other half would be used to work out of tommy igoe's groove essentials 1-2 books. I probably would alternate those two things into quarters though just to break up the monotony if I had the luxury of 12 hour practice days.

"EDIT" I made a mistake I would probably do it in 3rd's and add Mike Johnston's Linear Drumming book into my practice as well.
 
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If I were into jazz, and had your kind of time to practice, I would:
  1. Put together a 30-60 minute warm-up to do before every session made from
    • hand exercises (Igoe's Lifetime Warm-up is my fave, but Stick Control or the rudiments chart would be great also)
    • A few independence exercises
    • Technique focus exercises based on goals, like finger exercises, bass patterns, etc. The purpose of a formalized warm-up is to keep you habitually returning to these repetition-based exercises, of course feel free to expand any of them into a lengthy practice.
  2. I would spend a lot of time on Brazilian and Afro-Cuban rhythms as they apply to Jazz.
  3. I would listen to the greats every day. I would try to get my ears around guys like Elvin Jones and Art Blakey, and learn to appreciate the orchestration.
  4. Learn a song every day from the real book.
  5. Sight-read something every day.

Good luck! Let us know what you settle on and what works.
 
I believe that learning licks is essential to development on the drumset. They allow you to think of the music in a larger picture, and they are the building blocks of what we do as drummers. For instance, a para-diddle applied on the drumset could be considered a "lick". whether its a groove between the hihat and snare, or a tom lick, or on the crashes. Whatever. Playing a cool lick for the sole purpose of showing off the fact that you know the lick, is awful musicianship, of course. But you can't say that you shouldn't learn paradiddle grooves.

Bad musicianship aside, I'd DEFINITELY be learning licks and whole passages that the greats have played and integrate that knowledge into your own style. I've spent a lot of time learning what Philly Joe Jones played when he was trading 4's with people. Those short 4 bar passages are easy to learn and will mature your playing quickly.
 
Licks are separate from rudiments. I put a great big reply up earlier on this thread about the distinction but then an old friend came around and we got talking. I'll try and put it up again later.
 
Yea, I think the most gains come from practicing what you're not good at.

I think, drummers especially are good at avoiding the stuff they can't do very well... We don't have melodies, so as long as we stay in time, we can avoid a lot of things and still play.
 
Licks are separate from rudiments. I put a great big reply up earlier on this thread about the distinction but then an old friend came around and we got talking. I'll try and put it up again later.

Disagree. Licks are rudiments, or a collection of rudiments, which are collections of single and double strokes, which are collections of up strokes and down strokes.... Your statements have the same meaning as saying: Para-diddle-diddles discourage improvisation. You should only learn up and down strokes.

Why can't a lick be added to a list of rudiments for drumset? You talk about rudiments being the vocabulary of drumming.. true, licks serve the same propose. You can spontaneously compose using licks you've learned, just as you can with rudiments.

Plus, we all speak from flash cards sometimes. it part of life and it defines our style of speech. We don't all speak the queen's english. Colloquial sayings and figures of speech become a part of language as much as individual words do. And they may have different meanings depending on what part of the world you are in. ie...

I'm fixin to go to the store.
Lets blow this popsicle stand.
The Dude abides.
You done hired Bernard Purdie.
How do you like being where you're at?
She's got a bun in the oven.
Dead as a doornail.
Pie - (referring to pizza)
Pop - (referring to soda)
Anti-clockwise
Bees Knees
Bollocks
Bugger all
Smarmy
Sod
Keeping up with the Jones'

.. the list goes on. These phrases grammatically make no sense, or they are words that have no meaning or a different meaning depending on your region. These groupings of words we use in speech all the time, JUST LIKE groups of rudiments we could you to drum with, aka, licks.

You can't copyright drum licks. Even Steve Gadd will tell you.. everything I play, I've learned from someone else.
 
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I'm just jealous that you have the opportunity to play the drums for 12 hrs a day. But it sounds like you're making the best of it!
 
That is the precise issue here. Licks are undertaken as a purely physical thing, it's all muscle-memory. Reciting a physical pattern that you've pre-learned (devoid of context) doesn't actually invoke any musical response unless it's used in a very specific circumstance, i.e. the same piece of music that it was originally composed for.

While I believe learning rudiments is exactly this, I believe that learning licks lets the drummer put those rudiments in a sequence, pre-determined, pre-orchastrated and into muscle memory so as to develop a better understanding of where they fit in the context of a piece of music. The artistry, musicianship happens after the lick is made into muscle memory where the drummer can change to his/her own voice/voicing.



It's the equivalent of learning a set of comping patterns and then just using those the whole time rather than actually listening and responding. Sure, it might sound ok and it might even occasionally give the impression that you really are comping but ultimately all it's doing is teaching you to be lazy and to not respond to the music in the same way.

Why would you make a judgement like this about the OP? or any drummer here? that they would be lazy. Laziness could be used here if they did not carry their learning forward. But we have no knowledge concerning this with this OP
 
Sometimes, it's just good to play.

Jazz, Rock, Funk, whatever, just play what comes into your head. Find an idea you liked? Write it down. Once you find a lot, try to orchestrate these so they flow together. If you've know other instruments well enough, you may even be able to play out the other parts in your head, and match your drum parts accordingly.

You can do the same thing developing solo ideas. Just play. When you play something you like. Write it down. Eventually you'll have enough to form a cool solo.

There's only one question: Where do you get these ideas? How do you make what you play sound good?
Listening is the obvious example. The more you listen, the more ideas you get. Certain books are also geared towards this. Gavin Harrison's books are great examples of this. You master all of his books, and you'll have enough ideas to last a lifetime.

There is also the fundamental side of things, which is what lots of other books and dvds are geared towards. It's important to practice both of these to improve yourself both in finesse and creativity.
 
That's where we come back to vocabulary. It's not like learning the alphabet at all but when we talk about learning rudiments for the sake of vocabulary, we're actually talking about learning syllables of words and learning how they can fit together.

What would you determine to be the alphabet in drumming then? The down stroke and upstroke?



Imagine if I only spoke in sentences from flashcards that I tried to use whenever the context was roughly appropriate. Could I ever say anything of real value or contribute to the discussion? Absolutely not. I would fail the Turing Test. That's what 'licks' encourage - flashcard-style playing and there is no way to have a proper discussion (musical or otherwise) with somebody that's just reading from flashcards. You might be able to 'fake' a discussion for a while and fool a few people but sooner or later they'll notice.

Flashcards have their purpose. They are a beginning, not and end.

Learning a kata in Karate is not necessarily the equivalent of learning 'licks'. A kata is simply a measured way of combining disparate elements into a unified (and assessable) set of motions.

Isn't learning a lick just this?

Learning a 'lick' is like learning a sequence of techniques in a specific order and then re-counting them without flexibility and - more importantly - without the capacity for flexibility. Learning a lick is a top-down approach that limits the player into only combining that sequence and not being able to use the disparate elements flexibly.

It appears to me that, again, you make a qualifying conclusion without any information to come to this conclusion.

I practice licks but not in this manner.
If I am playing a cover, I sometimes tribute the original drummer by attempting his licks
It is good for me to practice them first..
 
I am confused on this "lick" issue.

MFB, if you are saying you should not try to learn a lick, where do you get fill ideas from then? Is there a difference between a lick and a fill?
 
I am confused on this "lick" issue.

MFB, if you are saying you should not try to learn a lick, where do you get fill ideas from then? Is there a difference between a lick and a fill?

The issue here is that there's a new generation of players, that in the youtube era, are obsessed with learning and pounding out lick after regurgitated lick, go to any gospel player youtube vid and you'll find a bunch of people "Yo man what's the sticking at 1:05" "Hey man can you explain what you're doing at 3:08". It seems all they're interested is the instant gratification that the lick provides, not the feel, atmosphere or musicality of the playing.

In this context, just learning the lick for the sake of learning it, there's really no musical growth, all you're doing is repeating a pattern someone else already did.

In an ideal context, you would listen to your favorite drummers, you would learn some of their licks, you see how they use them, how they serve the music, why are they there, and then you would learn them and make them your own, eventually giving you the creativity to make up your own licks.

Once in a while, you'll hear a super cool lick that you just gotta know, that's fine, go for it, but remember to not just learn it, you gotta take it farther than that, make it your own.

And lick is pretty much the same as a fill, except fills usually signal the beginning or end of a section, licks can be little things thrown anywhere.
 
I hear everybody talking about learning the different licks/fills. You think Bonham practice other drummers licks, I doubt it. What I do is try and get a sense of another drummers feel. In the case of Bonham, I interpret his feel as an sixteenth note triple feel sense when he does fills and his basic groove are melodic in nature when he played. Learn a drummers feel and add your own licks/fill if your playing their cover songs. Create your own drum sound/voice. The great drummers just listened to any drummer that happen to have great triples, fast singles, doubles, rudimental style, or just plain simple solid grooves and realize that you use it all, incorporate it into your playing and you will know what comes easy to you and you will accelerate in certain abilities and the result is your own drum sound.
 
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MFB, if you are saying you should not try to learn a lick, where do you get fill ideas from then? Is there a difference between a lick and a fill?

A lick is a preconceived technical passage; a fill is a musical function you might use it for. It would be pretty hard to play music without learning any borrowed ideas at all- the question is more about what you do with them.

Here's something that's helpful.
 
Nothing wrong with learning other peoples' licks, it will introduce ideas, note combinations and placements that you would have otherwise not come across. I doubt there are many drummers who won't feel the urge to take a learned-lick further and make something of their own.
 
What would you determine to be the alphabet in drumming then? The down stroke and upstroke?

Downstroke, upstroke, singles, doubles, triples, multiple bounce and then rudiments as sticking patterns, not note values.

Flashcards have their purpose. They are a beginning, not and end.

I addressed this. Learning licks verbatim is just like using a flashcard to communicate. As children, we do not learn language through flashcards; neither should we music.

Isn't learning a lick just this?

Again, I qualified. A Kata is different to a lick because a lick is taken as an inflexible whole that is played verbatim. A Kata is a much longer process that consists of many elements - it is much more like a song; albeit a song that does not change. Like it or not, songs do change when playing and if you were improvising and managed to play the same song the same way twice - you're in the wrong band. In a Kata, you do not get marks for artistic interpretation, yet you are still expected to be able to understand the function of each separate movement. If you lack this depth of understanding, then you can't perform the Kata properly - not at the highest level and you certainly cannot improvise techniques if the necessity were, sadly, to arise. If you do not understand the function of a certain lick and instead just learn the mechanics, then you're actually not performing - you're regurgitating and you're not in a creative process at all.

It appears to me that, again, you make a qualifying conclusion without any information to come to this conclusion.

Qualify: Licks are sought by the learner as verbatim. E.g. 'What's Tony's sticking there?'. Nobody ever seems to ask 'Why did Tony introduce the polymeter?' and that is actually the important question in understanding the music. Music is understanding, not mechanics. Mechanics can contribute to understanding but they are not the product.
 
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