Mad About Drums
Pollyanna's Agent
I watched a Simon Phillips clip recently, it's a long display of the man showing his skills, signature grooves, amazing fills and licks, creativity and so on, it's very long, 47 minutes, but within the middle of the clip, there's an interview of Simon while he's still sitting behind the kit, at one stage the interviewer asked questions about his feet technique, and he replied with the following quote:
"It's really control of your feet, you know, when you do this, one foot goes off into the distance, it's really weird, you have to find the speed were you're totally in control, sometimes to really control it, it's amazingly slow actually, to do individual stroke, to be totally in control of it, when you're playing live in front of people, anything happen, you just revert to whatever you've got in store, but I think by practicing with this it really does help, building up something, you just need to be very patient"
Another quick example before I go in the core of this thread, on another clip, I watched Rodney Holmes doing a demo of how to play two completely different patterns together at a high speed, once he stopped, someone in the audience said "do it slower", to which he replied "slower? it's much harder to do it slower...", he did play it slower and perfectly, of course.
Now this brings my reason for this thread, while I understand Simon's view on control, which could mean to be perfectly in control, it won't be that fast when you play something, but, on the other hand, I also agree with Rodney who said it's harder to slow it down.
I'm finding that depending what I'm practicing, it is very hard and difficult to slow down a pattern, while I have no problem at the "right" speed, it could be what's involve in the movement, different motion at lower and higher speed perhaps, but in any case, it does affect the control of what I'm playing.
The inverse effect is also true, some patterns are more difficult to play faster, but I can understand this much better, there's a speed limit of what I can achieve at the kit while playing certain patterns, but to slow it down, should be easier, and often enough, it is not.
Does this happen to you? if so, what did you do to overcome this aspect of "control"?
Thought?
Sorry for the long post
"It's really control of your feet, you know, when you do this, one foot goes off into the distance, it's really weird, you have to find the speed were you're totally in control, sometimes to really control it, it's amazingly slow actually, to do individual stroke, to be totally in control of it, when you're playing live in front of people, anything happen, you just revert to whatever you've got in store, but I think by practicing with this it really does help, building up something, you just need to be very patient"
Another quick example before I go in the core of this thread, on another clip, I watched Rodney Holmes doing a demo of how to play two completely different patterns together at a high speed, once he stopped, someone in the audience said "do it slower", to which he replied "slower? it's much harder to do it slower...", he did play it slower and perfectly, of course.
Now this brings my reason for this thread, while I understand Simon's view on control, which could mean to be perfectly in control, it won't be that fast when you play something, but, on the other hand, I also agree with Rodney who said it's harder to slow it down.
I'm finding that depending what I'm practicing, it is very hard and difficult to slow down a pattern, while I have no problem at the "right" speed, it could be what's involve in the movement, different motion at lower and higher speed perhaps, but in any case, it does affect the control of what I'm playing.
The inverse effect is also true, some patterns are more difficult to play faster, but I can understand this much better, there's a speed limit of what I can achieve at the kit while playing certain patterns, but to slow it down, should be easier, and often enough, it is not.
Does this happen to you? if so, what did you do to overcome this aspect of "control"?
Thought?
Sorry for the long post