Friday, January 30, 2009
Practice
Time to get the ball (the snare?) rolling, and what better way to do it than to talk about one of my favorite topics: Practice. For me practice often means sitting at the kit with a pair of in ears and an ipod. I have playlists of different types of grooves and different genres, often organized by tempo, so that I can sit down and focus on one thing without much searching. A far-too-small percentage of my practice involves working out different fills and grooves with a metrinome at different tempos. In the past year or so I've spent a healthier amout of time working out of a few of my favorite and/or reccommended books and working to expand my rhythm vocabulary and the communication between my hands and feet. In teaching drums to new drummers, the way that people approach the kit for the first time has always been interesting to me. More often than not I have trouble convincing students to sit down with a pair of headphones and just PLAY. When I started that was all I wanted to do and it wasn't until later on that I grew into an appreciation for learning new things that were realy challenging to me. How do you practice? Of the differnt things you do, what do you enjoy the most and what do you gain the most from? This is just the tip of the iceberg when considering this topic, but hopefully a good start to many discussions to come.
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For me, practice as a teenager was coming home and burning the grooves off of Buddy Rich or Steely Dan records. Just trying to copy what I heard. After a while, it was too easy just to play things that were comfortable to me. The biggest gains in my playing came when I would take the time to sit down and work on something that was totally foreign to me. Be it in a book or some recording I heard that blew me away.
ReplyDeleteNow, as a player that has spent many years working on my craft, I tend to spend the precious time allocated for practice trying to learn new concepts and styles. Not just technically but feel as well. There is a big difference between playing the rhythm of the mambo compared to capturing the feel of the mambo.
I agree about observing how new students approach the drums. Rarely do new adult students come in and just play what they feel. They want to disect everything and break it down. Quantify it. Young kids are usually the opposite, though I do occasionally get a few young drum scientists.
My favorite practice time comes from sitting down and playing an idea and then expanding that idea. I can get lost in that, which is a cool escape...
I had a friend that would spend the first hour of practice with all of the lights off in his practice "cave" and just play simple grooves along with a metronome. That cat always had work. Rock steady time is a great asset.
I used to play along with a Buddy Rich tune that was a jazz waltz. I was hooked on it. I would play along with it 3 or 4 times a day. I bet it was 6 months before my jones for that song was satisfied. One week my drum teacher landed me an audition with a jazz trio. The guitar player called a jazz waltz for the first tune. That's all they needed to hear, I got the gig. I was 16 and making more in one night than my friends did bagging groceries all week. A little luck can't hurt either...
Kurt, 2 specific things in your comments really stand out to me. One is that your favorite practice comes form expanding on an idea. I saw Billy Ward talk about this in his 'Voices in my Head' DVD and was blown away by what he did. I all too often learn a groove and get it to the point where I can nail it, but don't expand on it. Being intentional about figuring out how to place and displace different notes and textures in any give idea is critical and is the way you form your own style and do things other guys haven't already done.
ReplyDeleteThe other was your friend that played simple grooves to a metronome. I don't do that enough and need to find ways to make it more fun so I want to do it more often. When I do it I have a few ideas that have really helped. One is to play your favorite fills and pay attention to what happens. When and where does it start to rush or slow down? Which of your typical fills are trouble when it comes to tempo? The other - an idea from Zoro - is to pick a groove and switch between the way you would normally play it, half time, and double time. Nothing is harder than keeping a steady tempo while switching the time feel and that's been a great help to me.
Your comment about time and fills is right on. I still, when playing with a click, have to be conscious of my time when playing fills. Like I see with my students, everyone tends to rush their fills. Recording is the best way to work on that. Great players make thier fills sound like part of the groove. No disconnect. Not many have that gift, or develop it.
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