First things first - grab your free transcription here.
What are you supposed to say when every title you try sounds like 2015-era clickbait, but in your mind you actually, really solved, or partially solved this problem.
Where I come from, if they’re gonna call you clickbait either way, might as well get the viewz.
It’s in that spirit that I present today’s lesson - The Cheat Code for Faster Drum Fills. And it’s based on a pretty simple idea.
There’s the “old fashioned” way to increase your speed. Have your lexicon of improv vocabulary you’re practicing, and simply “bump up” the metronome a little every day. Then, something something, you’ll be able to play faster fills.
This isn’t even complete on its face.
“Why would we assume tempo is the only parameter we can play with,” an astute student in a drum lesson in that smoke-stained back room at Anthony’s Guitar Shop on East Main might ask…
…prompting his teacher to respond “SHUT UP, BILLY”.
But of course Billy is right. In software - I’ve heard on podcasts - there's the saying “you can have it cheap, you can have it bug-free, and you can have it soon. Choose two.”
It’s a pithy way to express a system with at least 3 inputs. And I’m sure we can come up with more inputs than just tempo for drum fills.
How about something like kinesthetic familiarity?
Or, the “kicker” in this case, number of things you try to play?
Take your normal 16th note improv speed. If I asked you to “double time” everything, you’d probably find it hard, right?
But what if I gave you only one lick, and asked you to double-time that?
To restate the software development adage - “you can play it fast, you can play it clean, or you can play all your vocabulary - choose two.”
By compromising on the “things to remember”, could we unlock some tempo gains?
Well, it turns out, from my experimentation at least, that we can.
That’s unsurprising. But what might blow your mind is that once we’ve added one lick to the double time regime, we can add more…
…and the time it takes to master them will, by my contention, still be less than if you’d just practiced everything linearly.
Hence “the wormhole method.”
Phew. Anyway, far from “clickbait”, I’m doing my best here to posit a genuine alternative for the accepted way to get faster.
Hope you enjoy!