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How Listening to the Haters Helped Me Play Drums Faster

Eoin Hayes December 13, 2019
"Haters" Transcription

I love when I get to create a lesson with a clickbait title that's actually literally true.

To be fair, I might have invented the title first, then worked backward.

Makes me wonder what other lessons I could create that way...

"I only played with my left hand for 3 weeks, here's what happened."

Welcome to my lesson creation process.

In truth, it's easy to create lessons that just teach drum stuff. I could lose 85% of the audience in the first 2 minutes talking about how KLRLL is the key pattern that unlocks a ton of combinations.

It's also pretty easy to go completely clickbait.

Gear Secrets Pros Would Tell You if They Weren't Keeping Them For Themselves

Doing something that's both delicious and nutritious...often requires suffering.

And suffer I did. (First world suffer.) I spent hours reading every negative comment on my Eric Moore lesson, before spending a week devising a practice routine ([which I'm sharing with you]), and learning it well enough to see if it worked, then teach it to you.

Why were there so many negative comments?

Well, there was the small matter that I'm on the internet claiming that the key to playing combos like Eric might be to learn something like them...slowly.

I'm not completely alone. Sean Wright's talked about this.

And most of the comments on the lesson were still positive.

But there was a...vocal minority.

Comments ranged from the constructive...

"I get your point, and you sound good, BUT..."

...to the immensely entertaining.

"HOW do you have SEX?"

The thrust..ahem...behind most of them, was that I was missing the major part of how to play like Eric. It wasn't about learning patterns or learning to phrase combos cleanly more slowly, then gradually increasing the speed.

It was mostly about ceasing to be a sissy, and playing more like caveman. To paraphrase. But I think it's a fair paraphrase.

"Hit those drums. They won't hit back!"

"Eric plays with abandon! You seem so careful!"

Try telling a sunday-driver that Lewis Hamilton drives "with abandon", and that the key to feeling more comfortable is not to learn any fundamentals, but just to speed up.

But my protestations fell on 100% deaf ears. (Deaf from playing so loud;)

Then one constructive critique convinced me...they might be right.

"I know it's important to play slowly and get things under your hands first, but maybe you (I) are at the point where you need to rush intentionally a little bit."

Over-clocking.

Supra-maximal training for weight-lifting.

Sprints.

Fine, I thought. I'm game.

And thus unfolded the weeklong experiment that resulted in the exercises in this lesson.

Enjoy, and see you next week.

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