First things first - grab your free transcription here.
This week sees a return to an old hobby horse. Practically what put 8020 “on the map”.
Years ago, while developing one of my courses, I took a survey. I was interested in the mistmatch between drummers’ stated goals, and their practice routines. I had expected something like poor time-management, and/or a few adjustments at the margins. What I found, of course, was a complete-and-total mismatch.
Complaint: “I don’t know why what I practice isn’t coming out in my playing!”
Goal: Play clean, musical fills and beats, be able to get around the kit.
Practice routine: the literal same exercises out of drum books that they’d been doing for decades. Hand warmups, abstract “independence exercises”.
Addendum: Plus a decent dollop of “literal transcription of whatever I saw on Instagram this week”.
Since then, course materials have evolved somewhat. I and others are producing materials that more resemble real-world playing.
Many of these “contemporary” materials even emphasize the “missing piece”, which we’ll get to. It’s just that many players are explicitly skipping that part.
So - what’s missing?
Let’s look at language learning. Say you memorize a bunch of literal sentences. Then you go to a bar and try to hang out with native speakers.
No one would be surprised what they practiced “wasn’t coming out in their conversation” if they hadn’t practiced making their own sentences and free-associating with the vocab they’d learned.
Heck - let’s even take this to a different instrument. Let’s say you practiced a bunch of scales, and even some simple Charlie Parker transcriptions on the horn. Then it came time to solo on a different tune. Nobody would be mystified that they couldn’t solo over Dolphin Dance if all they’d practiced was CP’s solo on one chorus of Confirmation.
But somehow we don’t notice the “missing piece” on drums: practicing improvisation.
And not just unstructured improvisation; improvisation with relevant vocabulary, with guard-rails and increasing degrees of freedom. Improvisation that begins with kernels of exactly what you eventually want to play, then steps you closer to…well - fully improvising…with that stuff.
So why?
I have a couple of pet theories.
One is that drums are less “solo-based”, in that, especially if you don’t play jazz, you can go an entire lifetime just playing the repetitive loops we call “beats”.
Another is that “written out” stuff is easier to teach - a teach has only to improvise in front of a camera or microphone, then hand the recording off to somebody to transcribe, then that goes in the book.
And the third is probably that we like written out stuff more too. It’s less cognitively demanding. More like reading a book and less like writing one.
But around once every few years I have to draw a line in the sand and say “this is what’s killing drummers’ progress”. The culture of courses has evolved from abstract hand exercises to relevant vocabulary, and even improvisation practice with the ideas.
I’m trying, in a small way, to evolve the norms around actually doing that part.
Hope you enjoy!