First things first - two transcriptions. First, for the “beat algorithm”. Next, for the “switching exercise”.
To the degree anything is a “magnum opus”, that’s today’s video. My “grand unified theory” on improvisation, which is to say “all drumming”.
This has been in the works over 15 years of me “retrofitting” my own playing, and 4 years of coaching students.
A culmination of all the “what’s water” moments (David Foster Wallace anecdote about two fish, one of whom remarks “the water’s lovely today” and the other who replies “what’s water?”), which is to say discovery of things I was taking for-granted that aren’t a given for those just learning to drum.
The sum of my micro-insights from “both sides of the divide” (knowing what it feels like when I feel good playing, knowing what I worked on to get there, and also seeing things through the eyes of students based on their questions, descriptions, and progress) cash out to two big things:
First, mature drummers (“pros” for the algorithm) have a kind of “bubble” around their playing, that insulates them from “mistakes” the way we typically think of them. (“Glitching”, big unintended sounds, feeling “behind your hands”, etc.)
The best analogy I could think of was the “flight envelope protection” modern fly-by-wire airplanes have. (Very short version - they won’t let you crash them.)
Second, you and I can learn to do it too.
There are many things that make great drummers great, and having a unique artistic voice is among them. But we don’t need to be artistic geniuses to teach ourselves to have that protective capsule around our playing, so we can “lean on things”, and our ideas feel insulated from “mistakes”.
**Quick disclaimer - many great drummers will say, in interviews, things like “I make mistakes all the time”, or “you should embrace mistakes”. That’s a bit misleading, imho, since any of these drummers could play a 90-minute set without once “glitching” or doing anything we’d detect as a mistake.
So, how do we do it?
By inverting the conventional understanding of improvisation. In my experience, improvisation is often seen (passive voice) as a place where you lower the guardrails, “embrace the muse”, and hope for the best.
In my opinion, that’s only useful later on. But at the beginning, I like to think “inside out”. Literally build that protective idea-capsule bit-by-bit, and rarely-if-ever play something outside of it.
This has the obvious advantage that we can practice improvising with ideas - rather than repping the same verbatim stuff over and over - while controlling the scope, so we’re always sure we’ve had a lot of reps on anything that might come up.
Finally, I reprise parts of a couple of recent lessons with examples of this type of exercises. Examples you can apply today.
Hope you enjoy!