Drum Exercises, Metronomes and Beginners Luck

I have been playing drums now for like 20-30mins a day for a year. I can do some stuff but I am still beginning. I don’t read music, I don’t have a teacher. I have an mp3 player… and patience. A lot of information is on the ‘net and there are a lot of different techniques which are taught but few seem to really help me improve beyond the basics. I did however find a couple videos recently from Aaron Bland which are really helping.

Two things of note. First I started (as with most I am sure) playing match grip. It seemed most natural yet I yearned for some reason to play traditional grip. I think it was a statement by Neil Peart regarding his switch to trad. grip (at Freddie Gruber’s prompting) after many years which inspired me to wonder about learning it too.

Secondly, while speed is important I am finding that I really want to get my technique in shape, hence the never-ending quest for instruction on the ‘net. The hardest part is filtering the wheat from the chaff when searching, as there are a lot of people teaching ways-to-improve-this-and-that which are perhaps a little lacking.

I have found that it is a split between watching videos and listening, over and over, to music. Neil Peart is an excellent example of quality as he brings a level of calm to the mix, which I have taken as inspiration to find a quiet place in my mind while I sit at a kit, but the music of Rush was created as a complete unit, so trying to take drum pointers from their music is, well, hard, as the percussion is an constructed as an accompaniment to a larger piece and I get a “Doesn’t play well with others” feel from it, so I leave the music from Rush as auditory splendor and move on to finding technique inspiration form others.

Johnny Fay of the band “The Tragically Hip” falls into the category of drummers I like to listen to. The Hip has a great style, and while I like their music a lot, I love the drumming a lot more. Classic beats, great tempos, and stuff which I can work on. The beats have a bit more soul in them for me. Groove, if you will. I find that I want to toe-tap when listening to The Hip and that puts me is a space where I want to play.

Just a side note, both Peart and Fay are Canadians, eh? Fellas, if either of you are ever in Vancouver, look me up so I can take you for dinner as a thank you for the inspiration!

Back to the reason for this post now. When searching for information, best practices state that you look for patterns that emerge from samples of data. Metronomes are one of those things that pop up continually, so I have been working more and more with my metronome to get my timing better. The hard thing about metronomes for me isn’t getting the time right, but rather finding something which is natural to play along to the constant Bing!, blip, blip, blip, Bing!, blip, blip, blip. The is where a video from Aaron Bland came to the rescue.

8th Note Placement is something I can finally use with the metronome and play without getting bored beyond belief in 2 minutes. This has the benefit of getting me some quality time with the metronome as well as giving me some tools to help me learn to mimic the sounds which I like most from the drums so thanks to you too Aaron. Although you aren’t a Canadian drummer, I will buy you dinner too if you ever stray north of the border :)