Practice, practice, practice

Many adult students I have think it is much easier for children to learn a music instrument. Having taught young children before, I can tell you they face the same difficulties as the adults do: learning physical coordination for a unfamiliar form of movement, learning how to read music and think in the music language (especially the counts). I see them struggle the same way we adults do.

The main advantages children have, compared to us, are:

1. They are used to struggling to learn anything. They have just learned how to walk, they are in the midst of learning languages and maybe even mathematics and all that. Everything was a struggle, they learned nothing effortlessly. We adults are used to knowing what we are doing, and sometimes the struggle of learning new things catches us by surprise. Sometimes we let that overwhelm us into thinking things are more difficult than they actually are. Nope, they are not. You want to know what’s difficult? A young child learning English. That is so difficult it is a miracle that some people succeed!
2. They have fewer demands on their time. It’s easier to get kids to practice an hour a day, or even more. We have to juggle practice with work, family and church. That is why I respect those people who make themselves available to serve at church even at a moment’s notice. Every church needs a few of those in-case-of-emergency-break-glass people. It is a big deal in my eyes! 
3. They also have parents to pay for the music lessons for them. Admit it, people. No matter how much you currently earn, you would still rather someone else pay for your music lessons and buy you your first instrument, right?

But since we are adults, like it or not, we’ll just have to make do with the time and resources we currently have. What then can we do to best optimize our limited practice time?

Keep turning up for lessons.

Over the years I’ve seen many people will cancel a lesson if they have not been practicing. By now I have taught even more adults than children, and I know with absolute certainty these people end up not practicing in the long run. This just doesn’t work.

You people know I don’t do a prima donna thing or throw tantrums during lessons if you don’t measure up. If you don’t get things right I will tell you, but I still try to show the fruit of the Spirit during lessons. I also pace out the lesson contents so that as long as you keep turning up for lessons you WILL improve, even if you don’t practice. And if you are having any difficulty getting the hang of any particular lesson, lesson time gives me a better chance to figure out what is actually going on and to help you work your way around your difficulties.

So keep turning up!

Important point – when it comes to drums, turning up for lessons is even more important than for other instruments such as piano. Playing drums is a very physical activity, and if you are intending to practice a lot by yourself I need to keep an eye on you to make sure you are not picking up any bad habits.

Fit practice into your lifestyle

I was always the weird guy in secondary school; I carried a pair of drumsticks in my school bag every day. It didn’t help my dating life, but I certainly got a lot of practice done! I have heard of people who work for themselves, and when they want to learn guitar or keyboard they actually keep those instruments in their offices and squeeze in some practice during their lunchtime or during quieter afternoons.

Doing the same for drums is of course a challenge, but there are still things we can do to get more practice done. A pair of sticks and a drum pad allows us to practice our single strokes and all that even on long bus journeys. Listening to a metronome app on your phone while tapping your feet helps you develop your sense of tempo even further. And any time you get to sit down for a couple of minutes, on a train journey or waiting for your food at a restaurant, is an opportunity to train your limb coordination with the ABC drill.

Don’t think you can practice effectively only if you have the proper drum set at home. In my generation, most drum students didn’t have supportive parents or easy access to equipment, so we would make do with drum sticks on the phone book (Yellow Pages), or set up cushions on the family sofa just to have something to bang on. It actually allowed us to focus on getting our movement correct (wrist, not arm) instead of getting distracted by all the bells and whistles on the drum kit. 

Those improvised practice sets could not totally replace practicing on the actual drums, but they made sure that by the time we could sit down there to practice, we could practice just what we needed the kit for. No point trying out advanced snare and tom patterns if you can’t even manage your sticks correctly, agree?

Focus on the foundations

As I just said, there is no point trying out advanced snare and tom patterns if you don’t manage your sticks properly. The foundations of drumming are still essential and you still need to keep practicing them (I still do).

1. Basic stick control (drum rudiments).
2. Hand-foot coordination; and
3. Counting (music pulse).

All these can be practiced with 2 chairs, a cushion (or drum pad) and a pair of sticks. When you start practicing fills you can get away with using 2 drum pads (to simulate the hi-hat and the snare). The point is that you have to show yourself faithful with the little first before you can be entrusted with much. We are now at the point of the lessons when we are learning drum fills and how to apply them. Your hands have to move from the hi-hat to the snare, the toms and the crash cymbal. If you will still continue to practice those foundational skills you will find all of the other stuff you are learning now much easier.

So do not despise doing the paradiddle exercise I taught you in the first lesson. I still practice that myself to maintain my basic coordination and stick work!

I hope all these thoughts help you get more out of your practice from now on. See you at the next lesson! 

Videos? No Competition

Some days I still get awestruck at the sheer volume of music teaching available on Youtube. If you price each lesson at $20, the total price of what has been shared there is well over the millions, of that I am certain. Sometimes I bemoan the fact that Youtube wasn’t available during my early days of learning music. If it was I would probably be 3-4 times better than I am now!

That said, however, the fact remains: you will ALWAYS need drum teachers, teaching face-to-face, live and in person. Even video conference lessons aren’t good enough, especially for beginners, for teaching the basics and foundations of drumming.

Why? Because drumming is a very physical art. A typical beginner starts with very poor kinaesthetic awareness. In plain English, most people aren’t very aware of where their limbs are, doing what and when. And that is why you people keep hearing me go like this during lessons:

“Use wrist…”

“Less elbow…’

“Wrist…”

“Shins 90 degrees to the ground”

“Wrist…”

“Wrist…”

"Elbows more to the front…”

“Wrist…”

Because drumming is very physical, you all need immediate feedback and correction when you are doing things incorrectly. Bad habits are hard to break, and they affect not only your playing but also your physical health. That is why I start our lessons off with warm-ups that improve your joint mobility. These exercises help rehab your arm joints before modern life messes them up for you, and help prevent problems such as carpal tunnel syndrome.

If you have difficulty coordinating your footwork with your hands, I have to prompt you during your practice as well, either by demo-ing before you in mirror image, or even by gently prodding your limbs with a drumstick here and there.

During every lesson I am also listening carefully to your playing and counting. I am listening out for hints of where you are unsure of the counts. If your counting is hazy, your playing will be hazy too. I change tempo on the metronome often to check for this as well. I don’t want you to end up being able to play beats or fills at only a few speeds and totally messing up at other speeds.

Many beginners mentally miss out the very last eighth-note count (quaver) of the bar. When that happens it affects your fills. I’ve heard countless wannabes who speed up the tempo after every drum fill. 80%-90% of the time it is because they mentally shaved off that final count of that bar, bringing the start of the next bar even sooner. So the song gets more rushed as it goes along.

Most of the time this is merely irritating to trained musicians. But playing drums for church has become more musically demanding over the past 10 years. Songs like “Beautiful One” by Tim Hughes or “Hosanna” by Hillsong are quite unforgiving; you have to get the tempo correct and maintain it for the whole song, or the worship leaders and the congregation can end up struggling to sing those songs properly.

That is all part and parcel of learning what it means to count, to establish and build upon the pulse of the music.

We are also starting to see the connection between what we sing and what we play on the drums, especially with what I call the “Stand-by-me beat”. This is my biggest value-aid: I teach drums based on what best supports the worship leader and the congregation. This is when counting aloud in earlier exercises start to pay off. The connection we established between your mouth and your limbs will help you match your drumming with the singing.

That makes your drumming a better support for the singing. I worked with drummers whose playing was based more on whatever funky grooves caught their fancy rather than what helped the singing. No matter how good they are, their playing would mechanical and disconnected at best. Very often the playing was distracting, making it hard for the congregation and worship leader to pay proper attention to what they are singing.. Of course I could tell such drummers what to play, but they would easily forget and go back to playing distracting stuff. The musicality was not built into them at the very beginning, so it got more difficult to add that in later on.

So this is what we are studying at this stage of your journey. Work hard on all this material now; we will soon be moving on to things you will actually be playing on the drums for worship.

See you at the next lesson!

Your Drum Journey

Congratulations on starting your adventure into the world of drums! It will be challenging, confusing and yet satisfying, I assure you. Just so you know, here is the big picture for your drum lessons for the next 3-5 lessons. You will start learning the 3 foundations of playing drums, which are 

1. basic stick control; 
2. hand-foot coordination; and 
3. counting (music pulse).

1) Basic stick-control

What’s the difference between just banging out rhythms on tables and walls (teenage boys do that all the time) and actually playing on the full drum kit? On the kit your playing has to be expressed through drumsticks. If you do not learn how to control the sticks properly, everything you do through your hands on the drums will be flawed. Once you have to play challenging stuff the flaws will become obvious.

So we aim to get some basic stick control first. Correct holding, correct wrist movement and all that. We all start with one hand weaker than the other, and the basic stick drills I teach will help you even it out for both hands and get both hands better. 

It is important to do this from the get-go. I’ve seen way too many people think they can skip this stage at the beginning. By the time they have to work on it properly the bad habits are too strong, it is very painful to fix. I’ve had to undo my bad habits for piano and drums before, and I know: it’s much easier to get things correct the first time!

2) Hand-foot coordination

This is the alphabet of drumming. They are not complex, but most normal people aren’t very well coordinated. The first few lessons help you build new connections within your brain, so that when new patterns and combinations come up your body is already primed to do them. You will also develop independence between your right hand and right foot. This is one of the trademarks of someone who has taken proper drum lessons before. 

3) Counting

This is about taking the pulse, the beat of the music, and knowing where everything you do on the drums fits in. People who are hazy about that are hazy in their drumming. Even worse, they are unable to adapt when the tempo of a song changes.

I’ve been involved with the worship ministry for about 20 years by now, and sat through countless practices and auditions. I was once in the middle of playing a song (to audition someone on another instrument) when halfway through someone sat down behind the drums and tried to play along. He totally messed up because he could only play in one time-signature (don’t worry if you don’t know yet what that is) and the song I was doing was in a different one. 

If he had ever learned how to count, how to discern the pulse of the music, he would have either been able to create on the spot something that can fit, or he would have known what little he knew didn’t fit and not messed up the song for other people. When it was his turn to audition, the other musicians started off at one tempo, and when he started playing the drums he couldn’t latch on to their tempo to support them. He immediately dragged the music down to the tempo he knew. Now imagine him doing that for pretty much every song the band tries to do on a Sunday morning… 

If he had been taught to count he would not have messed things up in the first place. But he never learned how to count. You can never say such people are rusty in their skills, they never had the skills in the first place! 

Counting is vital. The drummer has one job in the band – to count. He or she has to count musically, to count dynamically, but to count. A drummer who cannot count is no drummer at all. And problems in any of the basics cannot be handled with a few tips and pointers during band rehearsals, they have to dealt with one-on-one in proper music lessons. 

Adaptability

In the end, the goal of proper basics is to give you the ability to adapt. Without proper basics, “drummers” can play slow, they can play fast, but cannot manage anything in between. Without proper basics, drummers can play soft, they can play bleeding-from-ears-loud, but cannot manage anything in between. The basics are very important.

Final note: don’t try to find shortcuts around what I teach you. Everything I teach now, and the way I teach now, is to prepare you for everything you’ll need to know for the next 4-6 months. If you come back to this post in a few months time you’ll understand on a deeper level what I am talking about here. 

See you at the next lesson! 

One of My Students

(Personal blog post)

One of my students is this little Malay Muslim kid.

He's a bright and excitable fellow, somewhat emo and angsty at times, but that's common these days. It makes teaching him the conventional way somewhat impossible, so lessons with him are more about giving more music and playing exposure rather than explaining to him the nuts-and-bolts of music in a way other 7-year-olds can understand.

He says the darnedest things. One day, in the midst of the lesson he said "We worship the normal God; you Chinese worship the Chinese God". I wanted to ask him "Are you saying that my God is not normal?" but decided that he wasn't quite ready for such exercises in logic. I wasn't offended by what he said, I found it amusing and cute.

Well, he IS only seven, right?

Recently I was working with him on a song that was stored in the keyboard he was using. Kalinka, a Russian folk song. He really enjoyed it, I guess all kids would have fun with the mood changes within one song! Just to give him some perspective, I went over to Youtube on my phone and dug up a video for him.



He pretty much went crazy over this video, and kept watching it over and over again. I was commenting to his dad that he may one day grow up to have a fetish for Russian women. His dad took a look at that video and then told me, "It's OK. There are Muslims over in Russia. It does mean, however, that one day you may get an invitation to a wedding held in Siberia..."

By this time, however the kid in question had already moved on to other videos, such as this one...

There's something weird about seeing an army of Russian soldiers passionately singing about snowberries and raspberries, right?

Anyway, that's some of the stuff that comes out during my day-to-day teaching. *shrug* I can't say life is boring!