Thoughts…

From Drummer Issue 94:

Welcome back to another batch of tuition from the team here at Drummer. First of all I’d like to welcome a new member of the team to the pages – Iain Goodall joins us to take us through how to develop the wonderful skill of sight reading – something we can all benefit from improving on, no matter what your current level is. I look forward to working with Iain as much as I do reading and learning from his articles!

Last month I mentioned that we’d look at some ways of improving our practice. I’d like to go back to an approach to practice that I mentioned in DRUMMER 79: The Drummers Skill Set – what do we actually need to do to be able to play the drums well? I have been thinking about this a lot recently as there is so much material out there it’s easy to think that you should be practicing something because you ‘have the book/your teacher told you to/you read Vinnie worked through the whole thing when he was 3 years old’ etc, etc… I think it’s worth really considering applying material that will help you develop the basic set of skills that any drummer, at any stage of their playing, no matter what genre or area of music they want to play, must develop. So here are what I (and these thoughts are only mine, yours may differ) consider the six skills to be and how the contents of these tuition pages might viewed with that in mind:

Whilst this may not be the most obvious breakdown to you (or it might be…!) something that maybe viewed as one person as being a co-ordination exercise as it’s a new concept or pattern, you might be able to play well; you can then use it to focus on technique or tone or time – you need to think laterally with this approach but it can seriously help you focus your practice in a new way. Next month we will look into some simple techniques to improve your practice time. Until then and happy practicing!!

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