Focusing on the Feel

As you’re learning a new beat, it’s important to pay close attention to what the groove feels like as you play. The word feel in music often expresses certain emotions that the music triggers, but in this case I’m talking about the physical sense of the word. What does it actually feel like when you play it?

You can probably make the controller for your T.V. or game console do whatever you want without having to look at it. You know it by feel, which means you can get it to do what you want quickly and without much thought. In drumming, learning the feel of certain patterns makes it a much quicker process when learning new grooves that contain those patterns.

It’s easy to get so caught up in staring at the music on the page that you almost completely ignore the way the groove feels. A great technique to help focus on the feel is to try to play the groove without looking at the music. When you do this, you’re not only imagining the groove in your mind, but you’re forced to focus your thoughts on your body movements. Once you know the feel of the groove, you own it, and the next time it comes around in your drumming endeavors, you’ll be able to reproduce that feel very quickly.

The Art of Listening

If you have the opportunity to listen to the groove you’re trying to learn, this can help you grasp it more quickly. Try to imagine yourself playing the groove as you listen. Listen enough to get the groove “stuck” in your head to the point where you’re able to sound out the groove in your mind without actually having to hear it.

Also, pay close attention to what the groove sounds like as you play it, which is easier said than done. You might find that once you start really listening to yourself play the groove, you fall apart, especially when learning a new groove. Fortunately, we have handy recording gadgets all over the place. Whip out your cell phone and record yourself playing. You’ll often notice things that need to be improved that you couldn’t hear while playing.

Simply listening to a groove is probably not enough to pick up a new beat, especially if it requires some coordinational skills that you haven’t mastered yet. Used in combination with other learning techniques, listening is a powerful learning tool.

Building Muscle Memory

Great drummers all have one thing in common: they’ve played certain licks, combinations and patterns so many times that they’ve developed what’s called muscle memory for those particular movements. Muscle memory is built through repetition and allows a drummer to perform movements without any conscious effort. Have you ever watched a great drummer playing and thought, “He or she makes it look so easy”? It looks easy because it actually is for him or her. There’s no conscious effort because of the muscle memory built.

In this book, there are many coordination exercises, which are designed to gradually improve your coordination by building muscle memory. Each lesson in this book explores a new concept, which builds from the material in the previous lessons. As you work through the book, you’ll find you’re able to learn new beats faster and faster.