A little test:

Here is a little test you can do to show you a little about how your brain is wired. First, play a medium tempo song and clap upbeat 16th notes. Most people will tap their foot on the downbeats while clapping the upbeat notes because that’s how their "paths" in the brain are set up to play them. They use their ears to hear where the downbeat is to tap their foot and they use there logical brain to work out where the upbeat notes are in relationship to where their foot is tapping. Therefore, the only thing really "connected" to the music is their foot that is tapping on the downbeat - the upbeat notes are all produced internally through logical "routes" in the brain and are not "grooving" to the music. The goal is to be able to hear the music and hear where the upbeats are without any other information going on. Now this leads to an idea about independence.

Independence: These days drummers are practicing like crazy to get that holy grail of total independence. There are a ton of books where you play a repeating pattern with one or more limbs and then read a ton of other rhythms with your other limb/limbs. First a note on my personal philosophy on this, in my opinion, the goal is to create a great sound from your rhythms that sound good together, not to have different limbs playing unrelated rhythms for the sake of athletics. But either way you choose to approach this, there is a huge problem with the way most of us practice gaining this and it has to do with the test I mentioned above. When I was younger I would come up with crazy exercises where I would have one limb playing patterns in one time signature, another limb in a different time signature and the other 2 limbs would play a completely different time signature (I could never do that now.) But there is an issue with this. Let’s use an example from my youth; I would play a simple pattern with my right hand and left foot and then read a book that had left hand and right foot patterns in it. Now lets use the example from the test above and say I was reading a line of upbeat 16th notes. I would use my logical brain to figure out where those notes were placed in relationship to what my right hand was doing to produce that rhythm. So what I created was a route/pathway in my brain where the upbeat notes in my left hand and right foot are produced by where they fall in relationship to my other limbs--this is all internal in my brain and has little to do with the sound I was making or where these upbeat notes were in relationship to the music. You have to hear where the notes go first and then produce them by hearing them in relationship to the music, not by where they land in conjunction with your other limbs. If you are producing all your notes by all of four limbs by how they sound in relationship to the sound, you will be playing on a very high level. How do you practice this? First you must work on your rhythm in general. Just turn on a song you like and start improvising broken up rhythms between your limbs. Just listen to the music and listen to what you are doing and how that fits in. You will notice right away what rhythms give you trouble and concentrate on those. It takes time -stay relaxed. To work on the actual independence thing, remember to always improvise. Say you want to work on your jazz independence, turn on a jazz album and play along. Get the right hand playing the jazz pattern and then try just playing around with your left hand and right foot.

VERY IMPORTANT: While doing this, just try to play freely with your left hand and right foot and if your right hand changes the pattern, who cares! That’s what happens in actual music. When I was young I would play the strict jazz pattern with my right hand and keep it that way -unchanging- while reading exercises with my other limbs, but again from the first part of this page, that’s not what happens in real music, so why practice doing that? Eventually as your rhythm gets better, you will be able to do that anyway so there is no need to force it. By forcing it to remain strict and unchanging you are forcing your logical brain to become involved in the inner workings of what you are doing and you do not want that because it slows things down and distracts you from what you need to be paying attention to… the sound you are making and how that relates to the music.