I will use this page to explain my concept of playing and how to become a better player.  I think a lot of drummers spend way too much time practicing stuff that won't make them any better of a player, and then wonder why somebody who never practices can play better.

First, a little history about me - I will try to keep this short.  Growing up, I wanted to be an artist (you know, the pencil and paper thing), but when I got into high school, art wasn't pulling in the girls, so when I turned 15, I got a bass and spent about a year trying to learn that.  Problem was, I wanted to learn Iron Maiden songs, but my teacher would only teach me Mary had a little Lamb.  One of my friend’s bands needed a drummer, so I switched to drums.  And so began, the years of practicing.  Side note- I have also always been fascinated with how the brain works and learns, so I was always reading books on the subject.  I would spend hours and hours practicing from books and every combination of exercises I could think of.  I would come up with crazy exercises like playing odd time signatures with one hand and then reading other time signatures with my other limbs.  I could do a lot of stuff, drummers who heard me practice would say "that dude can play", but still no one ever accused me of "grooving" and when I played in a group, I could never really play a lot of my ideas.

Then I went to Berklee and went down the practice room monster type route even more.  I was reading a ton of books about learning and the brain and coming up with elaborate systems of mind games to use while I practiced, with still the same result I as before, --great in the practice room and not so great on stage.  A lot of people are thinking now "you just needed to play more with people."  Which is true, but what I want to explain here is how we learn and think and how that affects our playing.  One of the greatest things about being at Berklee was that I could watch what all the drummers practiced and then see how they played on stage.  There were over 600 drummers there, so it was a unique study experiment.  Anyway, I kept watching, studying and practicing and by the end of my Berklee experience, I could do a whole bunch of things on the drums, but was no where near where I wanted to be as a drummer.  I took about a year and a half off... away from playing.  Not really by choice, more like, life just got in the way (it happens as you get older.)  When I started to play again, all of that studying about learning and watching other drummers practice, all of that information just clicked and it all made sense why I hadn't achieved my drumming goals.  That’s what I will attempt to explain here.

First we must agree to a couple things.

1. Talent: A lot of people use this to describe why some people can play an instrument so well.  The problem with this idea is it has no use in helping us become a better player. You cannot prove it exists.  You can only state that some people seem to play the drums with a lot less effort while others try really hard to learn and play poorly.  I could just as easily say that there is a magic little green gremlin that lives in people who can play instruments well and he is what gives them their ability--he just disappears if you try to find him.  What I will explain here is that people who seem to have this magic "talent" just learn the drums(or any music) a certain way naturally and that we can all learn an instrument this way, but most of us don't.

2. Commitment: A lot of people will watch a great pianist and say "I wish I could do that."  What they really mean is, "I wish I could press a button and just be able to play like that without the years of practice."  To play an instrument to a high level takes a lot of work, and most people aren't willing to put in that work.  But if you are willing to work, there is no reason you cannot become truly "great." The problem again is most of us spend our time learning and thinking incorrectly.

3. We are all different: Some people think Neil Peart is the greatest drummer ever, some think Travis Barker is the cat’s paddadles.  Others will go for Vinnie or Dave---whatever. While some people may marvel at Virgil Donati, there true ambition is to play for Blink182.  We all have different tastes and we all learn at different rates.  The problem is, that if you aren't learning something correctly, you have no chance at ever succeeding at it.  Playing music is not that magical.  Some people are more creative than others and will have more ideas(there are exercises for that too, but that’s not what this article is about) --but what I want to get across to you is: anybody who puts in the correct effort, can become truly great at their instrument.

The Basic Principle of Learning

Ok, so after all my years of reading I came to this basic conclusion as to how the brain learns and uses information.  Basically, the brain acts as a connecter of information received from the senses.  Once 2 bits of information are received from 2 different sources, we learn something.  Then when we use that information, our brain spits it out the same way we learned it.  We can also connect information to previously learned information.  The way this applies to learning a musical instrument is that you have to learn to play based on the sound you are making and then connect the sound you are making to the sound other people are making, both rhythmically and melodically.  Now your probably saying "huh?" (that’s probably because I am not the best writer)..but let me demonstrate this with some examples:

On our very first drum lesson, you walk in and there is "Stick Control" --the teacher says, when you see "R", hit the drum with your right hand.  When you see "L", hit the drum with your left hand and count saying "1-e-&-a".  So what happens in our brain is this - we have visual information coming with the notes and the "RL"s, we have some logical information going on(R=Right hand ect), we have the counting and speaking information, and movement information (the actual hitting the drum part.) All of this gets connected in your brain into a "route" to complete the task. The more you do this exercise, the stronger this "route" becomes.

There is something very important missing in all of that mental processing. At no point are we directly using the information from our ears to complete the task.  Now, some people, will naturally use their ears but most will not. You may say, "of course I am using my ears, how could I not?"  Well, there is no doubt that you hear what you are playing, but you are not using that "ear information" to complete the task.  This is not a 100% complete scenario.  Either way, people will use various amounts of their "ear information" to play their instrument, but we are a highly visual society and for the most part, our "ear information" is not used to evaluate pitch and rhythm.

This is one of the most important things to understand as a musician.  To create music on any instrument, you must play it based on the sound you are making...not motor skills you have learned.  This is a tricky thing to explain, but you must learn to really hear what your are playing instead of logically thinking of something and spitting it up using motor skills and logical information.  Let me give you a real life example of 2 different students that want to learn the same fill.  Student A asks me what sticking to use and what drums to hit, then uses his logical brain to produce that fill (this hand goes there on 1, this hand there on 2 ect)...while student B sits at the drum set and tries to imitate the sound he hears, but is a little confused about one part so I show him that part.  Then once he realizes what to do, he goes back to trying to produce the sound he heard.  Student B has been playing for a much shorter time and is much better.

Have you ever noticed that when you are playing with a group and everything is fine, then you go for a fill and get lost coming out of it?  A lot of that has to do with the way you learned it.  A lot of us will play along to music for fun, but then get down to practicing and learning some new beats and fills.  We will learn a fill using all of our logic skills (first hit this drum on 1, then hit that drum on 2, then your foot...)  The problem comes when we go to play the fill, we spit out the fill the same way we learned it, not using our ears.  It's almost as if you turn off your ears to play the fill and then when the fill is over, your ears turn back on abruptly and your thrown back into the music and that can lead to the train wreck.

A problem a lot of drummers have is rushing or dragging.  This has everything to do with the lack of involvement of your ears when you are playing.  To give an example, when students would come in and say they were having this problem, I would sit down and play along to a song and ask them to tell me when I was rushing.  They would notice right away when I was speeding up, pretty interesting.  The basic problem is their brain is so caught up in the logical, mental gymnastics of playing the instrument, that they really were not listening to themselves or the band.  They were hearing them, but not producing their part based on what they were hearing.  I would always get students who would say right after this little demonstration "of course I am listening."  I would question them with, "you just proved you could hear when the drums were speeding up but when you play, you claim you cannot hear this?"  When you say that, it obviously doesn't make any logical sense, but again we must remember that the brain spits up info the same way it learns it. If you spend all of your time learning using your logical skills then when you sit down to play, your brain uses those learned logical skills to produce your playing and your ear is simply not involved.  That's why people can't hear if they are rushing or dragging.

A huge problem with most drummers is the elusive "GROOVE".  How do you groove?  There are tons of books on it explaining exercises to make you groove.  People will tell you to play the same beat for hours to a metronome and that will make you groove.  Again the problem lies in how you produce your grooves.  If you learned all of your grooves using your logical brain, your brain is caught up in all that logical mental thought while you are playing and not concentrating on what it needs to be concentrating on.  What sound am I making and how does that sound with the band?  Once you learn how to  hear yourself and shut off all those logical routes and pathways you used to learn with, playing a groove becomes effortless.

The Brain is very powerful and can figure out all of the little stuff.

Not realizing this is one of the biggest mistakes we make when learning to play. I used to spend hours and hours working on technique, stickings, counting ect.  The huge problem is when you are working on stuff like that you are using your logical brain which in reality is pretty slow.  Instead of working on stickings and counting, you need to be working on making the sounds you want to make and staying relaxed.  Your ears are way better at figuring out the technique to use than your logical brain is and it can do it effortlessly on the fly.

Time

Have you ever heard a great drummer screw up but it did not affect the time?  That’s simply because they are listening to the music.  Think about it, if you are listening to a song on the radio, and you never stop really listening to it, how can you get lost or break the time?  The other musicians are giving it to you.  You just have to listen to it.  It goes back to the whole ear thing.  When our ears aren't involved, especially in fills, we get thrown back into the music as if we just got back into the room.  Think of it this way- Say I put a poll at one end of the room and said run as fast as you can and go touch that poll.  Pretty easy, but what if I put a blindfold on you and then pulled it off at the last second.  You would think you knew where you were but you would probably be a bit off of where you thought you were and this would make you do a second take to see where the pole was.  You would have probably stopped running for a second. Where as when you were not blindfolded, you ran without a problem right towards the pole.  It is the exact same thing when we use our logical brains to produce fills.  Our ears aren't involved- almost like we willfully blindfolded them.  Then when we are done with the fill the blindfold comes off and were not quite where we thought we were and that’s when we screw up.  If your ears never shut off and you screw up, you always know where you are and the time never stops and you can just jump on it again without skipping a beat because you never lost it.

Counting is evil!!!

I remember when I took piano lessons briefly as a child.  I was playing a piece perfectly without counting and the teacher said that I needed to count out load. Counting can be used to learn how something should sound if you have never seen a certain rhythmic figure before, but once you count it out and hear what it sounds like, you have accomplished the task.  When you are playing on a high level, you are not counting. A lot of people will argue with me about this.  The common argument is that you need to count to get to a point of not counting.  But hear is the problem if you remember the basic principle of learning, when you learn using counting, you are using your logical brain and you create connections that create a "route".  Whenever you repeat those actions the "route" gets stronger and it doesn't magically transfer over and that is a huge problem we have in learning anything.

Problem - In order to achieve a goal we often do stuff other than work on what are goal really is.

Imagine a field where one half is grassy and one half is filled with dense thorn bushes. Then lets say there are 2 farmers that want to build a path through the dense thorn bushes for there cattle.  Farmer A says, "well, in order to get ready to cut my path I am going to cut a path through the grassy field to practice and get really good at cutting paths- then when I get to the dense part it will be really easy."  Then farmer B says "I need to have a path through the dense thorn bushes, so I am just going to start cutting a path through the thorn bushes."  As the farmer A cuts his path through the grassy part he gets really good at just digging the path, while farmer B gets really good at cutting through dense thorn bushes and digging his path.  Now at the end of the day, Farmer B is halfway through the dense thorn bushes and has really gotten the hang of cutting through thorn bushes and digging, while Farmer A has finished his trail in the grassy part and is just going to start on the dense thorn bushes.  Problem is, while he was practicing his digging, he has no experience with cutting thorn bushes while farmer B has now got a full days worth of experience with thorn bushes and digging plus he has half his path done.  This seems really stupid, but we do this all the time.  I did it for years, I would go out and see players like Dave Weckl play and then in an attempt to gain that kind of facility I would go and practice every combination I could think of yet that’s not what I heard.  What I heard were a few great sounding combinations that sounded great within the music but I went home to work on something completely different.

OK, so know what?

First thing is just realizing that you have to change your thinking.  Just by trying to listen to what you are doing and realizing that you can, you will start to make a change in the right direction.  When you practice, try to do things based on what they sound like and not what sticking you are using.  Try to squelch any logical thoughts about your playing and just listen.  This takes awhile and it's not like playing exercises.  When you are going through books and stuff, it's easy to feel like you’ve accomplished something.  "Today I completed exercises 1-10."  But when you are really learning correctly it seems slower.  It takes a lot longer to hear a fill and try to imitate a sound than it does to go through ten exercises in a book.  At the end of the day you have a fill that really sounds good because you make a choice to play something because of how it sounds and then you reproduce that based on the sound you are making.

Whenever you practice, play along to music...ALWAYS.  I will pick certain things to work on  when I play a song such as left hand ideas on the hi-hat ect.  Remember, when you are playing along to music, you can practice technique, but it's even better.  You are practicing the exact technique you will need to play your ideas.  If you like a certain drummer that is way above your ability, play along to their music.  Just play simpler stuff and eventually you will start to hear certain things and will be able to pull them off ... trust me.

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