A sine wave shaped staircase

Any practicing musician knows that continuous practice over long periods of time will resemble a sine wave shaped staircase, with varying frequency. You experience good days and bad days, sometimes also clustered into good streaks and bad ones. Never has this been clearer to me than today when I am in my fourth year of daily drum practice of one single song: Bleed by Meshuggah. Any normal person´s gut reaction will probably be that a bad day feels like a failure. But a couple of weeks ago I realized that those bad days are the most important days of all. Because they reveal the truth. They show you what you can really do, without any sugar coating. Tonight, with a high fever, sleep depravation and a severe man-cold is a wonderful day for drum practice. Tonight, I will learn how far (or close) I really am to the goal of nailing this song.

I started to write this blog post as soon as I got the idea. But before I publish it, I will head out to my drum studio and record the song, to get a proper reference point. The results will be added in a Youtube link at the end of the post. The past couple of months, I have been practicing the song at various speeds from 80% of the original up to 100% occasionally. If you want to really learn a song, the best approach I know of is the “Never make a mistake” method. It means that when learning a new song, you reduce the tempo until you can play the song (in slow motion if necessary) flawlessly. And then you increase slowly, until you reach full speed. The process can take months or, as in my case, years, depending on the difficulty level of the song of course.

A little explanation of the title might be appropriate here. The sine wave shape, I think you understand by now. With the second – staircase – part of the description, I mean that we all, including mr Tomas Haake himself, have a weak spot. There is always some part of the song that you can’t play as well as all the others. When you find out which part that is, I recommend you give it the “Never make a mistake” treatment for a couple of weeks or months until you get it. The only thing that inevitably will happen then, is that the weak link in your chain will be replaced by some other link elsewhere. And you give that one the same treatment for a couple of weeks… and start over in a third place. And so, it continues ad infinitum. Albeit with a progressively shrinking return on investment. In my case, the target is to play the song with no or only minor errors. But it could also be to play the song with twirling sticks thrown into the air. The latter would probably add another year or two to the process. We’ll see about that. But anyway, now you see the staircase description as well. It literally requires you to bang your head against the wall for a very long time and then suddenly it gives, and you can step up to the next plateau and repeat the process. And the higher you climb on the staircase, the longer you must work between each level-up. Exactly like grinding XP in an RPG game.

Anyway, let’s do it. Now I am heading out to my garage to record myself. The results are given below.