When I practise musical instruments, I always select the most difficult song I can imagine. The primary reason is that it will ruthlessly reveal your biggest weakness to you. Then, enlightened, I simply focus on that specific weakness for weeks, months or even years until I discover the next weakness. This past month, I made a wonderful discovery in my drum practice (I started in 2019). Finally, I could easily tell that my left hand was my weakest link.
Read MoreFive weeks ago, on day 1539 of learning Bleed, I doubled my efforts in drum playing from 15 minutes per day to 30 minutes per day. Up until the 9th of October, it felt as if I had almost stagnated for about 6-9 months. It is very nice to see the results now and wow, what a difference it made to increase the efforts. For the past 36 days I have finally felt steady progress again. I suspect that after 4-5 years of daily practice I had reached a skill level on the drums where 15 minutes just isn’t enough to advance anymore. It’s an interesting observation because I have seen similar patterns in my professional life.
Read MoreMostly, it is very easy to do the weekly brain dump that is my blog. Tonight, I feel rather empty. Strange. But it is the same pattern with my daily musical exercise. Some days are just totally off. The solution is fortunately extremely easy. Just do the task anyway. I am just too critical of myself and even if this will be my worst post so far, it will still be 1000X better than no piece at all. The unconditional importance of carrying on cannot be overstated. Besides, these worst days are the best and most important. They will ruthlessly reveal how good of a writer, or drummer or whatever you are. No-one cares what you can do on a good day. It is the bad day that counts. Don’t practice to win, if you want to become very good at something. Practice until you never fail instead.
Read MoreWhen I became active on social media a couple of years ago, I discovered the phenomenon of so called “haters”. They exist both in real life and online, but it sure seems as if they are more common online. The pattern often repeats like this, the first weeks or months (depending on your virality), the comments section usually becomes active with people who try to bring you down. My best example is when I have been documenting my progress of learning how to play the drums. Negative comments were more common in the first year, but from year two and onwards, it feels as if they have vanished. I guess it is not that fun to harass someone who couldn’t care less even if he tried.
Read MoreAny 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.
Read MoreWhen I decide to do something, I often become obsessed. The perfect example is when I decide to learn to play the drums and chose Bleed by Meshuggah as my first song. This is arguably one of the most difficult metal songs ever written, and thus I thought that it must be the perfect place to start for obsessed beginners like me. If you learn a song on the very edge of what is possible, any other (normal) song becomes a walk in the park, right?
Read MoreI always practice a musical instrument 15 minutes per day and have been doing it every day for the past seven years. In these years I have been experimenting with the optimal practice time, and I have tried all of them. What I have found, is that a habit like this works best first thing in the morning. When you open your eyes after a night’s sleep, your mind is fresh and feels like a blank slate. As the day goes on, more and more ideas enter your mind. And at the end of the day, the mind is so full of thoughts and ideas that a night’s sleep is needed to crystalize them, so that the process can start over the next day. That’s why I have found the morning hours to work best, but there are also other factors to consider.
Read MoreIt is now 24 months since I decided to learn Bleed by Meshuggah on the drums, as a beginner drummer. This is a totally crazy project, because it is arguably one of the most difficult metal songs ever written. It is also one of the best, and a personal favorite. I can now play all the parts of the song one by one, in somewhat lower tempo. It took almost two years to just understand the riffs. But now the next phase begins, which I call “The Grind”. It is the final push to connect all riffs together and bring the tempo up to the original speed. And paradoxically, this is the easiest part of the whole process!
Read MoreWhen I was a kid, I watched the movie Karate Kid where young Daniel wants to learn Karate and gets old Karate master mr Miyagi to train him. Miyagi lets Daniel clean and polish his cars using the “wax on, wax off” motion. He also lets him clean a terrace and pain a fence, always using special motions with his hands when appying the wax, paint or cleaning water. All in all, Daniel spends lots and lots of time with these activities until he finally snaps and goes furious – “When are you going to teach me Karate?!” It turns out, that is precisely what he has done. The special movements Daniel used in the activities are important Karate moves, and by doing restoration and renovation work, they have just killed two birds with one stone. A lot of works has been done, and Daniel now has the correct movements in his muscle memory.
Read MoreI started playing the drums in July 2019 and am in my second year now of daily practice. First and foremost, I would consider myself a guitar player because I have played for more hours on the axe than on any other instrument. If you already know one instrument, it will be easier for you to learn a second, even easier to learn your third and so on. Mastery on multiple instruments is comparable to polyglots who speak several languages. It gets easier and easier to acquire a new one, the more you already know. In this post, I will focus on how some important lessons I have learned in my drumming. Some techniques translate well from the guitar, and others do not translate at all.
Read MoreBack in 2012, a friend of mine asked me if I would like to come along to a concert with Tommy Emmanuel. I had never heard about the guy, but apparently, he was some kind of world class acoustic guitarist that was touring in my hometown Umeå. I said sure, it is always fun to expand one’s musical horizon. I went to the concert with zero expectations and it turned out to be one of the best things I have experienced in my life. Tommy Emmanuel is an absolute genius and a treasure of a human being. The things he creates with his guitar does not resemble anything else I have ever heard. He is the literal definition of a one-man band. In his own words: “When I was a kid, I wanted to be in show business. Now, I just want to be in the happiness business. I make music, and you get happy. That's a good job.” I don’t know of anyone who does a better job at that, than Tommy Emmanuel.
Read MoreLast year I attended an online course called the London Real Business Accelerator. The course had a strong focus on video and its importance for online business. A recurring theme throughout the whole course was to record vlogs. I believe most of you will agree with me that it is a strange and scary feeling to speak into a smart phone and publish it to the whole world forever. One of the tasks the first course week was to record 10 vlogs in 10 days. And on the 5th of November last year I recorded my first vlog. I had just finished an awfully long field day of measurements in the south of Sweden and had gotten into my rental car about to head back home. But I knew that I needed to record that vlog before I go, because it was late in the evening. So, after a LOT of resistance, I grabbed my phone and started talking about the thoughts that were in my head at that moment and published it on Youtube and shared the link on my other platforms. I did not stop at 10 vlogs, I just kept going. Now, a year later I am closing in 500 vlogs and the friction is all but gone. Here are some of the most important things I have learned.
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