The Catch-22 of drumming

Image by Alexander Lesnitsky from Pixabay

I 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. 

The most powerful method I know of when learning a new song or instrument, is to start slow and increase. Use your metronome and set it slow enough so that you never make a mistake. This might imply that you will play in slow motion sometimes, but trust me on this: It is worth it, and it is the fastest way to reach your goal. On the guitar, the method works wonderfully. I just start from slow motion and then I increase by 1 bpm/day until I arrive at my destination. The primary reason that this works, is that I am using the same technique in my picking hand all the time. I close my fingers to reduce the moment of inertia in the hand and then I play as economical as humanly possible. With the slow-motion increase approach, you will find exactly where you need to adapt and optimize your playing. Just like on a racetrack, when you have problems with a specific corner, it is likely that your real problem lies three corners earlier. Slow down three corners before, and you will discover new racing lines when you arrive at the “problem corner” at a lower speed. This is completely analogous to music. If you practice a song too fast, you might end up using a suboptimal choice of fingers on a specific passage through the song that you find most difficult. Slow it down, and you will discover new “racing lines” on your guitar neck. And then you can put the pedal to the metal.

When I started playing the drums, I used this slow-motion approach once again. However, there is a big difference compared to the guitar when you consider the kick drums. You use a spring-loaded pedal board to control the beater and this is a resonant system, with an eigenfrequency that you select yourself by changing the spring force, the club length and the coil spring (if your pedal has one). If you pull the kick beater back and release it, it will start to wobble back and forth with a certain frequency. The number of such motions per second is the eigenfrequency of the pedal. This eigenfrequency will correspond to certain note values at specific tempos, and if you get constructive interference, which means you will need very little energy to excite the kick drum with great power. It also means that other some note values and tempos will result in destructive interference, which will make it much more difficult to excite the kick drum. Consequently, when applying the slow-motion increase 1 bpm/day approach on the drums in a tempo span of 100-230 bpm for instance, you will pass through various regions of constructive and destructive interference. And this means that you will need to modify and adapt you playing technique depending on the tempo! In the 100-230 bpm span, maybe you will need 2 or 3 different techniques to play 1/16th notes. This effect is of course also present on the guitar, but it is negligible in comparison to the drums. And this is what I am struggling with now. I am learning a song called Bleed by Meshuggah, and I am now playing it in various tempos. Surprisingly, I find it easier to play it in 160 bpm than in 130 bpm! This was very counter-intuitive to me at first (coming from the guitar), but when looking at the problem through an engineer’s eyes, it makes perfect sense.

The past week I have been practising one of the drum fills which uses double bass, snare and tom-toms in 1/16th. It’s a very common and useful fill. I have been playing that specific fill and only that on repeat every night. And each time I change the metronome tempo, it feels like learning a completely new fill. Whereas on the guitar, it would have felt like the same thing just slower or faster. I am convinced that it will be very useful to me to learn the song and all its drum fills throughout a tempo span. That way I will probably practice several playing techniques. What a mess honestly… You need to play the song slow to “get it in your head”, but you need to play it fast so that the pedals work properly. This is like driving a F1 car slowly: You won’t get any temperature in the tyres or brakes, so you will have no stopping power or grip until you mash the throttle. But you cannot mash the throttle if you can’t find your way around the track either… Is this the Catch 22 of drumming?