The weakest link
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.
The solution was obvious. I fired up my metronome at 160 bpm and started endurance practice. I have found it to be very useful to observe how my snare hits differ between the right and the left. I am right-handed so my stick control is naturally miles better on that hand. I hit the same spot in the snare and the rebound is beautiful and controlled. On the left however, it was a different story. I rarely hit the same spot and the rebound is all over the place. The strength of the hit also varies quite a lot. A good exercise is to focus on getting the same relaxed behaviour in both hands. Tonight, after perhaps two weeks of practice, I am starting to discern a slight improvement.
Usually, I also often engage the feet to practice synchronization between all four limbs. This is very important. The typical death metal blastbeat/grind rhythm is useful in this aspect. I would like to learn it and be able to play it relaxed for an extended time. I do know that this path will likely make me more of a “human drum machine” with a quantized sound instead of a jazzy drummer, but I do not mind that at all. That’s the sound I am going for. I really love that sound when everything just comes together exactly. In acoustic terms we call it resonance. Perfect limb synchronization is just like resonance. We practice until we can learn to only use the energy needed to get the job done and nothing else. This is crystal clear when you observe a world-class drummer playing an exceptionally challenging song. It look effortless to them and that is because they are in perfect resonance with their body. You can think of it this way; If you play 99% correct, you will use probably more than 10X the energy compared to playing 100% correct. That final percentage makes a whole world of difference. When you hit that state, you can instantly feel it in your entire body. And when you feel it for the first time, rest assured that you will be able to find it again, and again, and again if you just keep showing up for practice.
Tonight, when I played Bleed after these two weeks of left-hand endurance torture, I could feel a massive improvement of a degree I haven’t experienced in several years. The only thing that comes close is when I replaced my OS spinning HDD for an SSD back in 2008. That’s how massive a difference it made. But also, very obvious. I haven’t given much attention to my left-hand control since I started in 2019 so that hand is honestly like comparing one year of accumulated experience to five years.
Fix the weakest link in any system and you will see a massive improvement. The crucial part is to learn which link that is. And that’s why I absolutely love learning extremely difficult songs. And the best part is that the principle should be applicable to just about any system.