Lessons, Week 43

We went back over the triplet exercises we've been working on for some time now and he added some new ones. I found that it was easier for me to pick up the exercises by watching him than it was by reading the music often. I also told him that I needed to slow things down on a few of them...and later he apologized that he'd probably been starting too fast often (I told him it was okay to push me, and that I'd let him know when I needed to slow down).

Things are coming along with these. My high hat foot is the last thing to come together, but even that is slowly improving. He acknowledged that the triplet high hat thing is not what I'm accustomed to with rock, but that eventually it will become second nature and will go on auto-pilot the way that 8th note high hats do in rock.

I've really been focusing on my hand position since last week. It's kind of throwing me off a little because I'm so obsessed with it, but I can already tell that it is really going to help things overall in the long run. Playing with the fingers instead of the wrists allows me to play with more finesse and less effort. Right now it makes my hands tired, but once I'm used to it I think the old way is going to make my hands MORE tired. Right now I'm in the middle...so EVERYTHING is making my hands tired. The finger stuff is definitely going to help with rebound, I think, though...which I've always had a problem with.

I'm leaving town early tomorrow for the holiday weekend in an attempt to try and avoid the snow and traffice expected late on Wednesday. I think I'll have enough time to stop by Midwest Percussion and to pick up a boom cymbal stand and extra boom adapter that the sweetie has promised me for a birthday present. I've had my right crash on a stand that doesn't stay locked very well for a while now, so that the cymbal is always moving. The new one will replace that one...and I'll move that one to a less key position and put one of the new cymbals on it. As for the extra adaptor...it will just provide options, especially for if and when Pants ever reclaims her kit, which I've now parsed out amongst my setup.