Consistency

I'm becoming more and more aware with the tunes this new group I'm in is playing how difficult it is to play consistently when you are playing slowly. I've always heard it was harder to play slowly than fast...but thought it was bunk. That's because I couldn't play fast but I could play slow...so how could fast be easier?

Now I'm 1 year down the track of playing punk rock at 120-190 bpm all the time...after a year of playing new wavey still north of 100. So I sit down to play Pearl Jam at 73 bpm and I suddenly feel retarded. Like the spaces between notes are HUGE and that I can't keep them consistently the same size in time. It's not so much that I want to fill the space with notes (and make it more busy)...it's just that my body won't wait long enough. I stumble in the space.

And that's a sure sign that this is just what I need to be trying out right now.

Don't get me wrong. It isn't terrible. It is hardly noticeable. Maybe only noticeable to me. But it's there. The inconsistent space. I finally understand what I've been reading all this time.

I read an article in Drum! magazine last night where they interviewed a bunch of really fast metal players. It was fascinating because the whole thing, instead about being about playing fast as you'd think, was about how hard it is to play slowly. That if you mess up at 200 bpm it is hard to notice...but if you mess up at 60 bpm it is really obvious. And that so many "kids these days" just want to learn speed, so that's all they work on. And then they never get the fundamentals down and they never learn control.

Fascinating!