Observations About Drum Skills

The entire Berklee experience has been a bit demoralizing. As low as my confidence in my drumming was before...I realize now that I'm not even as good as I thought. One thing in particular that has come to my attention is that I have a horrible internal sense of time. I used to think I was pretty good at this...but no.

CJ recently started playing "Blown Away" and there's this part where in the middle of the song the bass line hangs its ass out with nothing but the vocal and I've been painfully aware that I really don't know if I'm slowing down or speeding up or holding steady. I just pray for the drums to come back in two measures later. And that's what I've noticed with the Berklee lessons too. For instance, this week the assignment is a pretty easy 12/8 tune. But there is a 3 beat (well, 9 beat I suppose) cymbal wash and then a "10,11,12" fill into the song. I totally lose my place during the cymbal wash...so that when the rest of the instruments come in on the next downbeat I really have no idea what the tempo is anymore. I have to make micro-adjustments to get with the recording. By the end of the first full measure I'm with the recording and can keep with it pretty well.

I'm used to either playing with a live band (who will adjust to my changes in tempo) or with a recording that has the drums on it (so that I can stay with the drummer the whole time). But if you remove the element of someone else playing...I get lost. I don't have an internal "pulse".

This is a really bizarre thing to realize after having played for 6 years. The solution is to play with a click more often and work with turning it on and off and see if I stay with the imaginary clicks. This is hard, of course, because that means not playing along to recordings...which is kind of boring. Short of just doing exercises...I suppose I could play the drum charts for songs from my books along to a click but without the backing tracks.

Bleh.