I've been doing some more research, practicing a lot, and working on tons of other things which I should be sharing with you.  So, I will do so this year.

Best wishes to you with all of your goals and resolutions!

Granted, I'm not up to the recommended tempo in the book just yet, but compared to my initial attempt last night's improvement was staggering.  This is encouraging and makes me even more excited to practice tonight.

I'm still unsure of what I'll do over the Thanksgiving holiday, since I'll be short on time and won't necessarily have access to a drum set every day.  I'll bring the practice pad and continue doing hand exercises, for sure, but I may have to substitute something else (reading, research, etc.) for the kit exercises.

I stuck to my plan last week and practiced each day for 45-60 minutes.  I spent most of my time continuing to work on sticking and full set warm-ups.  After seven solid days of much repetition, I am now very comfortable with the warm-up exercises and I have them almost completely memorized.

With twelve total warm-ups, I realize that I'm going to have to restrict myself to a minute or two per warm-up.  Otherwise I will continue to live in warm-up land forever, and I'm very eager to move on to the "fun stuff"!  The warm-ups do serve an important purpose, though, and even over the short course of seven days, I already notice a marked improvement in my consistency.

Last night I tackled the first official Exercise in the 30-Day Drum Workout.  Each day begins with a sticking-only exercise, followed by a full kit exercise that is based off of the pattern defined in the sticking routine.  I love this approach, as working on the basic stick-only exercise ingrains the pattern in your mind, preparing you for the next step which adds more.

The first exercise followed on the single-stroke roll theme found in the warm-ups, but added some interesting accents to various notes within each measure.  I found the exercise challenging enough (and one can always increase the tempo to add challenge) to keep me engaged, but not so overwhelming as to be daunting.  However, during the drum set portion of the exercise, I discovered a major weakness of mine that definitely needs work: my left foot.  The pattern had a hi-hat foot on each quarter note- which sounds simple, but with the bass drum hitting on different sixteenths of the beat, it's not so easy.  I had to slow the tempo waaaaaaaay down before all of my limbs would cooperate on this one.

I may spend another session on the Day 1 exercise before moving on to Day 2.  Baby steps!  I'm getting into the rhythm (ahhh... another pun... they're everywhere) of practicing every night and I'm really enjoying the extra time behind the kit.

Following the instructions in one of my drum books (and the advice of many), I've been beginning each practice session with some standard hand warm-ups.  These primarily consist of repeating eighth notes on a drum or practice pad many, many times, in a variety of sticking patterns.

The first exercise, for example, instructs to do a single-stroke roll (R-L-R-L-R-L-R-L), beginning at 70 bpm, with full strokes, for three minutes straight.  Then you increase the tempo a little, etc., until you finally reach a tempo at which you can't keep the notes consistent sounding.

Observation:  70 bpm feels very, very, VERY slow when you're playing eighth notes with no accents.  And three minutes of hitting this humdrum pattern feels like forever.  At first, I found myself wondering, "Is it really necessary to begin at this tediously slow tempo?", however after forging through the exercises and cycling through tempo from slow to fast, I began to appreciate its value.  When playing through the range of tempos from min to max, the middle tempos are very easy to keep consistent.  However both the slow end and the fast end present challenges.  So, although it is boring at the time, it's good to force oneself to go through the full three minutes at 70 bpm to kick things off.

Added bonus: After about 30 seconds, my mind effortlessly wandered into a "zone", wherein I stopped thinking about the notes, but still noticed and adjusted things if any of them stood out.  It was almost a meditative state- Perhaps not ideal for my improvement as a drummer, but kind of nice for my general well-being.  :)

While playing at the slow, slow tempo I also paid very careful attention to my full strokes (particularly during the first go-through of this exercise).  The book I'm working from emphasizes to "play off the drum, not into the drum", encouraging the drummer to "drop" the stick and let it naturally rebound- not to use any effort to raise the stick back up.  During the dozens of iterations of tediously repeating full stroke after full stroke, I noticed that this technique comes quite natural with my right hand, but is not natural at all with my left hand.  In fact, I find it quite difficult, even when I'm really focusing on it.  I don't know if this is because right is my dominant hand, or if it's the result of years of throwing my left stick at the snare and purposely keeping it from rebounding so it doesn't interfere with my hi-hat or right hand/stick.  It's definitely something for me to work on.

The subsequent warm-ups were variations on a theme of single-stroke and double-stroke rolls, again at increasing tempo.  Unfortunately, I only got through three of them in the course of an hour, probably because of my severe/neurotic attention to acute detail for everything that was going on during the warm-ups.  I might be reading too much into what I'm doing, but I think it's okay until I get really comfortable with these exercises.  In the future I'd like to spend about 10-15 minutes warming up and then proceed to work on other things, hehe.  All in good time (pun intended)!

But, no sense in dwelling on the past.  Let's get back to the present.  How can I make sure I stay on track?

That's where you get to participate!  If you don't see any updates or progress, I want you to keep me in check.  Send a message, leave a comment, just (kindly) let me know I'm a slacker!  You've been very nice about encouraging me to do this and sending me tips, links, etc., and I appreciate it... But I also need to be held accountable when I don't do what I say I'm going to do.

I'll be getting back on the wagon this afternoon, doing some of the exercises I discussed before, and updating my practice log.  There, I said it!  And if I don't report back with results, you have the right to be upset.

On that note, I'll leave you with a little peek at what Sunspot's been up to.  Here's a song from our Halloween show at the Annex:

Just kidding.  :)  I don't give up quite that easily!

Although the past few weeks have been extremely busy (see one of the things I've been busy with here), fear not, for I haven't forgotten my mission of improvement!

I've decided to undertake the "30 Day Drum Workout", a drum exercise book I purchased a while ago but until now have only paged through.

The book is very well organized and structured in a manner that I think will fit nicely my style of learning.  It begins with a series of warm-up exercises to perform each day, at a progressively faster tempo, followed by a unique exercise for that day both on a single drum and on a drum set.

To help track my progress, I made a special Practice Log, inspired by these Weight Training Workout Trackers (props to Corrie Haffly for the awesome designs!).  Voila:

I think it will be fun to see how much I can improve and progress in the next 30-60 days.

On a different topic, I'd like to quickly thank everyone who has commented and emailed me through this web site!  Initially I wasn't getting alerted of the replies to my posts, so I didn't get some of the feedback until a while after it had been left.  But I do greatly appreciate each and every comment and email and hope to see more of them!

Me and drummer Greg HipskindThe lineup for Caroline's Spine was slightly different this time around. It was a total surprise too see a drummer who looked very familiar and turned out to be Greg Hipskind, who also plays with Wicked Liz and the Bellyswirls, a band with whom we played at Chicks Rockfest in Cincinnati a few years ago.  Greg put on a strong performance with Caroline's Spine, and he also kindly shared his drum kit with me.  His setup is slightly different from what I'm used to, with the higher toms further off to the left and the ride cymbal in between the rack toms and the floor tom, so that posed a little challenge, but overall it was fun to play and sounded great.

Pearl WinglocGreg clued me in to an extremely cool piece of hardware which I hadn't tried before: the Pearl WL200 Wingloc.  I've seen a lot of "quick release" wingnuts over the years, but these were by far the handiest.  They enable you to securely lock your cymbal on the stand very quickly, without having to thread the wingnut all the way to the cymbal.  This is extremely efficient and particularly useful in situations such as Saturday night, when we traded out cymbals during a quick set changeover.  They cost significantly more than traditional wingnuts, but I think it is worth it for the savings of time and the annoyance of flying wingnuts (if you've ever put a cymbal on a stand, you know exactly what I'm talking about!).  I love seeing traditional drum set and hardware evolve with these cleverly engineered solutions.

We performed a 90-minute multimedia set, which included videos and backing tracks on some songs, so I was playing with a metronome for a portion of the show. It worked really well this time around, but I still need to find some headphones that are comfortable and don't fall off while I'm performing.

This proved to be useful in observing some things while playing at rehearsal this week.  For one, my balance shifts fairly significantly when I sing. It's clear that I'm leaning more than I should be into the microphone.  So for tonight's show I'm going to try setting up the mic stand in a way that is more conducive to good posture.

Additionally, although this is an obvious aspect of drumming, I became even more aware of the core muscles used in staying balanced on the throne while all four limbs are a-flailing. I'm glad my new workout regimen has a lot of challenging core/balance exercises; it will be interesting to see how this affects my drumming.

I'm currently in the van on my way to La Crosse, where Sunspot will be opening for Caroline's Spine, a band I really enjoy listening to and seeing live. So going into the show with the anticipation of seeing them makes me even more excited to play.  I'm not sure if I'll be using my drum kit or not (last time their drummer - who by the way did an exceptional job of playing - shared his), so that could be a challenge. I'm sure it will be a blast either way, though!

I also find it fascinating how, after repeating a set of exercises a few times, one's mind automatically gets comfortable with doing it and finds the most efficient way to get it done.  What feels like an awkward movement the first couple of times around eventually becomes so easy you don't even have to think about it.

Practicing any instrument is a lot like working out at the gym.  Through many many repetitions, the musician's mind begins to automatically correlate a note on the page to the movement(s) required to create a specific sound on the instrument.  Like the movements of a physical exercise, eventually the motions of playing an instrument become automatic.  In my experience, reaching that threshold of being able to "sight read" the music has always been one of the most exciting moments of learning an instrument.

Getting back into the discipline of daily physical workout has gotten me thinking that with drumming, I should be on a parallel path of exercise.  Rather than the free form format of practicing drums that I have used in the past, I'm going to implement a much more disciplined effort.  I know I can do this, not only because of what I do at the gym now daily, but also because in the past I have done so with other instruments.  But for some reason with the drums I just haven't been as structured with practice- probably because the genre of rock brings with it an unavoidable aspect of chaos.  I don't need to let this chaos rule my drum workouts, though.

Beginning today, I will keep a practice log and perform an (as often as possible) daily practice routine.  Just as I do at the gym, I will record the status of each exercise, and try to push myself forward a little more each time.

Hopefully in a few weeks I'll look back and say, "I can't believe how hard I thought those exercises were on Day 1"!

Because I was listening to the audio version of the podcast, I only heard the shuffle and didn't get to watch specifically what was going on.  The beat itself is so interesting- it's hard to even envision what kind of stick gymnastics Purdie is doing.  So, this morning I did a little research and watched the YouTube videos of Purdie himself 'splaining how to do the shuffle:

Wow!  What I find particularly interesting is what's going on on the snare drum.  As Purdie masterfully keeps the triplet beat going between the hi-hat and the snare, the left stick appears as if it is dancing on the drum head of its own volition, free of the drummer's control.  But I know better. :)

The Purdie Shuffle is so cool sounding I really want to learn it.  I just added it to my Goals list for part of the Drummer Improvement Project!  Thanks for the inspiration, and the endearing tutorial, Mr. Purdie!