I was at my last drum lesson for the year last night, and I mentioned that I was trying to get the guys together for some more band practice over the Christmas/New Year period. In a year and a half we’ve so far only managed to actually get together as a group and play songs twice, which is pretty miserable – though understandable given most of them are busy parents with young kids and so on.

My teacher suggested that I could try joining the music school’s adult band program. They actually have two different programs: they match you up with other people who play different instruments according to your tastes in music, then they either give you a set list of about ten songs to learn, or they let you pick your own songs. You attend a roughly 2-hour practice session at the school once a week for some number of weeks, which is attended by a teacher who helps everyone with the songs. And then at the end they book you into a pub to play an actual gig!

My teacher said at the stage I am at with my drumming, I am definitely ready for this, and it will improve my drumming enormously. He says I really need to start playing with other people to develop that part of my experience. I’m going to consider it for a while and try to get my friends organised enough to do some more regular practice together. If that turns out to be too difficult, then I may go for the music school program…

Stay tuned.

Tonight at my drumming lesson my teacher said, “Okay, it’s time to work on your weaknesses.”

Normally he’s very encouraging and tells me I’m doing great – to the point where I’ve started to take it with a slight grain of salt as I know there are things I need to improve on. So it was quite a change this time.

My weaknesses are practising in time with a metronome, and transitions between grooves and fills, and grooves and other grooves.

I’ve tried practising with a metronome, but I find I just can’t stay in time to the clicks. I can play along with a song and keep perfect time. But when it’s just a metronome I drift all over the place and can’t home in on keeping beat with the clicks. I don’t understand why I find this so difficult – it must be some cognitive thing where I can’t process the solitary clicking noise into my beating time. My teacher suggested I start with a fairly slow beat – something I can easily keep pace with – and just let myself drift around with it, and keep going, not worrying too much about trying to stay on the pulse of the metronome. He thinks after a while I’ll naturally drift into time with it and start keeping an even beat in time with the clicks.

And to practice keeping a groove with fills for whole songs, I am to play along with random songs, and just try to keep the beat for the whole song, throwing in whatever fills I feel like when it feels like the song needs one. Don’t worry about copying the song’s drumming exactly, just do whatever I want as long as I stay in time throughout. That should be fun, at least, not like metronome work!

Apple recently announced the release of Logic Pro X, an updated version of their audio processing software. There’s a discussion thread on MacRumors.com about it. It comes with a new feature called Drummer, which is essentially a drumming machine component, described as a “virtual session drummer”. Several of the comments mentioned this and wondered how good it would be compared to a real drummer.

Cue the inevitable drummer jokes. Some people, while having a good laugh, also expressed the opinion that drumming is actually quite demanding and how they genuinely respect drummers. Then there was this comment:

I agree, drumming is a really hard job, up there with solving complex differential equations, simulating weather, image processing, managing data for millions of users…

Clearly sarcastic, but I couldn’t help finding it hilarious. Since I do image processing and solving differential equations for my day job, and have been taking weekly drumming lessons for over a year now. And I can tell you, in no uncertain terms, that drumming is more difficult than solving differential equations and image processing. I can tell you how the vibrational modes of a drum head are governed by an orthogonal basis of Bessel functions, but I’m still having trouble not swinging my sixteenth note syncopated snares in a straight 4/4 rhythm, or doing consistent 32nd note double strikes with my left hand. :-)

I’ve formed a band with some of my friends – none of us are particularly good at playing anything, but we’re keen and want to have fun. Discussing what songs we should learn to play, we discovered that there is very little overlap in our musical tastes (as mentioned before).

One guy is into progressive rock, and recommended an album to another guy who was interested. The second guy came back a few days later and said, “Wow, that album is great!” The first guy said, “Yes, I call it a masterpiece.” The second guy said, “Yes… I agree. It is a masterpiece.” Then there was some discussion over how does one recognise a “masterpiece”, and could someone who has no prior knowledge in the field recognise a work as a masterpiece? They came up with a hypothetical experiment: Give someone who knows nothing about progressive rock a copy of this album, and another prog rock album, and see if they can pick which one is the masterpiece.

And so a real experiment was born. I know virtually nothing about progressive rock, so I volunteered to be the lab rat. The guys discussed together and selected a second progressive rock album, which is generally acknowledged to be good, but not a masterpiece. They ripped the tracks off both albums, anonymised the files, and gave them to me. I was to listen to them, make notes, and declare which one I thought was the masterpiece.

Album 1, as it was called, had 12 tracks. Album 2 had 5 tracks. That was all I knew about them. I didn’t know the artists, the album names, or the track names. I played both albums through once, and then on a second listen I took notes. Here’s what I thought.

(more…)

So last year my friends and I finally got together and had a group practice session for our nascent band. We’ve scheduled a second session in a couple of weeks’ time and we’re learning our parts for our second song (I’m Gonna Be (500 Miles) by The Proclaimers).

So at lunch today we were discussing various related things, like what name we should call our band, and what other songs we should stick on our list of easy songs to learn while we’re starting out. And we started to realise that all of our musical tastes have very little overlap. There were three of us there (out of five) with iPhones/iPads chock full of music, and we could not find even one song that all three of us had on our devices.

One of us would call out something like “The Beatles!” and another would go, “Yes, of course!” and the third would go, “I don’t have any Beatles”. And then someone said “R.E.M.” and one would say “Yes!” and the third would say “no”. And so on. Billy Joel. Beethoven. U2. Blur. Muse. Enya. Mozart. Sinatra. Everything we tried, at most two of us had.

And then there were the other two guys in the room, one who is mainly into prog rock, which none of the rest of us are, and the other… well, he listed some of his favourite artists, which included Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Chopin, Scriabin, and some Polish composer I’ve never heard of. This guy took eclectic, cut the ends off, threw away the middle, and glued the two ends together. Seriously.

So in trying to come up with a list of more songs we could start learning, everything that someone suggested, most of the others had never heard of. We were amazed by the fact that we’ve all been friends for years, yet there seems to be virtually no overlap at all between any of our musical tastes. And we’re trying to form a band.

The good thing is that we bring a huge variety of enormously different music into this project, and we will all be expanding our musical knowledge.

Tonight my drum teacher started teaching me about dynamics. Accented notes, ghost notes, and so on. We spent some time on technique for the various different volume levels, practising to make sure there was an obvious differentiation in loudness when I played the different types of notes. He’s been running me through a program which he’s developing for his second book, and testing out the new material on me to make sure it’s not too advanced for someone at my level. He said this was the stuff he was most worried about, as it’s tricky to learn for the first time.

I did find it a bit tricky, but I think with a week to practise before my next lesson I might manage this material. The shown bars are a groove from James Brown’s Cold Sweat. This is the sort of level I’m at now. I can look at this music and have a good attempt at playing it. Not very well, but it’s not impossible and I can probably master it given a week of practice.

For reasons of busy-ness and the fact that I’ve been learning lots of new drumming stuff at my weekly lessons that I’ve been practising, I haven’t done a play-along of the first song on our band’s initial set list (Brass in Pocket, by the Pretenders) since our first group practice session several weeks ago. I was starting to worry that I might have forgotten how to play it, so I just decided to give it a play through now.

And played it through, two times out of two, at least as well as I’ve ever played it before. Possibly even better – more fluid, better timing. It looks like all this practice I’m doing is actually making me better!