DRUMMERS: Advice for a beginner

A teacher of mine in college used to do that in ensemble classes. We'd all play something and then he'd say, "OK, now sing what you just played." We all felt like ridiculous idiots, but when he explained it, it made sense: the music is coming out of you, so you should be able to sing it (not necessarily accurately) as well as play it. It's like when you hear Bud Powell or Milford Graves vocalizing on records, like a way to focus differently. Or something.

Like this?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LRxro9dW2EM

yeh i guess but not that elaborate!

the music is coming out of you
i had never thought of this before tbh* and that helps. but unless he's gonna give me some mind altering substances, i don't know that i feel comfortable doing this in front of people. are there some noises that normal people use or can i go in there and start singing wha dump dump pooch dinga linga dinga linga and he won't laugh at me?! i mean the syllables i keep coming up with are unacceptable.

*i am going to try to remember this because it's a good motivator

Think about the sounds/noises the various drums make and play around with onomatopoetic words similar to them. Like, you aren't trying to beatbox per se, but maybe if you think about it more in those terms, you'll find some words that don't make you feel silly when you use them?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jJewbFZHI34

dump dump pooch

This should be a band name.

bd: boom
hh: ch
sn: kha

^^ news i can use!

Apparently Rush's producer Nick 'Booujzhe' Raskulinecz is known for his propensity to mime and sing drum fills to Neal Peart. One of the faithfully transcribed examples:

'Bloppida-bloppida-batu-batu-whirrrrr-blop—booujzhe!'

Sometimes when I'm messing around with fills I'll actually vocalize it first to figure out what I want it to do, and then try to transcribe the rhythmic sequence onto the drums.

(Sadly, sometimes the fills are easier said than done.)

my hs band instructor was a huge proponent of singing everything we played, the worst was during the festival competitions where we had to sight-sing

still, I'm sure it helped

did you just make up a set of syllables to use? do you always use the same ones?

i understand the utility of doing this, and I'm willing to try, I just don't know how to do it.

it was pretty easy for percussion because everyone basically played one part: snare, bass, etc. tympani had more notes I guess but I never played tympani

when I played tuba earlier in my hs career it was just singing notes... I sang "lo" a lot iirc

I would say "ba" over "kha" for snare but who really cares amirite

Last night while walking the dog I became obsessed in my head with a drumbeat that went "rikki tikki tavi rikki tikki tikki tavi". I am not a drummer but may try to get it down on my drum machine at least.

just use whatever words/sounds come to mind -- there isn't a "right" way. It is also a good way of getting the rhythms and parts instilled in your head without the filter of hands and feet.

i'm working on it...

in the meantime, my speed is improving, and i am also working on my very bad habit of standing up and walking around/taking a break as soon as i get something i've been trying hard to get. it's such a weird habit and i'm not sure why i do it.

i also made a new recording and learned that drums are referred to as bateria not tambores en esp.

batterie en francais iirc

Bombo!!! http://es.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bater%C3%ADa_%28instrumento_musical%29

German for percussionist is "schlagzeuger." It literally translates to thing-hitter.

that's more like it!

relevant for "batteria" + "modern drums: a practical guide" + dope samples:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uuOrytijQhA

def heard that beat sampled before - I think DJ Shadow, and maybe also something on Paul's Boutique?

does your teacher have you working on hi-hat accents?

He has mentioned them, but we haven't worked on them formally.

yup:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S5rVw2SEqwk
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3zx0eOlnbQ4

update: today was supposed to be my final lesson, but it was rescheduled. this is good because i haven't really been able to bring myself to sing very many beats!

good news: i've finally figured out the perfect band to practice with to test out new stuff and pretend that i am playing with real people, feels natural, feels familiar, and is predictable enough for me to anticipate what to do next
bad news: it is the velvet underground

still, i made some adjustments to the tightness of the drum heads (is there a verb for this?) over the weekend and i feel like i'm sounding crisper/more precise than before. and it was really fun!

Yes, properly tightening your heads will definitely do that. I'm not an acoustical engineer, so I'll probably misexplain this, but if you think about a hit on a drum, a tighter drum head will vibrate less and for a shorter period of time. Also a properly tuned head (in tune with itself) will have fewer different overtone rings of different lengths. Thus you get a more "precise" sound because the length of the sound is shorter.

A good method for tuning (which your teacher may have already told you) is to lightly tap near the edge of the drum right where each lug is, and try to match the pitches of each lug. But go crosswise instead of going around the drum; tighten one lug, then match the pitch of/tighten the one opposite it. Like so:

http://www.waywood.com/images/drumtune.jpg

I suck at tuning, though; I tune my snare really, really high, and it rings like crazy (which I love, but recording it is a pain).

If the drum is out of tune, it will have a wobbly tone when you strike it

Tuning! That's the verb I was looking for. Duh! I didn't know that about tapping, I'll check when I go home to see if I tuned evenly. All I know is that it sounds a whole lot better.

Tuning a snare drum is kind of like getting a two-year-old into a tuxedo. It takes a lot of patience, and every time you think you have one thing in place, something else is out of place.

my method of tuning involves letting the drums bounce around in the backseat of a car for a few weeks at a time.

Once I put new heads on using this crazy method that took like 30-45 mins per drum and involved a hairdryer. I do think they sounded pretty good, but probably not worth the trouble.

anybody use an app for tuning? my old friend was telling me about something he has on his iphone but i was skeptical

update:

final lesson was rescheduled over and over until it landed toward the end of the month, so i have some time to rack up a nice big list of questions before i bid my teacher adieu for a while. also his schedule is full for the next 2 months, so maybe i can use that as a window of opportunity. knowing what you do of me and my skill level, does anyone have any advice re: setting goals for myself? that is not really a skill that i have developed much. i don't want to reach a plateau and get stuck there because i don't know how to move forward, and then give up (this is what i usually do).

i was getting a little bored, so i have been trying to think of a new routine that would be fun and i now do a new warm-up thing that is making my brain light up a little more and also allowing me to try new things. so that's good. have been enjoying the longer sight reading exercises in my book. not a lot of (no) progress on the singing yet, but i have a few more weeks to try to come up with something. right now i'm working on learning what playing a song feels like so i've been playing along with a lot of different music to get a handle on that (and obvs this is totally fun)

otherwise, i have noticed that continued motivation to play requires focused listening to things that i know i can probably come close to playing, so i've been making a lot of mixes to listen to in the car and i forgot how fun THAT is too. so overall, good news. just in case anyone was wondering if had given up.
nope.

i think the way that i like to practice and think about drums in general isn't like most other people, from my experience, so the following fun practice idea probably won't appeal:

one thing that i really like to do is stick with a simple beat, play it at a slow, easy tempo, and really concentrate on listening to the tone of each of the main components (hihat, bass drum, snare). first i'll just jam on the simple beat with everything at a moderate level. then i'll see what it sounds like a single component is accented more than the others - e.g., laying into the hihat a little more heavily, or easing up on the BD while keeping everything else steady. it's fun to alter the volumes of individual components gradually, so that each bar is nearly the same, dynamically, as the previous bar, but over time you're shifting into a different feel altogether. you seem much more organized and goal-driven than me, LL, so this probably sounds terrible to you, but i enjoy the freeform structure of practicing in this way - it's fun to not worry about how long to stick with each set of volumes or accents, or what dynamic shift you're going to make next, but to instead just kinda zone out in each groove until it's second nature. it not only drills in the basic beat, but you get to really know each individual component of your set, what each piece sounds like at different volumes.

along the same lines, i also like to do the same kind of zone out thing but work on gradually altering timbres of each drumset component. a snare drum makes a totally different noise if you dampen it by striking it and pressing firmly into the top head with the tip of your stick, vs. striking the head and letting the tip of your stick rebound for a more resonant sound. or the hi-hat, which has an incredible number of noises it in, depending on how tightly you're holding them together, and at what angle you're striking it with the stick.

i guess if you wanted to transform the above "420 dude" exercise into something structured, you could do it like this:

1) start off by playing a beat at a very loud volume for 16 bars - think led zeppelin, sold out crowd, and you have to fucking HIT the thing because you're john bonham dammit
2) over the next 8 bars, gradually reduce the intensity one of the three components - either hihat, snare or bass drum - to a medium volume, while keeping the other 2 at full volume
3) over the next 8 bars, gradually reduce the intensity of a second component to a medium volume.
4) over the next 8 bars, gradually reduce the intensity of the third component to a medium volume.
(you should now be playing at a medium volume across the board)
5) repeat steps 2-4, but this time bring everything from a medium volume to a whispering intensity.

ha! your first paragraph is exactly (well, more or less) what this i now do a new warm-up thing that is making my brain light up a little more and also allowing me to try new things is! i am not goal driven at ALL, i am mostly novelty driven, so i gotta keep trying new stuff or rewarding myself in some way or i give up. the times i am having the most fun is when i don't try too hard to perfect anything, just to keep going and trying different things until i run through all the things i know how to do. then i do the same things on different drums. i like moving around a lot!

ultimately though i do like having a plan, so i appreciate the 1-5 step plan :)

eventually after running through all the things i always default to the same sort of plodding ritual-sounding beat with increasing cymbals. i am a little cymbal crazy, i can admit that.

also fun is adding my own little flourishes to songs that have a really simple beat. that's fun too. i'm not very good at it but it's fun.

i guess i feel like other people are going to expect me to have a plan? so if i want to play with other people they are going to expect me not to just freak out at my own pace, that i should be able to play "a song"
i mean right?

for me the only thing that gets me excited about practicing is learning beats in a different genre, which usually requires some kind of independence that i haven't been working on. so you can try figuring out country 2-step beats, or New Orleans beats, or a bossa nova, or some Bo Diddley shit. either just listen to something and try to approximate the feeling in your own way or look up a lesson on Youtube, although that's hit or miss of course.

nb: i don't really practice anymore, except mentally.

that is a good idea and i have a head start on it because a while ago i bought a book that has tons of different genre beats and i know +/- how to read it now. it has CDs too so i can verify that i'm reading correctly. that is on my plan.

i guess i am so afraid of my own tendency to give up that i need a lot of structure? i dunno. maybe i'm overthinking but i don't really mind because i have never felt so diligent in my life!

speaking of which, i played a gig with my sit-down New Orleans jazz band last weekend, and i hadn't played that music for a year at least (and haven't been playing much drumset, except in short spurts at Ch/\nts gigs).

while playing the tunes i felt totally comfortable and relaxed, even moreso than in the past. however, the thing that goes when i don't practice is any ability to solo, at least in a jazz context, the ideas and the instinct just aren't there. so i get through the whole gig just fine and then, while i was taking some bars at the beginning of the last tune, my brain stopped talking to my limbs for a moment and i had a totally embarassing gap before bringing the band in. just horrible, i couldn't believe it.

xp - is learning to write music something you want to do?

like i remember one of the early exercises my teacher gave me was to write 10-15 fills and then practice them at various speeds with the standard rock backbeat.

My advice is to find people you feel comfortable with and start a band.

I learned and played so much more when I was in a crappy band for six months than I have in the combined six years since then.