The Value of Thoughtful Repetition

I’ve been thinking about repetition recently. It can take a surprisingly long time to truly ingrain a groove, a passage of music, a rudiment or technique, or many other elements of music. Students must learn to embrace repetition in their practising, but some approaches are more effective than others. One of the most important elements in the process is feedback.

Progress will be slower if you repeat something without thinking about it or paying attention to it, even if you play it over many times (although there’s always an exception! See below…) You will be better served by gaining feedback, either by directly assessing yourself, by recording yourself (audio and/or video), or by playing for other people. Here are a few guidelines:

1. Repeat more than you think you need to! Playing through something once or twice is not enough, especially when it comes to developing technique. This is true for any instrument, in any genre of music; to truly ingrain a musical element, you will have to repeat it many times, over the course of many days.

2. Repeat thoughtfully! Play through whatever it is you are working on. Stop and think about how it sounded, and how it felt physically. What worked well? (Make sure to do that again!) What would you like to improve? Play it again, attempting to adopt the feedback you gave yourself. Try occasionally recording yourself - either on video, or just the audio - and listen/watch back in order to decide your next step. Repeat this process many many times!

3. Play for others! You don’t need to limit yourself to playing for your teacher at your lesson. Try playing for a friend or family member. This could be someone with musical knowledge, or without. They don’t even necessarily need to give you feedback themselves: just the act of having to communicate a musical idea to someone else will be very revealing to you! Take feedback from your listener, or give yourself feedback (step 2), and then apply it to what you are working on.

4. The Exception… As mentioned above there is an exception to the rule of avoiding mindless repetition - in limited doses! Some musicians advocate repeating something on a loop while watching tv (in certain circumstances) - for example I’ve found this can work well for learning certain techniques. The idea is that it gives your body a chance to figure out how it wants to accomplish the technique, without your brain getting in the way (because everyone is physically different, there’s usually no “one size fit’s all” approach to technique. Also, the suggestions above can sometimes lead to “over thinking” things). This is a bit of an advanced situation though - it will be more effective once you have learned to evaluate your own playing, as discussed above. That way you’ll have a better idea of when it might be appropriate.

Have fun, embrace repetition, and enjoy the gradual process of improvement!

Tune your drums!

If you are playing on an acoustic snare drum or drum set it is well worth your time to learn how to make your instruments sound their best.

• you’ll enjoy the sound of your playing more

• your sticks will respond better, and playing will feel easier

• you’ll be able to get more musical depth your playing

• you’ll get an up-close understanding of how the instruments work

There are about a million YouTube videos with tutorials on drum tuning, some better than others. I won’t go into great detail on HOW to tune in this post, but I like this channel:

https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCo6TJR4giQyL_qcxnWKPE6w

I’ll just give a few quick tips on tuning your snare drum that you could try right now, to give you a sense of why it’s well worth the time to learn more about drum tuning. And then if you’re inspired, you can dive into YouTube and really become an expert!

There are many ways to tune a snare drum, depending on the style of music you want to play, and the sound you are going for. This is a bare bones approach that will give you a good starting sound:

• turn off your snares

• start with the top head

• loosen all the tension rods

• tighten the tension rods gently by hand until they are just contacting the counter-hoop

• using both hands, tighten two tension rods on opposite sides of the drum as much as you can. Repeat for all the tension rods.

• using a drum key, tighten each tension rod by one half turn (rotate the key 180 degrees). Repeat several times

• measure the distance from the top of the counter-hoop to the head at each tension rod with a small ruler (this will be only a few millimetres. Pick the most common measurement, and adjust any tension rod that doesn’t match - if the measurement is too small, loosen the rod a bit. If it’s too large, tighten it.

• tap the drum with a stick. If the stick responds well and you like how it feels, you’re done! If not, tighten each tension rod another quarter or half turn, and try again. Repeat until it feels good.

• repeat this process on the bottom head up to the measurement stage

• tap the TOP head. If the drum rings nicely, you’re done! If not, tighten the bottom head another quarter or half turn at each lug, and try again. Repeat until the drum sounds and feels good.

• Loosen your snare tension all the way off, and turn on the throw off. While tapping the drum, slowly tighten the snares until they sound crisp.

• You can put a small piece of cloth or tape on the top head if you want the drum to ring a bit less.

You may have to work with this process a few times in order to get a feel for it, and there are many nuances that you won’t be able to learn from a blog post. But if you try this method out, and then dive a little deeper on YouTube, you will begin to get some excellent sounds from your drums, and your playing will become much more satisfying!

How Do You Like to Learn?

As you go through your music lessons and at-home practising, you may begin to notice some interesting things about how you absorb information. Maybe you’re struggling with a particular passage of music, but can easily understand it after you watch your teacher demonstrate it? Maybe you figure out a way to overcome a technical challenge after focusing on how your different parts of your body feel while playing or singing? Maybe you finally figure out what’s been holding you back on a piece of music after recording it, and listening to yourself play?

What I just described is visual learning, kinesthetic learning (feeling and the physical side of music), and auditory learning (having to do with hearing and sound). If you can begin to be aware of how you process information from these different angles then you can take advantage of them to spur great musical progress and growth!

I personally seem to have a preference for visual learning, so I often practise in front of a mirror so that I can see what my hands and arms are doing. I have a much easier time understanding something when I see it being done, so as a student I liked seeing my teachers demonstrate concepts or passages of music, as well as watching them perform live. Today I find youtube drum videos to be extremely helpful, and I wish I had them when I was growing up!

At the same time, I try to explore the other learning styles. I spend some time during my warm up focusing on the feeling (kinesthetic) of the sticks, my hands, fingers, forearms, and shoulders. As a drummer it’s essential that I develop an awareness of where I might be holding tension (my shoulders and jaw are prime offenders) so that I can eliminate it. For the auditory side of things I often record music that I’m working on, and listen back to help make adjustments and corrections. I try to set aside dedicated music listening time - whether for the sake of understanding what other performers are doing, or for learning drum parts by ear.

Understanding what makes learning easiest for you is extremely important, but you can also work to develop the areas that are more of a struggle. I’m not always as comfortable with auditory learning, and figuring out drum parts by ear is a particular area that I have difficulty with. To help develop my ear a little better I set a small, manageable learning goal like trying to figure out the introduction to a song by ear. I work on it for a limited amount of time to help avoid fatigue and frustration, and then return to a more comfortable learning mode for the rest of the practise session.

I always try to help my students understand how they learn best, and I encourage you to explore these different angles as well. Happy practising!

Managing Volume! Playing Drums With Neighbours in Mind

There’s no way around the fact that drums and percussion instruments can be quite loud. This problem is compounded by the fact that here in Toronto many of us live in apartments, condos, townhouses, semi-detatched houses, or a similar living situation where you share a wall/floor/ceiling with a neighbour.

I’ll start with the bad news: it’s more or less impossible to soundproof a room unless you’re willing and able to spend a ton of money and do some serious construction. There are lots of myths floating around about cheap DIY soundproofing, but these don’t generally do much, if anything. Sound is like water - it will find even the tiniest gap or space to travel through, and easily flows through duct work, floor joists, pipes, etc. And on top of the actual volume of the drums there are impact vibrations - especially from the drum pedals and the bass drum - which travel through floors, and can be even more aggravating to neighbours than the sound. These can occur even if you are using an electronic kit! If you can locate your drums in a basement or other area where there is nobody below you, you will be solving a lot of problems.

If you keep all of this in mind then you can work in more sensible ways to make drumming manageable and possible in close living quarters.

Talk To Your Neighbours: You are almost certainly going to produce some amount of sound when playing drums in an apartment, even with the ideas I go over below. Get to know your neighbours, talk to them about what you are doing, how often they might expect to hear you play, ask how much they can hear you, and whether there are times that they really need quiet, such as people doing shift work or with toddlers who need naps. 99% of the time people will be open to what you are trying to do, and willing to work with you.

Modify Your Drum Kit: I won’t go into great detail on how to do this - there are many detailed solutions available on the internet. I recommend this video on modifications to the drums themselves, and this one on isolating the vibrations of the drums (this almost eliminates impact vibrations, and greatly reduces even sound vibrations to other rooms). You will see almost right away that a) this isn’t cheap, and b) it takes up a fair amount of space.

Use An Electronic Kit: Electronic drum kits can be a great solution since they can be played using headphones, and the pads of the kits generally don’t make a huge noise. Bear in mind that the quality of sounds and feel of these kits can vary widely, and having low quality in either of those categories can really affect not only your ability to play, but your enjoyment. On the other hand these kits can get extremely expensive, so it’s worth exploring several different kits to find a good balance of sound and price. This list is a good starting place. As I mentioned above, impact noise can be a problem still, although less so than with acoustic drum kits. Some manufacturers make special pedals or platforms to help deal with this: Roland makes pedals with what it calls “Noise Eater Technology”, for example. If your floors are wood with neighbours below, you will probably need to do something to address impact noise with an electronic kit.

Explore Other Instruments: You can get a lot out of drumming with other instruments in the percussion family. Hand drums are a whole musical universe of their own with amazing musical styles, sounds, and techniques to explore. I’ll give you two very different examples here and here. Keep in mind that large hand drums that rest on the floor like congas will produce impact noise, but it will be easier to manage this than with a drum kit (for example, you could move to a room that’s the less problematic, put down layers of foam and carpet to absorb the impact, or even build a smaller version of the drum platform). I’m also a big advocate of doing tons of work on the snare drum (or to reduce noise, a decent practise pad like this). The creativity, musicality, and technicality of this instrument is truly amazing, as you can see from this one small example here. Add a shaker, tambourine, and maybe a cowbell to your collection of instruments and you’ve got a very nice set of percussion instruments to explore. The styles, techniques, and music literacy you can learn on these instruments can easily be applied to drum kit if you have an opportunity to access one occasionally outside your home (I used to practise kit at school when I was in high school).

Final Thoughts: It’s never been easy to practise drums in your home, as there are tons of barriers from price to volume to space that require a pretty serious commitment to overcome. I hope this post might give you some ideas on how to lower some of those barriers, as I think getting into the world of music in general, and drums in particular, is well worth it. I wish that there were more community spaces where people could access shared musical instruments and have fewer sound restrictions. There are many reasons why this could be a more equitable and practical model to explore - perhaps a topic for another blog later on!

Setting a Schedule.

Learning to play a musical instrument well takes regular practise - this is pretty much a cliche I realize. But for many students and parents, the phrase “regular practise” is not very precise or helpful; what exactly does it mean, and how does it apply to students with different goals, levels of ability, and personality type? And the frustrating answer is “it’s different for everyone”! But I can at least offer a few guidelines.

1. Multiple short sessions vs. one long session? Definitely multiple short sessions. Don’t try to cram. Muscles need time to adapt, develop, and occasionally recover with a day off, and brains need time to digest and absorb information. A young beginner might practise for as little as 15 minutes a day, but do it 5 days a week. This can be expanded to 30 minutes a day, an hour, and much more, as the student gets older and progresses in both abilities and specific goals, but it’s the daily repetition that’s the key to success.

2. Regular vs. flexible timing? Some people thrive on having a regular, daily time to practise. Others prefer to fit practising in at different times, based on the rest of their schedule. Either approach will work fine - it’s more important that you follow rule #1 and get in a practise session on most days. Being organized can be helpful though, especially for more advanced students, or when preparing for important performances or auditions. For my own practising I create a schedule at the start of each week, based on my other obligations.

3. Should parents participate? I go into this subject in more detail here with some helpful tips, especially for parents without a musical background. The short answer is: sometimes, especially at the very beginning stages with younger students. Occasionally sitting in on a session with your child can help keep them on track, and help them begin to establish a routine. But they also need to go through practise sessions on their own in order to develop independent work habits; I find 1 or 2 sessions a week with a parent is often enough, although some personalities and learning styles require more hands on involvement.

4. What should I do during a practise session? That’s the subject of a whole post here!

Parent involvement in practise sessions

One of the more difficult parts of helping your child learn an instrument is figuring out how involved you, the parent, should be in their practise sessions. There are lots of nuances to this subject, and every child is different, so there will be a certain element of trial and error in figuring out the right balance. Most students will be somewhat lost and directionless without a parent to guide them every now and again. On the other hand, most students will get frustrated, annoyed, self conscious, etc with a parent that wants to hover over every minute of their practising. I try to follow two simple guidelines:

1. Try to give a bit of structure. Every so often you could sit with your child at the start of a practise session and have a conversation about what the teacher has asked them to do that week, and even read the teacher’s notes. Try “putting the teacher in charge” here by asking questions, such as “What did Tim ask you to practise this week?” or “It says here in these lesson notes that you should work on your technique as a warm up each day” This is often enough of a reminder to keep students on track. In the very beginning stages you may need to sit through a whole practise session in order to keep your child on track, but try to give them space to develop that routine and organization themselves as they make progress. I recommend eventually limiting this type of interaction to once or twice a week.

2. Ask for a demonstration. Kids generally like to show off for their proud parents. Ask them to show you something they have been working on. Give them the choice of what to demonstrate, even if it’s just a small snippet of a piece, or a little technical exercise. This could also be once a week, or whenever you sense that they are itching to show you something.

Parents don’t need any musical experience or expertise at all in order to engage with their children in this way, and these little interactions will really help your child begin to take ownership of their work. If you don’t understand something that your child has shown you or if they are asking questions that you can’t answer you can check the teacher’s notes, or just write down the question to ask the teacher at the next lesson.

What goes into a practise session?

Getting the most out of your daily practise session is easy! Students just have to include a bit of structure in each session:

1. Warm up and technique Music requires the use of muscles as well as the brain. Warming up your muscles with a few technical exercises not only develops and refines those muscles, it helps you to mentally settle into practise mode. Your teacher can help you choose a few exercises to begin each session. Later on you will be able to design your own warm up routine

2. Musical repertoire Work on the piece(s) your teacher has assigned you, as well as any more detailed instructions such as going over a particularly tricky section a few times.

3. Improvise! It’s actually a good idea to spend time “messing around” and making up your own patterns on your instrument; this is a great way to get to know how the instrument works, what makes it sound good, and any ideas or patterns that you are naturally drawn to. If you need some inspiration try putting on the radio, and just playing along with whatever comes to mind.