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Notes: 525 / 1 year ago from baringmysoul (originally from wordpainting)"If you stuff yourself full of poems, essays, plays, stories, novels, films, comic strips, magazines, music, you automatically explode every morning like Old Faithful. I have never had a dry spell in my life, mainly because I feed myself well, to the point of bursting. I wake early and hear my morning voices leaping around in my head like jumping beans. I get out of bed quickly, to trap them before they escape."
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1 year ago
Here I am playing with The Grand Scam at the Green Door in Lansing.
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Notes: 2 / 2 years ago"Teachers are expected to reach unattainable goals with inadequate tools. The miracle is that at times they accomplish this impossible task."- Dr. Haim Ginott
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2 years ago
This is a short video of me playing the five stroke roll from slow to fast. Feel free to play along! Enjoy, and thanks for watching!
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Notes: 4 / 2 years ago"There are three things to remember when teaching: know your stuff; know whom you are stuffing; and then stuff them elegantly"- Lola May
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2 years ago
How to Practice: Save Your Minutes
There is a quote about money I have always liked: “Save you pennies, and the dollars will take care of themselves”. I like this quote a lot for two reasons;
1. I have pennies. Lots of them. I’m also pretty sure I can get more. This leads me to believe I’ll be rich some day.
2. It helps to illustrate a very basic aspect of practicing the drums.
We’ll leave my future billions out of this article and concentrate on how this quote can do wonders for your personal practice. We’re all busy people nowadays. Work, School, Gigs, Kids, Pets, Parents, Yoga, Sports Center, etc. We don’t always have hours to practice our instrument, and sometimes we don’t even have a single hour! While I think there are many people who could be practicing a lot more instead of watching Star Trek: The Next Generation re-runs, and also some people who need to loosen up their schedules a bit, we can all relate to one simple idea; “I wish I had more time to practice”.
This is where that quote comes in. As it relates to practicing drums, I like to use the quote “Save your minutes, and the hours will take care of themselves”. What the heck does that mean? It means that if you could practice for just a few minutes every single day, you would see a tremendous amount of growth in your drumming, no matter what your skill level, style, age, or science fiction television taste.
Most people don’t believe this when I tell them, and the reason they don’t believe it is because they have been inundated with stories of drummers who wood shed for 8 hours a day for months on end, emerging with long beards and a sensitivity to light. People believe that in order to be successful at the drums, you have to practice to the point where you can’t possibly have a life, so why even bother?
While it is true that practicing for hours on end for days on end will make you very skilled, it IS NOT the way the majority of proficient, talented, and more importantly, WORKING drummers choose to live. You CAN become really good at the drums, AND even practice for great lengths of time, AND still have a life.
Now, I know what you’re thinking, but this isn’t like one of those plans where you lose weight while you sleep. It’s more like 8 minute abs (except this actually works).
Start by practicing for 10 minutes per day. Just 10, no more, no less. That’s it? Yup. Here’s why: you’re going to do it EVERY SINGLE DAY. Weekends, Holidays, Mardi Gras, whatever. It’s the everyday part that is most important. The reason why is that after about 21 days or so, you will develop the habit of practicing. You won’t have to remind yourself or make time for it, because it will simply be part of your routine. Once that happens, you can go to 15 minutes, then 20, and so on until you are getting an hour everyday. An hour everyday of quality practice time is HUGE. It can make a world of difference after a few months, or even just one year. You can take it as far as you want, but if you start with a solid foundation of consistent practice with quality material, your playing will hit warp factor 9.
I swear to you, no more Star Trek after that last one.
Pennies add up to dollars, and minutes add up to hours. Save them both, and wealth and happiness is sure to follow.
I hope this really helps you with all of your percussion endeavors. Feel free to e-mail me at JDemlow@gmail.com if you have any questions. I would love to help!
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Notes: 1 / 2 years ago"One mark of a great educator is the ability to lead students out to new places where even the educator has never been"- Thomas Groome
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2 years ago
This is a video of me using a double stroke check pattern from the vic firth website as a warm up. Feel free to play along! Enjoy!
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2 years ago
How to Practice: Setting Goals
In order to be able to acquire, polish, or even master any techniques on the drum set, you must begin with practice. This is a pretty obvious, if not totally obvious statement. How do you get to Carnegie Hall? I’ll give you a hint, it is not a plane and then a taxi. There is however one exception that I take with the above statement, and that is that you must BEGIN with practice. Practice is a crucial element to any musician’s development, but I feel like many drummers of varying backgrounds and levels of development miss another critical element that I feel needs to exist before a person even picks up a pair of sticks.
Goals
In order for any practice, even the most basic practice, to have a truly positive and propelling effect, you have to have goals. Even one teenie, tiny goal gives a person enough direction to accomplish amazing things in a short amount of time. I know this may all seem very obvious, but many people come in to my lesson studio with what they think are goals:
“I want to be a better drummer”
“I want to play faster fills”
“I want to play an awesome solo”
“I want to impress chicks”
That last one by the way requires switching instruments from drums to guitar. All of the sentences above are fine statements and even worthwhile pursuits, but they ARE NOT goals. They are wishes, hopes, maybe even dreams, but not goals. A goal is something specific, tangible, it can be measured, and above all else, it can be clearly pictured by the goal setter.
“I want to play clean double stroke rolls at 120 bpm”. Now that is a goal.
I don’t want to fall in to the self-help abyss of goal setting and time management in this article, because I might not find my way out. So here is a quick checklist on how to set proper goals, so that you can practice in a way that gets you the best results in the shortest amount of time:
- Do I have a goal?
- Now that I have a goal, is it specific and can it be measured?
- How long do I think it will take me to achieve my goal?
- What benefits will I have gained once this goal is attained?
- Will this goal help me achieve other goals?
Remember, choose goals that will take you where you want to go. If you want to join your high school jazz band, don’t practice blast beats for three hours a day. Also, make sure you re-evaluate as you go. If you need to tweak your goals, that’s ok. The important thing is to keep things concrete, clear, and consistent (and any other alliterative happy phrases that you feel help).
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2 years ago
Here is a video of me using a warm up for Single Strokes from Vicfirth . com. 16ths, 16th Note Triplets, then 32nd notes. Silver to Platinum level. Feel free to play along! Thanks for viewing!
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