Zu makin' a beat

So here we are, almost at our 56 day mark, and ya girl did not learn 1 song to confidently say she’s mastered, let alone 5 😢

At the beginning of this journey I somehow thought this goal was super attainable, but atlas, Zu is indeed not (quite) makin’ a beat (yet).  

So I’ve made a list of what went well and what I could have probably done a bit better: 

Went well: 

1. I got an actual drum set that was reasonable for my living situation  

2. I managed to figure out a tiny bit of the basics  

3. I looked into rhythms that interested me and at least attempted to play them

Do better for next time: 

1. Make a more detailed learning schedule 

2. Stick to my learning schedule 

3. Give myself more attainable goals 

One thing that I definitely think would have helped from the get go, would have been starting off with some very basic skills for the drums. So instead of just immediately trying to make a beat, I should have researched which drums do what and how to manage a tempo as a beginner.  

So, with that in mind, I did look up some basic drumming lessons, and found this trainer who has a whole course you can take as a newbie and really breaks down the basics.  

I really enjoy the fact that she seems to be having so much fun teaching these skills, that it gets me jazzed to try again 😁

So that’s where I’ll be, starting simply again, but properly from scratch this time. Is the term ‘scaffolded learning’ ringing a bell for anyone else too or is that just me….  

Thanks for coming along with me on this journey! I hope that if no learning was done, then at least fun was had 🥰

Okay so, this week, I played around with the metronome a bunch on my drum set, but I don’t think I’ve 1) really got a good hang of using it and 2) probably need the help of professional to know what the heck I’m doing 🫠

So I’m not attaching a video today because really, the beat I was making off tempo do not need to be shared past my apartment walls, and the sound of the metronome through the recording and over the drums themselves didn’t really come out very well anyway sooo….. better luck next time?

BUT what I’ve learned from this small endeavour, is that maybe I need the aid of a professional to get me familiar with the basics of the drum set first (because was I scared to play with the settings?? Of course 😬) before attempting to go much further here. I’m sure that if I’d had a drum teacher from the get go I’d be living the rock dream like these two over here ⤵

So, I’m sorry for no video this week, but I’m going to be looking into online or youtube sessions where a professional not only gives me some songs to play, but maybe also some basic tips and tricks for getting used to a new instrument like the drums! Not too sure why this wasn’t my initial starting point… but maybe this was all part of the learning plan 🧐

So this week, I decided to actually dig a little deeper into what went wrong in the video I posted in blog #5 (musically, not the fact that my dog judged me hardcore), and did some research into ways I can improve my time keeping (tempo!) 🎶

After playing the same 4 beats of “We Will Rock You” again and again, I decided there must be something that I’m either doing or not doing that’s making me lose my rhythm. So, I went to the handy dandy internet and googled “why is it hard to keep tempo when learning the drums” – succinct, I know  🤓

On the glorious web I found a site that offered me “7 Ways to Improve your Drum Time Keeping”. Was it the first link that popped up? Yes. Did I click it anyway? Oh heck yeah 😎 However, it did turn out to be pretty helpful!

Besides the fact that literally the very first suggestion it has is for the person learning the drums to get a stupid metronome… I found the rest of the article useful enough!  

Here are some of the key take aways from the article: 

• Practice with a metronome or click track – Ugh
• Try practicing at different tempos – This make sense, I see the point here
• Alternate playing and stopping – I mean, based on the time frame it took me to upload these blogs… I’m already an expert at this
• Practice your fills – Definitely not advanced enough for this one yet
• Play along to recordings – Nice!! Been doing that since day one
• Record yourself playing – Finally did this one and found out I was TRASH, but I guess I’ll do it again
• Try time keeping software – Who has the time to download that for real though 

Because my drum set is still pretty new to me, I didn’t actually know if there was a built in metronome, so I went and tried to figure it out. Unluckily (but really, luckily) my drum set does have a metronome setting 🥲 To show you guys what it sounds like, here’s a quick video of Ben (my floof of a dog) and I listening to the different tempos 

I’ll keep ya posted next week on whether or not this metronome helps me keep time!! (Or if it makes me lose my mind, it’s really one or the other at this point 😅)

Hello and welcome back to this week’s post where Zu (that’s me) is actually makin a beat!! (queue the unenthusiastic clapping from the back). So, there’s finally a video, and to make it EVEN better, my doggo is in the background to exemplify what my #1 fan looks like ⤵

So, as you can hear, this is the beat of “We Will Rock You” which is the first song on the list of 5 songs I need to learn before my 56 days are up! Take a gander back to my first blog post to see the video I am trying to learn from 😊

In my video, I think it’s worth while to note that I’m actually not very good at keeping the beat. Making the beat, anyone can do, but actually keeping it was oddly tougher than I thought!

As someone who’s played the piano and trumpet, I am no stranger to the dreaded metronome, but somehow, that incessant ticking did not do its’ job of teaching me to stay in time with the rhythm. And what’s worse, is the rhythm of “We Will Rock You” is literally just 4 beats repeated throughout the whole song 😬

At the end of the video you can see I start to notice that I’m losing my tempo, and therefore I stop playing. So, for next week, I’m going to work on keeping my internal ticking in check and not only makin a beat, but makin a beat consistently and confidently!

Hello and welcome to this week’s blog post where we learn that inconsistent practicing does lead to inconsistent progress (who woulda thought).

So, as previously mentioned in my first three posts, the plan is to try and learn 5 songs in 56 days, however, it would seem that this seemingly attainable task will not get done if I don’t make the time to actually do it!!

As someone who has played musical instruments before, it’s not lost on me the importance of practice, whether it be good or bad, practice is practice. And so, I’ll be the first to admit that I have not been great at holding myself accountable to a consistent schedule.

And here is why I think that is:

1. Aside from just saying that I want to practice a few times a week every week, I did not make a strict schedule with dates and times of when I planned to practice, therefore I was able to delay practicing more and more
2. I do not have my drums set up in a place where I see it every day, therefore I do just simply forget I need to practice. Unlike when I was playing the piano and I had to walk by this big honkin’ instrument every day and feel eternally guilty for STILL not practicing it (are we seeing a pattern here…?)
3. And lastly, I really do think that other priorities with worse consequences if I miss those deadlines got in the way! That’s not to excuse my procrastination, but I do think it’s a contributing factor on why I’m not a drumming superstar at this point like this guy ⤵

Needless to say, my lack of practicing has led to the lack of cool drumming beats I can show you, and for that I am very sorry (that’s assuming I’d actually be any good) 😗

So, for now, excuse me while I go set up my drum-set on the table and create a schedule for the next few weeks that I can hopefully abide by! See ya next week to find out how far (if at all) I get with my 5 songs 🎶

This week’s blog post is a short and sweet interview with a dear friend of mine, Angus, about drums and lessons and music and all that fun stuff 🤘🏽

After attempting the Phil Collins drum solo over and over and over again, I was just not able to get to a place where I felt like it was coming together. And so I took a short break from pounding at those rubber pads and recouped.

While talking to my friend Angus, I realized that the short simplicity of “In the Air Tonight” pulled me in so blindly, that I forgot to actually re-teach myself the simple, yet necessary, thing of… uhm don’t laugh…reading sheet music again.

Apparently, re-learning how to play music is not the same as re-learning how to ride a bike 🙁. SO, I’m sad to say I still do not have a video of me perfectly executing that Phil Collins drum solo, BUT I did get to chat with my friend about playing the drums and get his thoughts on my initial plan to learn how to play 5 songs in 56 days!

I started off by asking Angus how he began playing the drums, and what sort of drums he has played…

How did you start playing the drums? Or how were you first introduced to them?

“My grandma’s partner Barry used to teach drums on the sunshine coast and he had two drums set up in the living room of their house. Whenever I used to go visit as a kid I used to just play around on the kits and the marimbas and he used to give me a few super casual lessons.”

That’s pretty cool, what were the sort of drums he had that you could learn on?

“Marimbas of all sizes drum kits in various arrangements hand pans, hand drums, and jumbos.”

(I didn’t know what a Hand Pan was, so here’s a picture in case anyone else didn’t know!)

SO many to choose from! What did those lessons usually look like? Do you still remember some of his lessons now when you play casually?

“He would give me brief technical lessons on how to make different sounds with different parts of the drum, and then usually he would just get me to watch him play and then follow along afterwards. Then he would either correct me or just allow me to try again… it was mostly just a like a play by ear sort of learning style you know? However, there was one lesson I do remember that is the basic lesson on how to do a drumroll. You basically start slow and hold the drumsticks gently, and just let them bounce and then you speed up gradually”.

Would you give me a demonstration?

“Haha sure! You can even record it if you want!”

So, as someone who knows how to maintain a beat, what are your thoughts on the YT video that claims a beginner can learn to play 5 songs in 10 days? (See video in blog #1 that I am referring to)

“The video was very informative, and he laid out how to play the songs very well and the song choices were also good in that the more you progressed along through each song, the more you’re using skills from the previous songs to incorporate them into the later songs. He went from simple to more difficult, allowing a beginner to learn 5 songs in 10 days”.

So, there you have it folks! If Angus says it’s possible to learn those 5 songs in 10 days, then I surely can do it in 56 (one would hope 😅)

Welcome back 👋🏽! This week, ya girl finally has her brand-new drum set and learns that knowing how to read piano music is not equivalent to knowing how to read drumming jargon… but we make it work!

I was so excited for my drum set to come that I actually got the box to be delivered to my parents’ house because I didn’t want anyone snatching up my brand-new noise maker from my apartment lobby (trust issues much??) Anyway, it was delivered to my parents’ house, and I immediately opened it up, all excited and giddy, and was stopped dead in my tracks by the extremely daunting …. (drum roll please) instruction manual 😱.

So, a little background about me, I used to play the piano and the trumpet when I was in elementary and middle school, so learning an instrument and its’ specific jargon wasn’t even something I was worried about. But then I turned to page 9 in the manual and … let me just show a picture for reference …

I’m not going to lie, I took one look at all the various drumming options available in the settings and did not touch the drum set for three whole days 😬 . Not great, I know… BUT after the three days of feeling overwhelmed by the sheer amount of print on that page, I overcame my fear not knowing what all those words meant and decided to just give it a go anyway. So, I chose something short and simple to ease my way into this new endeavour and didn’t require me to change any of the settings 😅.

What, you might ask, was my idea of a short and simple rhythm? Well, have you ever heard of the man who wrote the scores for Tarzan and Brother Bear (and of course many other amazing albums)? Yup, I began to teach myself one of the most recognized drum solos of my time: “In the Air Tonight” by good ole’ Phil Collins 😎.

I had planned on adding a quick video of me trying to hit the drums to the beat of Phil, but alas, technology was not in my favour. So, look out for my first few attempts at “In the Air Tonight” in next weeks’ blog!!

Learning something brand new is not easy, and so this week I allowed myself to start slow and feel ready to learn, rather than trying to understand all the settings of my drum set in one sitting, and ultimately overwhelming myself. And as it turns out, I didn’t even need to change, or fiddle with, the settings because I am SO amateur that none of them apply to me right now (haha who woulda guessed).

Thanks for reading, and please enjoy listening to this masterpiece of a song….

Phil Collins – In The Air Tonight LIVE HD

For my Free Inquiry project I have decided to embark on something I have never done before and try to be original! Instead of choosing a skill that I needed to learn (like driving stick shift) or something that I sort of already knew how to do and fine tuning it, I decided to listen to the adventurous side of myself and commit to learning a brand-new skill. So, for the next 8 weeks I will be hitting some things with wooden sticks and hoping by the will of God that some sort of musical arrangement comes from it. Basically, I’m going to learn to play the drums. But not just your regular old drum set in your dad’s gross garage, no – because I live in an apartment and don’t want to be evicted – I’ve got a tabletop synthetic drum set that allows you to record what you’ve played and to be perfectly silent whilst doing so! 

I also plan not only to learn just We Will Rock You and call it a day, over the next month and a half I plan to learn five different songs. The reason why I’ve decided on learning 5 is mostly because I found this guy on YouTube who teaches beginners to play the drums and had a video where he teaches you 5 songs in 10 days (Link to his video is at the bottom if you also wanna check him out)! So that’s pretty cool. But for both the reasons of lack of time in my weeks and the purpose of this inquiry project, I’m going to extend those 10 days to 56 days (minus the weekends) and hopefully be able to actually play all 5 songs – that’s how I’ll know I succeeded I guess; however, I do also think that just being able to keep a beat and have fun doing it is also success 😊  

I’ve ordered my brand-new drum kit, which is scheduled to arrive on Sept 23, so once I have that all set up and ready to rock (yep, I hate myself for that one too) then I’m hoping to set a flexible schedule of drumming about twice a week for maybe a couple hours. This could totally change because, life, but according to my calculations, I should be able to learn 5 songs over 56 days by committing myself to 2 hours twice a week. Those are the plans thus far!! We’ll see how it goes 😊  

5 Fun/Easy Songs For Drums In 10 Days