#6: Time for time (keeping)

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 😅)