I’m at a very odd spot in my playing. On one hand I feel as though I am at the absolute top of my game. There are days that I sit down and play and marvel at the gifts that the hours woodshedding have given me. On those days I feel like I’m not me, but the player I want to be. Each and every hit fall the way they are supposed to and the music gods are having a fun time controlling my limbs.
Other days I can’t play a paradiddle correctly. Seriously, paradiddles. I try to play them and they turn into whatever sticking exercise I was chopping out last. My speed disappears. My fluidity turns to lumpy gravy.
Practice is supposed to be the key to fixing that. In practice we hope to narrow the gap between the player we are and the player we want to be. The hard part about that is that the drummer I want to be is a moving target. That’s the thing about getting better, is that it allows you to see the next step and all of a sudden you want to be that guy, instead of the guy you thought you wanted to be. What’s weird about this time around is that more than ever I am not just hamstrung by the drummer I want to be, but also by the drummer I used to be.
By that what I mean is that I have continuously run into having to relearn concepts that I thought I had down. Feels that used to feel right don’t feel right anymore. My left hand sucks now, I thought I fixed that years ago! What happened?
Oddly enough I think it has to deal with being a better player. A benefit of gettin’ good is that you understand the instrument and the music with much more depth than you did before. This allows one to analyze their playing at a much higher resolution than they were previously able. Things that seemed smoothed over have a vast network of cracks right under the surface. There were a lot of ghost notes in that one song you figured out five years ago that you couldn’t hear then. The feel you worked so hard on is still not right. All the work you did on your left hand made it ok back in the day, but now your right has gotten so much better it has left its partner in the dust.
Where am I now? Well, it is gettin’ good, but it’s also a lot of going back and patching the foundation to hold up all the impressive new structures on top.
‘Till next time,
otto