Last summer I was walking on a major street in Toronto where I live, and I came across some 60+ people, mostly Asian women, practicing tai chi in the park. In that moment I got to thinking that drumming is very much connected or performed in the same way that tai chi and martial arts are learned and perfected. If you notice someone who is practicing tai chi, going through the 200 or so movements in a very slow manner, they are actually connecting their mind and body and getting inside the movements. These people in the park are practicing tai chi very very slowly, which allows their muscles and body to become one with the motion. It also allows them to be so in tuned with the motion, that if they were to actually do these movements really fast, tai chi could become a very violent martial art or just a great way for self defence. (I dare anyone to come up to an old lady practicing tai chi in the park and steal her purse – she’d beat the hell out of you and she could probably run faster than you). One might still ask themselves what this has to do with drumming…

When learning drumming, the tendency to rush things and play fast and want to play beyond your ability is very common. We always want to learn it now, learn it fast, without taking the time to play slowly and really be mindful of our physical motions. I feel this can actually slow down the process of learning to play the drums. So many times I have tried to play things fast and had slow and poor results but when I listened to my teachers who say “play everything at extremely slow tempos” I found that when I eventually increased the tempo after practicing very slowly for a decent amount of time, things worked out better. By slowing down, I allowed my body to actually get inside the movement or motion of the drumming exercises that I was working on. It’s kind of like allowing your body to accept the feeling of the motions. Telling your mind to allow your body to accept the motions or feelings of the drumming exercise is a concept that my current drum teacher always hammers home.

Another way to look at this, is your muscles have memory and it takes time to work through physical motions before your muscles become accustomed to the movements. Nothing illustrates this better than the movie The Karate Kid. For those of you who were kids in the 80′s would remember this. The Karate Kid was told by Mr. Miyagi (his karate teacher) to wash and wax around 15 cars. He was told to put soap on the car with the right hand and wash it off with the left hand in a circular motion. Then after that was done he was told to wax the cars, by putting the wax on with the left hand in a circular motion, then taking the wax off with the right hand in a circular motion “wax on, wax off”. At the end of all the cars being cleaned and waxed the Karate Kid was losing his mind. He had just gone through the motions of committing a movement to muscle memory in a slow and repeated way that took hours but he could not see the value in doing that. The Karate Kid started screaming at Mr. Miyagi, complaining that he felt like a slave and that he couldn’t understand what this had to do with learning karate. Mr. Miyagi then began to throw punches at the Karate Kid and the Karate Kid was able to block these punches with the same motions that he had just spent all day learning while cleaning and waxing the cars. He was blocking these punches with ease and a lot of speed.

Drumming is very similar to this in that let’s say you take a six stroke roll R l l r r L R l l r r L and play it very very slowly with the accents (which are the capital letters) at 90 degrees in height from the snare drum or pad, and play the non-accents (lower case letters) one inch from the snare or pad, this rudiment will sound very solid and have a nice rolling effect. This is hard to achieve if you don’t practice real real slow, allowing your muscles in your fingers and wrists to get inside or connected to the movement of the accents, non-accents, and strokes. You can waste a lot of time by blasting away at rudiments, drum feels and drum beats too quickly and not allowing your body to accept and gain the muscle memory of the physical motions that you’re putting it through.