Practice routine stuff and groove insights.

[renardvert]

The more I play and the more I know "talented" musicians, the more believe that the ONLY talent that really matters is perseverance. Forget age, gender or natural skills: if there´s a person willing to devote 6-8 hours a day to playing there´s very little things that can stop he or she achieving their dreams... (oh, btw, funny how the more I practice, the more people found me "talented".. ja jaj a)

Regarding your last sentence, I'll relate a Tony Levin quote (as told by Gavin Harrison in an interview):

"It all goes down to luck, but the more I practice, the luckier I get."

I love that quote.

[Julián Fernández]

JAjaj, nice one! Totally true... If there´s one thing that all of the guys from the hod banner have in common is that all of them (besides changing music forever!) spend countless hours developing their skills... If you manage to that too, the rest will come along...

[john lamb]

not countless... it is 10,000 hours! at least according to research. That's 3 hours a day for 10 years, or 10 hours a day for 3 years (Med school anyone?)

Incidentally, I head Adam Dietch talk about watching Steve Hass in the practice room @ Berkeley (where LOTS of guys go primarily to network) ... He would practice playing at burning tempos at a whisper volume for hours and hours and hours and hours and hours.


Yes, being able to figure stuff out quickly is a big help. However, there are some folks who don't "get it" right away... they take extra time, but when they do "get it" it is completely and deeply understood. Many of the folks that race through things miss details. I've sure had THAT problem in my life.

Yes, you will have to be able to learn and learn fast. However, that itself is a learned skill and, moreover, the inevitable result of more experience. No beginner or intermediate student can learn 40 songs in 2 days, at least not w.o charts and a clear schedule for rehearsing. Experts can do it in the car on the way to the gig because they can know where a song is going intuitively. That intuition is really the weight of experience. Can't do it w/o spending time. I've heard from 3 different great players that they think, at this point in their careers, that they could have practiced better - learned faster than they did when they were younger. I dunno. I think it takes all that experience to be able to learn faster.

[deseipel]

Learning common song forms is a really good idea. Like

Intro
Verse
Chorus
Verse
Verse
Brdige
Chorus
Solo
Chorus
Chorus
Ending

A ton of songs have that formula or a variation of it. Learning those formulas of song form can take you a long way.

[john lamb]

absolutely. Its like languages - after you learn enough of them, it gets to be pretty easy. Key changes up a half step, extra bars added in/removed, all that stuff gets to be pretty mundane and easily filed away after a while.

[Gaddabout]

Gadd was playing with jazz and blues greats as a kid. I think he played with Dizzy at 11. Chamberlain was taking lessons with Garibaldi and Bissonette in high school.

While I think there's always something to learn from successful drummers like that, I think it's critical to keep their practice habits in perspective. Those two guys were having experiences at young ages that none of us can capture for our own. Their idiosyncrasies are entirely their own.