Question HELP ME LEARN
I've been playing drums for around 6 years, and it is my biggest passion and I'm always trying to get better every day, recently I've had the nag to learn to ways of Jazz Fusion, I've listened to Jazz fusion for a couple years and I love it, my favorite band that I've found so far has been "Soil & "PIMP" SESSIONS", I love their more crazy songs such as basically everything off of their Plant Pimp album, I really want to learn how to play these songs and this style, but I have no idea how to really start because I'm mostly a rock/indie drummer among some other genres.
If anybody who plays this style (or anyone for that matter) has any tips, recommendations, or advice, I'm open ears to it all.
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u/Ornery-Arugula-7791 11h ago
Learn how to play jazz (swing and Latin) styles and grooves, and some typical independence and melodic exercises to go with them. Lots of good and accessible systems to learn. Practice your rudiments over and around foot ostinatos.
Learn to approach playing like a jazz musician, thinking about form, melody, and comping. Listen to the music and musicians and improv and fill the space in a suitable way. Use everything you’ve ever learned and your imagination to do what you think is best and most interesting at the time. Don’t “play it safe” and do take risks. But don’t play above your abilities either.
You need to be in the drivers seat. You don’t need to know every bump and bend in the road, nor expect to handle them “perfectly” You can’t control or predict all of that. But you can control your own choices while there, and you can study the roadmap map ahead of time, though you don’t want your head in your map while you’re playing. You cannot crash and you can’t slow down either (luckily if and when you do crash in music no one gets hurt, so don’t treat it like life and death, stressing will detract from your craft). Strive to be entirely aware of and present in every situation (something you can practice in every aspect of life)
When you find things in your playing that keep you from that sense of control while flying by the seat of your pants, then you’ve found what to lab and practice and grind on in the shed.
Always be progressing technically, but never think that’s what will or should hold you back from making good music. What matters is your taste, mindset, and confidence in your musical discernment. Practice allows for quick and decisive decision making. Practice so you can trust yourself to play. And practice trusting yourself to play.
From there just make everyone and everything around you sound good. Ideally you’ll never be done progressing, but you’ll hit a point where you’ll rarely, if ever, hold another musician or any other extrinsic aspect of the music back. There should be times then where you’ll wish you could’ve achieved something out of your technical reach, but because you make good musical decisions the music itself did not suffer at all, and you put what will work (and still work well) above what your ego would’ve liked to work.
Then go practice some more so you can get past that hurdle next time, and see what obstacle in the road would follow next.
It’s more than 90% mindset and mental training IMO. Have fun and life well and happily. Play like you live and live like you play. Fuse it all together and be you. You are always enough, but you are never done.
Learn to learn and to enjoy the process of figuring out life and music for yourself. There will never be another you
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u/-Fleeb 11h ago
Thank you so much for the advice and words of wisdom! 🙏 I will definitely be using it to improve.
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u/Ornery-Arugula-7791 10h ago
Course! Sorry it was a bit of a novel lol. But if you’re into this stuff I’m sure you’ll understand how hard it is to find the balance and not go all in on anything.
Everything with a grain of salt too of course
Have fun and be well!
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u/open_headquarters 22h ago
Don't sleep on Midori's drumming with that band, dude is a machine with ghost notes and off-kilter accents