Hi Robert,
I’m almost towards the end of the Beginner’s Course and I find it helpful. I look forward to get started with Grooving and Improving.
Right now I am practicing the basic beat and the three variations. I’m practicing them with a metronome with 5 BPM increments. I can now play the basic beat at about 135 to 140 BPM with the LH hi hat added on the “e”'s. How fast do you recommend as the upper limit for speed so that I play any song without any hindrance? I really want to get good at this, like a pro.
Hey, I would say that in most cases 140bpm is more than fast enough. I mean, there are always exceptions, but you don’t need to take it any faster. My (maybe a little annoying) advice to most people, including myself, is to actually learn how to play a groove at a tempo that is too slow. This is kind of the equivalent of zooming in on something.
If you can play it too slow, resisting the urge to speed up and really feeling where to place each hit, if you then speed it up your beats will sound much better, more consistent and more together.
But… that is advice you might not yet need right now. It becomes important once you can play some things and not get totally lost when playing together with a metronome. If you then want to take another step and improve your consistency in timing and groove, then this thing comes into play.
For now I’d say 140bpm maximum is a great upper limit to set!
Regarding your comment:
“If you can play it too slow, resisting the urge to speed up and really feeling where to place each hit, if you then speed it up your beats will sound much better, more consistent and more together.”
I remember you saying this in one of the lesson videos. I think it was how to get good really fast or something along that line. You are kind of right, this wasn’t the advice I was looking for LOL I wanted to know the upper limit of the speed but I’ll keep in mind and try the other direction as well. I always have to start out slow anyway because in the process of learning I need to know how it works first.
By the way, it was helpful to know 140 was fast enough, at least for a while. What BPM in your opinion, is too slow of BPM? Right now I set my lowest at 60.
Yes 60bpm is probably the lower limit if you play anything that would then still sound “normal” and not extremely slowed down.
The interesting thing is that if you go to for example 30bpm, you will probably just hear it as 60bpm with half of the clicks. So at some point super slow clicks can be useful for practicing and timekeeping.
When I record with a clicktrack I usually set it to half the amount of clicks because that works best for keeping a more natural sounding groove and still be on a grid.