Question about the soft snare hits, is it bad practice to rely on a completely different square for soft hits instead of just practicing soft snare hits regularly? On a lot of your other lessons you stress the importance of practicing dynamics so using a different square just for soft hits seems a bit counter-intuitive
The explanation at the start of the course is that it’s difficult to learn the independence for a hard hi-hat and soft snare on the same hand simeltaneously (which I think you taught in another course also), but it seems only the 6th course of the breakbeat lesson really utilizes that techinque, unless I’m mistaken. Do I really need the indepedent soft snares for the other ones? Or the last one, for that matter?
So the thing is, I created the breakbeats course as one of the first courses ever and at the time I considered it to be a “beginner” course. For that reason I made sure the student would not get stuck in some sort of difficult hand independence situation.
The soft snare is being used in other beats than beat 6. Lesson 2 and 4 (from the top of my head) also require the soft snare pad.
That said, I found out after making the course that for most students this was still a bit “advanced” and the whole idea of it being a super simple introductory beginner course kind of not panned out.
If I would record the course now, with all the other information I now have in newer, better courses, I would probably just explain this idea of the soft snare in the beats that might need them (as a shortcut for beginners), but then also give an alternative on how to do it with the independent hands method, and I would encourage the student to play his/her own dynamics wherever possible.
If you want to know how I’d play certain breakbeats without the soft snare pad I can talk about it in the livestream for you and demonstrate it. Would that be a good idea?
I’m slowly but surely working towards “remastering” the curriculum to iron out all of these inconsistency’s that inevitably creep in when you record your whole method over the course of a couple of years. It’s a little less work to re-record a course than to build it from scratch, but it still takes time to do it right. I hope the breakbeat course will also receive a fresh coat of paint over the next 2 years, but I have a moeller technique course to make first, and then I’ll redo Grooving & Improving and Building fills so… yeah. It will take some more time!
Thanks for the response. I have yet to check out a live stream, but it would definitely be interesting to watch.
When you play these breakbeats yourself, do you just play the soft snares manually?
I certainly struggle with dynamics, especially on a 64 grid, but I’m not sure if I want to take shortcuts if I could/should be practicing dynamics instead, if that makes any sense. It almost feels like using these soft-snare pads will cause me to rely on them in the future, and maybe that’s a bad habit?
I don’t expect you’ll develop a bad habit by doing the breakbeats as presented to you in the course, unless you’re going to focus on just that for the next 6 months or something. If you also just practice some dynamics by doing the other lessons/courses that have soft hits, you’ll be fine.
I will see what I can do in the livestream saturday!
Here’s the stream. Timelinks are in the video itself so you can skip to your question (Chapter “Dynamics on the snare and hand independence”) >> Livestream March #2 - YouTube
