Grooving & Improving - Section 3

[iDuncan]

I’m currently working on Section 3 of Grooving & Improving and just have a general question about the main beat and staying on track when the speed increases.

I know the notes and can generally play along to the Very Slow and Slow (beat only) for the majority of the backing track in lesson 2. I seem to be reasonable on the Medium but on the Fast, after a little while I’m hitting extra notes. For example after playing the kick and hi-hat on beat 1, I periodically also hit the kick the next ‘a’ instead of just the hi-hat.

Is this fairly normal for a beginner - I think it might just be my concentration fading? I guess in many real situations, you have some sort of variation or a fill at some stage so perhaps this goes away once you start doing that. I’m going ok with the flam in the fill and can play the groove and fill at Very Slow tempo, just thought I’d try the main beat at Fast.

[Robert_Mathijs]

Yes I think you can take it up a notch when you feel like you’ve been doing the slower stuff and it goes pretty well.

A faster tempo can also be easier in the sense that you don’t have to artificially hold back that much. It’s hard not to speed up if you’re playing slow.

What you can do is take a couple of breaths before you start, close your eyes and pick one thing you want to “nail”. So in this case if you don’t want to play that extra kick drum, make that your mission. The rest you can screw up as long as you get that right.

And then you pick an other mission after that, or next time. That can be effective too.

Also, these beats aren’t the holy scriptures. They just exist to teach you some basic concepts. If you played them for a while, move on to the next!