How long does it take to complete the entire course?

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A year? I practice almost every day for 20 to 30 minutes.

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Hey Brendt,

It’s hard to answer that question without giving a pretty big range because it’s different from person to person. It also depends on if you have prior musical experience or not (so if you for example already play piano or something).

First of all, I more or less summarized a couple of years of practice in this youtube video, which might be a nice overview of a long practice journey: How to Get Good at Finger Drumming? A Summary of Years of Practice - YouTube

But I also just want to write things down for you, taking into account how often you practice in order to make the whole thing more complete. Here we go.

With 5 days of practice a week and assuming you’re going pretty fast I think it will look something like this:

  • Beginner course: 1 week
  • Grooving & improving: 6 weeks
  • Hit the gym: 6 weeks
  • Building fills: 4 weeks
  • Funky song: 4 weeks
  • Next level beats: 8 weeks
  • Moeller technique: 4 weeks (in the advanced techniques course. I will create a new course about this specific topic at some point but the info is the same)

That boils down to about 8 months for the core curriculum. I personally recommend to “chew” on things a little more though. Either by messing around a little bit yourself or by doing things outside of the core curriculum. I think taking your time to “digest” the information before opening up a new subject will give you the best results over all.

A timeline that includes some digestion looks like this. Please note this is just an example of how I would do it. You probably will do it a little differently based on what motivates and inspires you:

  • Beginner course: 1 week + 1 week of playing some basic stuff
  • Grooving & improving: 6 weeks + 3 weeks of playing some real drum songs from the “Easy awesome & real” course.
  • Hit the gym: 6 weeks + 4 weeks playing some breakbeats and trying to apply the exercises from the gym course to make them flow
  • Building fills: 4 weeks + 6 weeks jamming, coming up with variations and really trying to make executing the fills completely effortless
  • Funky song: 4 weeks + 8 weeks playing some more songs, for example from the monthly challenge, and applying everything we’ve learned so far about how to memorize things and also how to refine a new groove
  • Ideally, around this time, so before or after this course, you take some time to do a couple of “Time & time again” lessons or… you start watching Benny Grebs dvd “The art & science of groove”. This will help you in playing along to drumless backing tracks and get a nice feel going that comes from within you. I would take 8 weeks for that.
  • Next level beats: 8 weeks + playing some of the more difficult monthly challenges that use these rudiments for 4 weeks
  • Moeller technique: 4 weeks + playing some of the more difficult monthly challenges that use these rudiments for 4 weeks

So that boils down to 16 months, roughly 1,5 years. As mentioned before, I more or less break this down in a youtube video.

Realistically, assuming there will be periods of less practice because of busyness, or holidays etc. I would say that if you commit, practice diligently, take some time to digest things and hopefully make some music on the side I think that after 2 years you will know and understand everything I know.

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Robert

Thanks for the detailed reply. I watched the video you attached. I have previous musical experience so I’ve found that for the early part of the course which I’m on now I’m going through at about twice the recommended speed. But I expect that will slow down once I hit the three month wall you mention.

I also asked about EZ drummer for your livecast. I listened to your response and it confirmed what I was beginning to suspect. It takes a combination of tools (finger drumming and loops and midi editing) to create convincing drum parts. I bought EZ drummer and the bandmate feature does generate very good starting points, but extra work is needed with them.

Thanks for creating the course. I started recording about ten years ago on computer and had a padKontrol but didn’t know what to do with it. I got another one about a year ago and then found your course when I got frustrated with loops and my inability ot create original drum parts.

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