Welcome to another progress blog post where I will be reporting on the progress I made with my drumming journey with my mentor Jason Overy.
From my last post, you will have seen that my learning is back on track and that I’ve been making steady progress with the help of my mentor Jason Overy. Although Mr. Overy and I have had a couple of communication issues in the beginning, I wasn’t able to get him to respond to my calls and texts because it was a really busy time for him, but since then, we’ve had clear communication since then. I’ve had to do a meeting two weeks in a row due to being slightly behind schedule, but since I’m all caught up, we will be meeting once every two weeks. Each session will be an hour long at Mr. Overy’s studio because he has the needed equipment for testing my improvement such as big snare drums, a full drum kit, and a drumometer. In order to stay in touch between our in-person meetings, we will be communicating through text in order to confirm our lesson times, so I can ask questions, and so we can maintain our connection.
Although we’ve had quite a good relationship already, I could still improve the quality of my mentoring interactions. I can do this by applying strategies such as practicing as much as I can to make improvement. By doing this, I can progress further, and give Mr. Overy a better opportunity to help me improve and give me advice. This improves the quality of my mentoring sessions because I can learn more from my mentor instead of just going over the same things during the session. I can implement this strategy at any time because I have my own electric drum kit which I can practice on. Another strategy I can use is to clearly communicate my goals and my needs for this project. By doing this, my mentor and I can be on the same page, and my mentor can know how to help me reach my goals. I’ve already implemented this strategy before we started, but I can continue to implement it when something I need comes up, or my goal changes. The third strategy I can use is to stay in touch with my mentor frequently. By doing this, not only can I communicate my goals and needs clearly, I can update my mentor on my progress, further helping him prepare for our meeting. I can implement this every week before our lesson.
Apart from my meetings, I have been practicing around 20 minutes every day. During these practices, I mostly work on improving my basics such as my paradiddles or three different rolls. On some days though, I work on the Wilcoxon drum solo I was assigned the meeting before, and the drum beats that I learned from the meeting before.
This week, I’ve really seen improvement in my basics. Although I have prior experience of drumming, I’ve never learned the double stroke, so that was quite difficult for me. But, with enough practice, I quickly caught on. So, during the drumometer game this week, I got 564 on the singles roll, 877 on the doubles roll, and 1109 on the multiple roll. But this week, in addition to these, Mr. Overy gave me another basic beat to work on because he also saw my improvement. This drum beat only required the snare drum, and is a quite famous drum solo from the song Wipeout by the Surfaris. This drum beat really accentuates accents and requires the player to be able to work with paradiddles.
When we moved to the drum kit, Mr. Overy taught me another basic rock beat with a lot of paradiddles, and a basic jazz beat. Apparently, the reason for doing so much paradiddle practice is because paradiddles are very essential to being able to play controlled and quickly. As for the jazz beat, Mr. Overy said that jazz beats are quite fun to play, and that it’s a good change of pace.
!Volume Warning!
Me practicing the jazz beat I learned on my drumkit.
Me practicing the second rock beat I learned on my drumkit.
Once again, I’ve had so much fun learning how to drum and getting to know my mentor. We’ve had quite good communication, and a good connection, so learning from him has become very fun and I enjoy his teaching. I look forward to the next week.