speed

Today I'd like to talk about speed. More precisely, how it is perceived by most people, not necessarily drummers, but musicians in general. Your speed doesn't always depend on your technique, but rather on how quickly your brain can respond to a particular tempo or phrasing. That is, all impulses begin in the head. I hope this is clear.
For some reason, all novice musicians basically try to deal more with speed than with music itself. And the faster the pace of the thing they play, the more surprise in their eyes.
"How am I going to play it at this pace???". This is where all the problems begin. The brain does not have time to perceive neither the pace nor the fact that you are playing. More precisely, he perceives it in pieces. And when you start playing it, somewhere in public, then your facial expressions and movements begin to resemble a very slow Internet, your brain is constantly shorting, and after them the whole body is shortening. BUT There is another way of speed, how it is reflected in the groove.

Usually it happens like this, any person has favorite rhythms or those tempos in which a person constantly plays. Suddenly, at some point, we need to play at a tempo that is not familiar to us, for example, ska-punk, or any other that is faster than 160. And our brain begins to perceive this tempo not as (160), but as our favorite with the same pockets and times when we start thinking about breaks or changes in rhythm. And it turns out that the fast pace does not sound, the breaks are either faster or slower than necessary. That is, in general, the picture is clear. We see the same thing when we play mostly fast and we need to play slower. As a result, joints are obtained at the beginning of the part when we begin to get used to the pace. And now let's imagine that a fast piece, for example, goes 8 bars, and it turns out that we just got used to the tempo and again we need to play slowly.

There is another issue related to pace. People who replay someone else's stuff, trying to play it in the original, probably don't realize that whoever came up with it has been playing these phrases for a very long time, and there is a risk that you will sound like a machine. So I've heard Rick Latham solo, Dave Wakel in the original on numerous occasions without a hint of a groove. Actually the question is how to deal with it???
It's very simple - to play at a fast pace, you need to perceive everything at a fast pace. This applies to both rhythms and breaks or some figures within the measure. In any case, with an increase in tempo, our mechanical memory will prevail more, and there will be less time to think. But in general, no one bothers us to think about what we are playing during the game, and this will not particularly interfere with mechanical memory. We can also, in order not to lose and catch the groove - before playing it, play the rhythm in our head, and everything will sound very cool. In any case, everything comes with experience (especially with the studio), when you can hear yourself from the outside, these failures are especially audible on the recording. Sometimes after listening even hands down, but do not forget that if we heard some kind of dirt in our game, then it's good, it would be bad if we didn't hear it.
Hope this article helps someone. Or at least open his eyes to his problems. In any case, the people say "A trifle, but it's nice." And the quality of the game itself depends just on these little things. And if we pay attention to them, then our game will get better. And there will be motivation to continue doing it, because we chose the fate of a musician for a reason. Author: Andrey Matvey Matvienko