Help your drummer play with a metronome or click track

  Speaker 3 If you have a drummer who struggles to stay on the click track, then this answer from one of our private Q&A sessions inside the Worship Administration Academy is gold. There are a few really practical techniques that you can start using this week to help your drum improve their metronome drum playing. So check out this response to one of our academy students’ questions.

Speaker 1 Drummer does well, but when he adds fills, he gets off the click. Any tips for helping people grow?

Speaker 2 Yeah. So my son is 12 years old, and it’s less about age. It’s more about experience, right? So he’s just getting his bearings. But the beautiful thing is I told him, I said, When I started playing, I didn’t have in ears, I didn’t have a click track or a multi-track stem to play to or any of that, we would just sit there and I would click the band in and whatever tempo I clicked, we would start. So what I’m doing with my son, we use the Prime app from Loop Community. And so I just created his own little playlist and I added all the songs that the youth would want to learn or that he would play and want to learn, like praise from Elevation Worship, that stuff. And then rather than just putting a metronome, that’s boring for a younger person to start learning. I don’t want to play with this thing. It’s so robotic. But when it’s embedded in the track of a song, by default, you’re actually learning to sync up. For my son, he’ll come every morning at 7: 00 AM after breakfast. He gets ready for school, and he’ll play drums for a good 25 minutes.

Speaker 2 He’ll open up his laptop, put his in ears in, and just play through the setlist. Unfortunately, there’s no simple, easy way. You have to play with a click to get comfortable with the click. But yeah, get playing with the click. And multitracks are probably the easiest way to sell it to an inexperienced drummer who’s just learning or getting started on it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, and this is something I used to do, Mark, is I would have a drummer that I was training. And this goes to someone else’s question, too. This is Danny Fiero. I’m going to tie it back to Mark’s question, but Danny’s also asking, I’m losing a bunch of drummers. How do I train new ones? Well, one of the things that I did with my other drummer that I was training was I would have him come in, I would play through a song with him and give him advice, and then I’d leave him with the laptop for an hour and say, I want you to practise with the click on all these songs with the multi-tracks, right? And then he would practise for an hour, and then I would come back and I would do one last song with him and give him some final feedback. And every week he would come in and he would play at the church on the drum kit, and I would just let him in. I would spend five minutes up front, five minutes to the end, and let him play for an hour or however long he could. And that was a great way for him to learn.

Speaker 1 The one caveat is because tracks are all literally lined up to a grid, it doesn’t take into account that when you play in a live setting, your actual musicians are going to be a little sloppier because they’re not quantitized, computerised. So then the drummer is following, instead of following the click, so he just has to make sure the click is loudest. And then specifically giving feedback, Mark, to your drummer that, Hey, actually, you need to pay attention to your fills, and you need to make sure that you’re not rushing your fills, and tell him to practise his fills over and over and over to the click. So for example, you’re running the song, and then you just keep the click after the multitrack’s finished. You keep the click going, and you just practise What’s that fill like, and then you do it over. And you try to make sure you’re staying on time.

Speaker 4 Over and over and over and over until you stop rushing it.

Speaker 1 And so that’s how I would train a drummer who’s rushing and getting messed up on his fills.

Speaker 2 Go ahead, John. I just want to add. I’ve used this tempo app, and if you see these circles, you can actually accent or remove them completely. This is a little more advanced, perhaps. It’ll skip. That would be like a, and two, and three. But I’m going to mute, let’s say, the second one. One and three. What you do is over time, you take out all of them, except for the one, perhaps. Then it creates that idea of space, and I have to make sure that… Oh, I’m off. And that was just one bar. Then that’s another way, a little more advanced, perhaps, of how they can train to get that inner clock going. Back to what you were just saying is to build. A lot of times, it’s when you’re getting to the course and there’s a build for it or in the bridge building to the course again, that’s where you’ll find, I call it the train that’s speeding down the tracks and it just keeps getting faster and faster. Those are usually the moments. It’s in those builds where they’ll tend to speed up. Exactly what Alex said, have them practise those fills, isolate it with a click so that they can lock it in.

Speaker 2 That’s what my son has to do. When he took drum lessons, his teacher would isolate that trouble spot and work it and then loop over and over again.

Speaker 1 We did a podcast a couple months ago with a Grammy award-winning singer, and I asked her how does she do her crazy runs? She said, Never practise faster than you can do it successfully.

Speaker 3 That’s a strange phrase, but basically what she’s saying is slow the tempo down until you can do it right, and then keep doing it right until you can never do it wrong, and then speed it up by 5: 00 BPM and start over until you can never do it wrong, and then speed it up by BPM.

Speaker 1 And then eventually you’re doing the run so fast or the fill so fast because you’ve built your way up to that speed. And so, yeah, that’s a lot of great advice.

Speaker 3 Thanks for the great question, Mark. If you love this real-life practical coaching for your actual questions that you have as you lead your ministry. I want to invite you into the Worship Ministry Training Academy, where you get to ask expert guests that we bring into the academy your own questions, and they give you these types of answers, very specific to your specific situation. So I would love to invite you to join us inside the Worship Ministry Training Academy. Besides our live expert interviews, we have 13 in-depth courses that will give you the confidence and skill that you need to lead with excellence. We have 20 time-saving templates that you can use in your ministry to immediately streamline things and reduce the headaches and stress. There’s a bunch in the academy. You can try it for free for 15 days by going to worshipministrytraining. Com. Hope to see you inside the academy. Otherwise, check out whatever YouTube is recommending next, as long as it’s from Worship Ministry Training. All right, hit subscribe, hit like, and share the love. God bless.