I’ve got this electronic kit set up in the corner of my room for the summer, next to my desk, trying to put in the first few of what will hopefully become 10,000 hours on the drums. So far it’s been working like a charm: whenever I’m wanting to get away from the computer or waiting for a load of laundry or just in a procrastinating mood, I sit down and wail away to the iPod or the metronome for twenty minutes. It’s a great workout, playing drums—mentally as well as physically. Today it’s offbeats, always a weak spot of mine: maintaining a steady pattern that’s directly opposite the main pulse of the song. The -pah -pah of the oom-pah oom-pah. It’s driving me nuts. Keeping offbeats going on their own isn’t the hard part; it’s introducing other stuff that moves independently of that pattern, so that offbeats have to go on autopilot, motoring away no matter what irregular rhythms are going on around them.
Working on things like this reveals how connected the different parts of my body are by default, how sympathetic the left hand is to the right foot, how intuitively they just want to join forces on the same task. Everybody oom, forget the -pah! I’ve noticed the same phenomenon in dance (which I’m not good at either): why do my arms tense up when my legs are doing something difficult? They’re not supposed to be doing anything; they could stay relaxed until something was asked of them. But limbs have a kind of herd mentality, and the point of practicing—drums, at least—is to re-train them as independent spirits. Long process. It hurts my head in the best way.