I’ve mentioned this topic on my YouTube channel a couple of times, but I felt the message was worth repeating here. That message is this: Those that look at what is happening during the Covid-19 outbreak as an OPPORTUNITY are going to be so far ahead of those that look at it as a woe-is-me, major setback.
In other words – if you sit around, feeling sorry for yourself about whatever setbacks you’ve encountered during this pandemic, I’ll just be bold and say that you’re wasting your time. I think that grieving the loss of a job, income, playing opportunities, etc is important – but once that grieving has reached it’s third or fourth day – it’s time to pull yourself up by the boot straps and get busy!
With the entire world screeching to a complete halt, we live in a world of incredible opportunity to hone your craft.
I think this holds especially true for creatives & musicians. With the entire world screeching to a complete halt, we live in a world of incredible opportunity to hone your craft. Many of us are under shelter-in-place orders. We are hunkered down with our instruments, not able to gig or go to band practice.
To those of you who are in the same situation – I have the following suggestion: Instead of binge watching Netflix and eating all of the frozen pizza in your freezer, spend the time on your craft and perfecting the things you have struggled with recently.
So, it is in that spirit that I present to you my Survival Guide to Social Distancing for Drummers in four parts:
Practice, Practice, Practice
I think the most obvious topic of conversation on how to make the best use of your time while social distancing is to practice as much as humanly possible.
Have there been songs, techniques or fills that have always eluded you? Has it been years since you’ve brushed up on your rudiments? The answer to both questions is most likely yes – which makes this the perfect time to bust out the metronome and tackle those challenges you’ve never conquered.
An important aspect of this though is not just spending time playing anything that comes to mind – but actually using proper practicing techniques to get the most out of your time.
To help you out even more, do reference a couple of other articles I’ve written on the topic of practicing. The first is how to properly practice with a metronome
and goes into detail of how to make this time keeper your best friend. The second is an article that is a bit more related to the next topic of drumming quietly as it goes into how to practice drums without a drum kit in front of you.
Shhhh… Keep It Quiet!
Drummers face an every-day struggle which a lot of other musicians don’t have to consider: the fact that our instrument of choice is a naturally loud instrument! To make the problem even worse, the vast majority of us live in situations where loud noise is intrusive to our families and neighbors.
Pile on top of that the fact that shelter-in-place is a reality for all of us and you have a recipe for being left without the opportunity to play drums at all.
Never fear though. I have collected a set of suggestions that will dramatically reduce the amount of noise you make as to not interrupt your practice routine:
Practice Pads Are Your Friend:
Sure, they aren’t quite as fun as your drum kit, but a practice pad can be a life-saver at a time when making noise is just not an option. Practice pad drum sets are even an option if you want an entire set of pads to hit. And hey, if you close your eyes and crank up the tunes loud enough, you might even forget that you’re not playing a real kit.
Mesh Heads and Low Noise Cymbals:
Guess what!? You can put Remo Silentstroke mesh heads on your drums and get yourself some Low Volume cymbals from Zildjian. This won’t completely silence your playing, but it will definitely go a long way towards keeping your family and neighbors sane.
Electronic Drums:
Electric drum sets have come a long way in recent years. It used to be that mesh head kits were only available at the top end of the range, costing multiple thousands of dollars – but these days, a decent kit will only set you back a few hundred. I recently bought a Simmons SD600 kit and for the money, it has served me very well – and allows me to play whenever I want!
Soundproofing:
Now, unless you’re going to spend ooodles of money truly soundproofing your room or house, there is little that you can do to truly eliminate the sound of your drums. That said, there are plenty of things you can do to alleviate the severity of your noise intrusion. These items include putting foam in your windows, building a floating platform for your drums to keep the sound from going through the building structure and hanging foam on your walls. A quick Google search will yield you a lot of options.
Pillows, Padded Chairs and Couches, oh my!
Using stuff around the house to create a makeshift drum set is a practice as old as time! We’ve all done it to one extent or another, now is a great time to get back to it!
Zoom Jam Sessions
Zoom! is a relatively well known video conferencing software out there, but is one of roughly a dozen different platform which can be used to get a group of people together, but virtually.
So much of the fun of hanging out with other musicians and playing music is being able to read another person’s body language and really ‘see’ what they are feeling.
That is why playing virtually on a Zoom! call could be a great option for you to still share musical experiences with your peers!
There are definitely some drawbacks here though, the first being sound quality. Even if you’re using amazing microphones and mixing your sound/drums down to a great stereo feed – it’s likely that any video conference software will compress and degrade the sound quite heavily – so it’s almost not worth even getting fancy.
The second potential drawback is latency. Video feeds tend to chew up a lot of bandwidth which slows down the rate at which data can travel. Add to that the fact that the world is putting a pretty big strain on the internet’s capabilities right now – you’re left with some pretty tangible challenges to get video synced up correctly.
Even if it is close, the sync between you and another musician will likely be a tad off. As long as you go into a Zoom jam session expecting this sort of thing – you’ll be fine. After all, it’s more about just having fun than getting some serious syncopation locked up, right?
Share Tracks
Most of us musicians have some sort of method for recording into our computers. For this exercise, it doesn’t really matter if we are using the free Garage Band software that came with your Mac, or using a full blown ProTools rig. The main point is that it can be a ton of fun to record a track, groove, theme or melody and send it to your fellow musical network to have them add additional tracks to your audio.
In a way, this pulls us back in time just a bit to an era where ‘committing to tape’ meant recording something and putting it out there without the luxury of doing a whole lot of fixes and tweaks.
By sending someone a raw track – they are then able to add their own part on top of that and send you back either their own isolated track for mixing later – or a committed mix of the two parts together.
By repeating this process with a few other musicians – before you know it you might have a full blown song on your hands. I’m also willing to bet that some pretty creative things could potentially come out of collaborating like this. Things which would have never come across if all of the same people were collaborating in the same room.
Final Thoughts
We live in an era of many unknowns. At the time of this writing (March 28th, 2020), nobody really knows what is going to happen as Covid-19 continues to spread throughout the world. Though there are definitely signs of slow recovery here and there, we are also easing on restrictions in various municipalities, which could have further negative impact down the road.
The point is this: things are uncertain and nobody knows when it will get better, which makes this the PERFECT time for creatives to do what they do best – put out some amazing work.
I am excited about the prospect of Finneas and Billy Eilish being cooped up in their childhood home, working on music in their bedrooms like they have for the past few years. I’m almost certain that we can expect some exceptional work to come out of these two being stuck in the same house together months on end.
The same rings true for the entire musical community – and the arts in general. This is a time of reflection and reconnecting with the things that are most important to us as individuals and I think that artists stand to gain the most from this pandemic as the doors to creativity stand WIDE OPEN!
