The 3 Things Monopoly Has Taught Me About Drumming
Photo credit: .A.A.
I usually win at Monopoly. In fact I've only ever lost a couple times in my whole life.
I'm not ashamed to admit that recently I've used Google to find different techniques on how to win. A lot of the techniques I found were ones that I had already used before.
But what surprised me the most was that I don't always use those techniques and I've actually won against people who have used them on me.
So I really got to thinking about why I keeping winning at Monopoly because if I could figure it out then maybe I might be able to figure out how to win at everything else in my life.
Here are the 3 things that I reckon are
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A Simple Way To Increase Your Hand Speed
Photo credit: R'eyes'
You know the one about the Ninja and the corn right?
Jumping was one of the most prized skills a Ninja could develop. They had to be able very agile in order to sneak into buildings without detection and avoid slashing attacks from swords and spears on the battlefield. So from a young age Ninjas were trained how to jump high.
Legend has it that when a young Ninja began his training he had to first plant a corn stalk in the ground. Then every day for the rest of his training he had to jump over the corn stalk. As you can imagine it was very easy in the beginning but as the corn grew, the Ninja had to keep jumping over it even if grew taller than he was. Their training was so strict that if he ever failed to jump over it
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How To Set Up Your Drum Kit In 7 Minutes 20 Seconds
In this video you'll see me set up my drum kit from its cases onto the stage in 7 minutes 20 seconds. Sounds crazy but it can be done. It's all about practise. I actually think I could've done this faster but our bass player's daughters packed away my equipment at our gig the night before. Although they did a great job, things weren't where I expected them to be so this added on a bit of extra time.
Listen to the commentary I made for this video to get even more valuable information about setting up your kit at gigs.
From watching the video you will learn:
- How you should prepare the stage for your set up
- The correct order for
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How to Set Up Your Bass Drum Pedal - 3 Practical Ways You Can Improve Speed, Power and Sound
Photo credit: cod_gabriel
When you're setting up your bass drum pedal, the first thing to check is that the spikes on your foot plate are screwed out so the sharp tips just stick out past the footplate. These help achor the bass drum pedal to your mat. Warning: These may rip a normal house carpet and will not work on a smooth floor.
After you're confident that your pedal will not slip away its time to start adjust it to optimize your speed and power.
There are 3 main ways to adjust your bass drum pedal
- Spring tension
- Beater height/rotation
- Distance of beater from bass drum
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How to Increase the Speed of your Single Stroke Roll by 96 BPM
Photo credit: Amnemona
Its not easy but it is possible.
Here's how to do it:
- Pick a single stroke roll exercise. It really doesn't matter what it is as long as you can play it to a click.
- When you practise it, start off at a slow click setting and keep putting it up a couple of BPM every few minutes.
- Do this until it's so fast that you can no longer play it.
- Repeat this every day for a long period of time.
Case study: Stuart
I set one of my drum students, Stuart, a single stroke roll exercise and recorded how fast he could play it. Then after practising it for 3 months, I again recorded how fast he could play it. To start off with, he was playing at 50 BPM and after 3 months he was at 146 BPM.
How did he do it?
He followed my advice outlined above and he practised it near enough every day for 3 months. If you did the same thing would you see the same improvement in speed? Maybe, maybe not. Would you see any noticeable difference? Absolutely, practising works!
Below is the exercise that I set him so you can try it out for yourself:
You'll see that the timing changes a lot.
This is because when you're working on the speed of your single stroke roll you should practice it at both slow and fast speeds.
The slow speeds will help with your timing and give your wrists a well needed break.
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