Originally published at: Woman challenges herself to learn how to drum in 30 days | Boing Boing
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Well if the kid in Love Actually can do it, why not her?
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That was cool…I wish we’d seen more extended clips of her playing along the way. Even a great drummer will drop the stick here and there, that’s hardly an indication of her newbie-ness.
Instead we have to get a sense of her progress based on what she tells us. If she took a page from “tips for writers” and showed us rather than just told us it would have been a much more interesting video.
Just 2 or 3 one-minute clips of her playing along the way would have been great. Have her try to play the Bruno Mars song at 1 week, 2 weeks, and 3 weeks before going into the studio and sounding like a pro at the end.
That said she did present a lot of interesting details about her progress. We got some really good trees but needed a bit more forest!
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Learning drums was the funnest thing ever! I wish I had started when I was younger.
This is pretty damn impressive! Drums is (are?) one of the few instruments that straight up baffles me. Every time I sit in front of a kit I’m just lost.
So what she did was very impressive, she should be very proud of her progress. That said, I don’t think that we’re hearing her audio at the end of the video. I am a percussionist, and the sound doesn’t seem consistent with how she’s playing. How you strike a cymbal, for example, can make a huge difference in the sound that’s produced. Listening to the audio, it sounds like she’s being very consistent with how she hits the ride cymbal, always with the tip of the stick in about the same spot. Watching her, though, it looks like she’s unused to the swinging of a real cymbal - as opposed to her practice kit - and often strikes it with the shoulder of the stick, which has a very different sound that I didn’t hear.
It’s likely that this session was the first time she’d ever played on a real kit, and it takes a lot of getting used to a new kit. It wouldn’t be surprising if she had difficulty getting good and consistent sounds from a real kit, so I suspect they used someone else’s audio track. I don’t doubt that she learned the part and played it in the video, she did a lot of work and it shows. Think of it like this: a student can play a Bach violin sonata without missing any notes, but it will sound very different than a virtuoso playing the same piece. This sounds much closer to a virtuoso than to a beginner, and visual cues persuade me that she’s not making the sounds we’re hearing.
I suppose it’s possible that there were many takes and the clips I really paid attention to weren’t the ones with the best audio. Maybe the best audio track was the last one of the day, but she used video from earlier in the session when she was still getting used to the set. I don’t know, I wasn’t there - so, it’s possible that she didn’t used someone else’s audio for a better narrative, but that’s what I think happened.
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It did sound wayyyyy too studio produced, which was disappointing, the sound gets rid of all the rough edges. I figured when they took the audio recording and added it back to the video it didn’t quite synch up due to frame rate issues.
But I still wish they’d just did a “room” recording, no compression or gated reverb or whatever they did to it.
There should probably be a word in German for when you are happy and impressed by someone’s achievement and at the same time intensely jealous why you cannot do it yourself. Wonder what it could be?
It was also edited. There was a part where a cymbal sounded but she didn’t hit it.
That said, I don’t blame her for that though. Her time was great and her technique was solid. Makes me think I would have been a better drummer if I wouldn’t have begged off the piano lessons my parents wanted me to take.
What really helped me was liquor and adderall in a windowless practice space for 12 hours at a time.
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You are correct that it’s not the original audio. She clarifies in the YouTube comments:
hey daria! good eyes, so I couldn’t use the original audio because you could hear the neighboring drums quite loudly in that studio. Had to re-record afterwards and overlay, but I promise it’s me playing
I should probs clarify this in the video or description tho
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Ha! That would do it. The only instrument I can play while I’m drinking is the piano, though. I mostly play guitar these days, but any more than two drinks and everything starts to fall apart. I think piano is just burned into my soul after all the lessons and exams I took as a kid.
I don’t know what it is about drums that gets me. Probably the fact that I need to coordinate my entire body to make it work.
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It took me about an hour a day for a week of forcing my arms and legs to work semi-independently to get the basics of standard rock drumming back when I was about 20. No lessons, no videos, just hearing John Bonham’s beat from “When The Levee Breaks” in my head and trying to do it until I sounded reasonably smooth and not clunky. Then a host of other beats came easy, just no fancy fills.
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Very entertaining video, looks like a lot of interesting things on her channel already, hope she stays with it. Learning new tasks like this keeps you young, they say. Some years ago the late Neil Peart gave Rick Mercer a drum lesson, it went OK I guess:
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Very cool journey! I wish they’d showcased her actual performance, something’s fishy since her drums aren’t mic’d up. And there’s a cymbal crash that isn’t accounted for visually at 9:14. Still, good for her, excellent progress, and very impressive outcome. Drums are much fun to play.
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Why start with the hurdles when you can go straight to the pole vault and set it on the highest bar!
One lesson I’ve learned when it comes to timing and feel is the best practice is to play along with the original at slightly less volume… when you’re not thinking about the timing and when 'you can’t hear yourself’ you’re in the pocket!
I thought the same thing. Where are all the mics? Those drums we’re hearing had more mics on them than what we’re seeing.
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