I'm a clinical psychologist, health researcher, and professor. I've also played the drums (amateur) for over 20 years. Your analysis is good--skills are acquired through direct instruction and deliberate practice with immediate feedback. Messing around for a long time or repeating the same easy warmups does not result in improvement as quickly as practicing deliberately (e.g., focused, intentional) in the "zone of proximal development" (where things are hard but not impossible), especially when combined with feedback (e.g., attending to the details of what you're doing or recording yourself). Also, placebos are great until they become a nocebo--an inert thing that causes unwanted side effects. There will never be a randomized clinical trial of drum warmups, because why bother, but I agree with your assertion that warmups can be helpful or unhelpful depending on the function they are serving.
I think you need to know what you gain from warm ups. I look lessons for 11 yearsI was just taught the basics and would help on self improvement. I stop taking lessons after high school since i was moving. I moved back and kept playing drums for up until now and still doing so for 24 year in total. Also my friend who is in a metal band is away from his kit. So he is doing singles, doubles and double stroke rolls to keep his chops. It also keeps with 2nd nature in your brain. Plus on a cold marching comp back in high school we did better than most since we air drummed to warm up. Thous tricks always help and I always play better warming up.
I was taught '20 minutes a day' and 'practice time management' when I was a student. If you can focus for 3/4 minutes each on nothing but 4 or 5 rudiments, you'll get much more out of it than sitting around playing the same thing over and over for hours. I've always been heavily against things like the concept of watching TV and practicing that a lot of people seem to advocate for example, because it's not mindful or productive practice. In terms of 'practice time management' it's a question of not getting bogged down on the kit so you don't end up needlessly playing stuff you already know. If you're not making mistakes, you're not learning!! Most of us don't have enough time to devote to just playing drums all day, so that practice time has to count and you can get through quite a lot of material in an hour if you need to! There's a word that I think is missing a lot from this conversation though, and that word is 'discipline'. How many people time what they're playing and play to a click? How many people have a schedule for the next year of stuff they want to improve? Even impossible stuff becomes easy at some point, how long it takes to get there is down to discipline and drive. People need to understand that the time spent on accuracy and dynamics is an investment; the speed comes for free!!
@@jadedbreadncircus9159 You should be able to play tension free. Somebody famous said you should hold the stick like it's a baby bird; gently enough that you don't crush it, but light enough it doesn't fly away. What finger do you use for your fulcrum with your thumb? If you use the index finger, it's very easy to get into the 'death grip', if you use the middle finger, it's almost impossible to grip the stick too hard.
@@jadedbreadncircus9159 Have you ever had a teacher, or a technique teacher? Which grip do you use the most? French grip is like extending your hand as if you're about to shake somebody's hand and closing the bottom 3 fingers around the stick with the pivot between the thumb and index finger with the two hands perpendicular to the drum and facing each other. German grip is holding your hand like you're about to knock on somebody's door, with palms down and the sticks fitting in there at at about 45 degrees so they look like they'd be at about 20 to 4 on a watch face. Hybrid/American is a mixture of both French and German with the thumbs pointing to about 10 'O clock. Each grip has its strengths and weakness. French grip is really good for finger control, quieter dynamics and fast tempos via the fingers, but it's very difficult to generate power without lifting your whole arm to make a stroke. French grip pretty much makes the wrist joint redundant, so it's not a useful technique to employ all of the time. Germanic grip is very powerful and loud because it utilises the wrist, but not the fingers nearly so much. As a result, it's difficult to play with as much subtlety as French grip. Hybrid grip is a hybrid of both French and German grips, but I think it's important to master both grips individually before converting to hybrid. In terms of the ball bouncing, it's more like 'following' the ball. You throw the ball down and you hand follows the motion, you don't throw the ball and your hand just stops dead. As the ball bounces back up, because your hand is tracking the ball you should be able to catch the ball with literally no tension. Your hand and the ball should meet when the ball is at the top of its arc and your hand should be following the ball back up to a point where they meet with almost total neutrality. The ball is doing all the work, you're just providing that initial impetus. If you throw a tennis ball at the ground, you don't throw it down as hard as you can, you throw it with just enough force to get it back to your hand, right? It's the same with a stick. If you try to throw the tennis ball faster, you don't really change the technique you're throwing with, you're just throwing the ball a shorter distance so you use a smaller movement and smaller amount of power with the same technique. If you're dribbling a tennis ball an inch from the table top, that distance and power needed to maintain the dribbling is much, much smaller, but the technique is still the same otherwise you'll catch the ball in the wrong part of the bouncing cycle and that ball's going through the window!! Does that make sense?
@@jadedbreadncircus9159 Awwww, man. I hate it when I do that, especially in Facebook!! Have you ever watched the Jim Chapin "Speed, Power, Control, Endurance Instructional Video " at all? It's here on CZcams if they haven't taken it down yet. I would strongly advise you to find a good local teacher, even for just two or 3 sessions. If you're hitting the wall at 200ish then a couple of lessons just to help you analyse your technique with them might really help give you a leg up over the wall!
I have to say that as a 54 year old drummer, when your younger warm ups(for the sake of "preparing the muscles") are kinda pointless but as you get older and because you want to play as relaxed a possible(especially in jazz), they start to become really essential. Why? Because like beef, as we get older our muscles become more dense and tougher...requiring more stretching and more blood flow to work as desired. Plus, I also find warm ups remind your muscles to move in a desired motion so you don't have to think about that motion or worse, fall into that old undesired motion out of muscle memory. All in all, I've found that warm ups are more to refine your technique and train your brain and muscles to move in a desired way. What I usually do as warm ups is practice playing rudiments on a pad as lightly as possible to a metronome. Then when you can comfortably play said rudiments quietly and with speed and control introduce a new rudiment or sticking pattern.
@Jesse Olsson Enjoy your tender, nimble lamb muscles while you can. Cause one day they'll be all tough and stringy like yesterday's mutton... And all they'll be good for then is to be boiled up in a stew and fed to poor homeless children. And once the children finish their drummer stew, they'll be infected with the rhythm of your old, tired drummer muscles. And your drum spirit will have found new life in the bodies of the poor waifs that consumed it! They won't be able to control themselves, they'll be compelled to exorcise the beats flowing inside them. And they'll all start a band together, every single one of them playing drums. And they'll tour the country like a huge, rolling juggernaut of skins and brass. Unleashing a sonic assault on the cities that formerly shunned them and relegated them to a life of street thuggery.
I understand your point with the "eating disorder and 'cutting'"-part. But as someone who has struggled with mental health in my life i thought that point could be dealt with more gracefully.
If you're gigging a lot, you stay fairly warm all the time anyway. With that said, warming up and stretches are the difference between being able to hit the ground running in the first tune or somewhere around the third/fourth tune. For gigs, I use Moeller triplets and move through the accents as I speed up and some some doubles and singles and flams. It's quick and easy. For kit practice, I have a pretty short routine; I play straight single 6's, single 9's and single 5's and then single 7's onto longer triplet rolls. From there I segue into triplet 6's (RllrrL), then break the 6's into 3's (Rll and rrL) and move around the kit with them while improvising. Then I knock out a decent tempo Samba to get the feet working and add a little solo. Simples. It takes about 12-15 minutes. Warming up is something that needs to be done. It's not a lunch date, so I try to be as efficient as possible. I take a fairly dim view of moving warmups around the kit. Unless you're physically learning to conquer the space/time it takes to get to a different part of the kit, orchestrating doesn't really help. Your body already knows how to move from snare to rack tom(s) to floor tom, because you're using big muscle groups (relative to warming the hands and feet) to do that, so you're just repeating the same warmup three or four extra times and not really adding anything your previous stretches didn't take care of. For me, it's just a bit of a time-stealer...
Bro, I love your humble delivery and the content is some of the best I have seen (I'm a veteran of 25 years of drum DVDs and VHS tapes) Don't give it up!
Incorporate your left hand into the right hand/foot singles warm up (at the same time instead of alternating), and you'll be on your way to blast beats. :)
When recording drums nowadays, I usually nail it in one to three takes, and I never warm up at all. Whenever I used to warm up it was always some dumb routine for my hands on a practice pad, which neeeever correlated to the feel of an accoustic kit of drums. LOVE the bloopers btw :P
One often underrated tool, take a little break! If you've really been pushing yourself very hard sometimes the best thing is to come back fresh after a day or two. I'm also a big fan of taking some time to reflect on your session after you wrap up. What did you like? What didn't you like? I generally try to have at least 1 thing that improved from the day before, even if it seems small.
Great video, very impressed with the placebo discussion. Interestingly, there have only been 3 comparative surgery outcome studies like the knee surgery you mentioned (At least since I last checked). The first one looked at a common surgery done to relieve angina symptoms and the other looked at using stem cells to treat parkinson's disease (or was it Alzheimer's, I forget). All of them showed no difference between the placebo and actual surgery. Of the 3, only the knee surgery is still done. As for my experience with warm-ups, I have found them more useful as I've gotten into my mid 50's. Although the music I've played during that time has concurrently become more demanding.
I never really warmed up before playing show or recording. Until about 2013 (I was 29) when started noticing that my wrists were feeling really heavy. I warm up before the show or recording but only in the playing style. After 2013, I tried warming up for a long time (about an hour or so) before the show few times. It helped a lot with positioning the hands and withstanding the wild kind of playing (crossover thrash/heavy doom metal) but it was lacking the "vibe" if that makes sense. It just felt like I was just playing along the band without any soulful approach to it. I feel like warming up (with a practice pad) is good as a self discipline. But I don't see myself haivng a warmup as a mandatory thing. I feel like playing at a soundcheck or playing the kit before the show suits me more as a warmup than shredding on a practice pad. Great episode, as always, Nate!
for me, playing metal, my warm up is about getting my body ready to hit immovable objects with great force haha. really i just play a few songs that are slower and dont require lots of speed and that gets my blood flowing and my muscles ready. one or two songs later im ready to practice or perform
Because there are so so many ways to warm up what I do (because I consider warming up a necessity) is change the routine often. One month it may be Stick Control's first three pages at full strokes at varied tempos followed by taps and vamps a varied tempos then another month I might do the warm up exercises Sonny Igoe taught me or the exercises Spivak taught and so on. That said if I notice in playing out that something is awry or just doesn't feel right (maybe the press roll seems too choppy) I'll work on that on a pad but that isn't warming up, it's practicing to improve of facet of ones playing. Lastly guys like Louie Bellson, Steve Smith and Steve Gadd always warm up and they do it for one reason...to stay loose and at my age staying loose takes warming up. I enjoy your vids Nate but what you described as your warmup seems more like a practice you're doing to improve that aspect of your playing.
@@Triggagnomic Actually I studied 5 years with Gary Chester and then around 2 years with Sonny Igoe. The Spivak things I got second hand from people who had studied with him. I also studied with Allen Herman and he had studied with Joe Morello so through Allen I got a lot of Joe's things.
@@macvoutie That is pretty damn neat!! Gary Chester was a monster! I haven't really come across Sonny Igoe as much as his son Tommy, but I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree! I got involved with Allen Herman's Facebook pages/groups for a while, but he just seems a bit 'my way or the highway' for me. Which is not to say I don't respect his teaching or playing but I couldn't get on with his teaching style in his videos. I do enjoy his playing though! That's some pretty wicked teachers you've had there!
A lot of those intro examples were actually just rudiments practice. For me, a warm up means getting your body ready to do whatever it is your about to do.
In my opinion, my recommendation would be that the best warm-up is to sit on the drum kit, start with a rhythm that we like playing (softly) preferably something complex so that coordination is practiced at the same time , alternating from hi hats to ride cymbal, keeping the same volume, and as our body begins to warm-up/ lose tension in muscles, that's when we start to add drum fills giving strong hits and more notes on the bass drum etc. It is also important to maintain a constant, natural breathing, as well as staying hydrated. It is very helpful for building endurance. Something else i would like to add is practice with heavier drumsticks, Something I like to do is play in the air following the music, it is very useful to learn a song without the need to lose energy. Of course it is not the same but it helps to learn the patterns before the transition .
Good topic. My warm ups are pretty short and using just involve me doing the main motions with my hands and feet to get them ready. I would like to do more little stretches first. I’ll start today.
Warm up 5: In Metal we call that a European blast beat, though we try and maintain that for upward to an entire section. It is one hell of a work out, and gets the blood flowing fast. also, it gets very difficult the faster you go. I've personally never understood the warm-up thing myself - at least inside the practice room - as I've always viewed long warm ups as a time waster. I just found a song or 7 that I can play cold without worry of pulling something, that will undoubtedly get the blood flowing by the end of it. However, stretching and breaking the adhesion in my wrists and ankles I find to be very valuable.
When you are in your 20’s and 30’s warmups are not necessary, but as you hit your late 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, they are, so it is a good idea to get into the habit of warming up when you are younger. Most CZcamsrs will show “warm-ups” that use fast singles. Those are not warm ups! It will do more harm than good. Start off with slow, relaxed movements, and gradually progress to playing faster. Warmups are not about playing fast; they are about gently doing range-of-motion so that your muscles are not shocked when you start playing. Also, don’t overstretch before warming.
I feel like yeah the warmup is no good when it feels like a ritual instead of an exercise, but you kind of glossed over the real point of the warmup-getting your body loose, getting your blood flowing and just easing into playing without taxing yourself too much in the beginning.
@@innie721 wow, that literally never occurred to me to try that! Lol I just set I my gig kit lefty, I just want to break some bad habits I picked up being self taught!
Try something, as soon as your wake up, I mean as soon as your conscious come back start running or doing push up. If you're young enjoy it while it lasts 😉
1. Drumming is not crossfit, and there's no rule that you have to play 150% from the first note (unless you're playing bast metal, but even those guys have technique so they're not using 100% muscle and brute force) 2. czcams.com/video/wiUw7c_NiXY/video.html - "warming up" may be overrated/misunderstood even with regard to rigorous exercise
Hey Nate, what do you think about idea of Indian musicians that you don’t have to warming up , you just have to play the music? I think Bernard Purdie demonstrate perfectly this conception on the drum-set. Have you ever seen him do warmups or playing exercises? I’m not . And he told on Drumeo that he warming up by playing grooves for 20 min.
Sergey Shevelev yea I think nobody but 60-plus year olds playing metal actually “need” to warm up. Everybody needs exercises. But we have to make the distinction
Holy shit, the cutting. I had a girlfriend who did that. Attention seeking with a weird compulsive aspect to it. My first introduction to it was the 2am phone call saying "I hurt myself" and me racing across town. We went our separate ways after a while and she's doing much better, but man, what a time that was... Warm-up and practice in general are boring and I play drums for fun. Yes, it'll holds me back ever becoming great, or even good. But I warm up playing some fun beats and paying attention to what I do.
@@8020drummer No sweat, neither am I. I just experienced it from up close. She has learned to deal with it, but the scars are there. I think you're spot on that there (often) is a compulsive aspect. Like your earlier 25 minute warmup. ;-)
I thought the point of a warm up was to warm up, not to get better at something. For me, I really do need to limber up and get the blood flowing to my hands. If I want to do doubles at 180 bpm or faster, I can't do it (not now anyway) cold, but I can work up to it in a few minutes once I get the blood flowing. I have noticed that as I get better, I require less warm up to do certain things, but this still points to a warm up making comfortable things even more comfortable compared to coming in cold.
Very thought provoking. Thanks for all the great content. Respectfully, your practice room looks like a dirty prison cell. Is there a method behind this madness?
Where’s the line between warmups and legit practice exercises? Because it seems to me that this entire segment you’ve been discussing the actual exercises, in terms of effective / ineffective, improving / not improving, waste of time or not. But the warmups aren’t supposed to get you improved. You’ve got exercises for that. Warmups are what they’re named - warm-ups. They’re supposed to stretch your muscles, get the blood flowing, wake up your brain from the night’s sleep, etc. And they don’t have to be effective in order to achieve that. In fact, it’s okay when they’re dull and repetitive, because they’re supposed to be short. So if your warmups last 40 minutes, those are probably not warmups, you’re already exercising when you’re doing them. Am I wrong?
Interesting, right? I think you've hit upon a worthwhile dovetail, which is that exercises utilize that deliberate practice thing to actually work on a skill, whereas pure "warmups" operate on the premise that your body is "cold" and not ready to play until you put it through the motions. I think I concatenated them because I had the instinct you might as well kill two birds with one stone, and utilize real exercises to "get the blood going". It's this idea that we need to play singles on a pad to "get the blood going" I'm really taking issue with, I guess. Why couldn't improvising lightly on the kit also "get the blood going"?
@@8020drummer Hey Nate! Big fan. Question! Do you ever hit the drums really hard? Pretty banal question, but sincere! I identify with the "clean" execution concepts you have talked about and I LOVE playing quietly and cleanly. I studied jazz with Quincy Davis! The reason I ask is I find that playing wrist strokes as hard as I can, with a towel on the drum, really gives the best mileage on actual musculature endurance, and a great warm up. I never see you smack the shit outta the drums, and some of your (and my) heroes definitely do that! Like Eric Moore! Anyway. Was just curious!
I never got why a warm up should be some rudimental stuff that you only do with your hands. cause when i'm not warm i'm not learning new stuff with that, so i practice rudiments when i'm already warm and it really makes sense to me, just to pick a groove and play a groove for 5 to 10 minutes to warm up the whole body and not just the hands and wrists. Also playing a groove is way more musically to do so, this ist still music and not a sport, otherwise you'll end up like the guy in whiplash, wich also is not good for the mindset in my opinion.
Sometimes I warm up and play shit, other times I just straight in and everything seems to flow. I actually think my playing is more affected by mood/nerves, than whether I'm warmed up or not.
If you want to be mediocre yeah you don’t need to warm up If you want consistency & delivery every time, warm ups help. I totally understand click bait :)
jambajoby32 so if you get called for a gig and you don’t have 25 minutes to warm up beforehand, you’re not the guy? You can’t sound good from the jump?
The 80/20 Drummer don’t need 25 min to warm up! I believe we should all have a few different levels The quick 2-5 min warm up The 10 min Then the full length warm up
The 80/20 Drummer I play several instruments and yes I can get going right away but I find a warm up gives me confidence to play things I’m usually not comfortable played ie new ideas/patterns/rhythms
What if you do a warmup that's actually a "workout"? I do one with a ten-minute timer and it's at the tempo where by the end my arms are burning. Every once in a while, I can increase the tempo to keep it challenging. Ever since the first couple times I've done it, I've been convinced that it leaves my muscles looser and more agile.
Before practice time I never do warm-ups. I just start with simpler exercises and slower tempos. Before gigs warm-ups have sens, because most of the time we don't begin show by easiest or slower songs.
@@StraightNoChaser86 Yes, but this exercises belong to the topic which I working on at present. For example: When I have only one hour to practice, and I want to spend it to develop my groups of three I don't play paradidle for 15 minutes it order to warm-up my arms it's kinda wasting my time, especially when I have limitet time to practice during the day.
I was going to post this as well. There's not much point to warming up before practice, unless you want the "start" of your practice to sound better, which doesn't really matter. Just jump in and cut yourself a little slack for the first 10 minutes.
The 80/20 Drummer To be clear, I’m referring to the snap, tap, whistle, tic-like, thingy. Book cover judging aside, I like your lessons. Having given up drumming long ago and moving on to theater tech (I’ve built A LOT of scenery), I still love watching, listening and learning. Oddly enough, over decades, I have applied much of what might be considered the psychology of craftsmanship to my work. Just like you do with learning an instrument (drums). Discovering your videos reinforced the notion that any long-term human pursuit entails a fully rounded approach. One last thing ( (“Oh come on carpballet, enough already”), “Hang in there. It will be worth it, I promise’), as hackneyed as it may be, “Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.” - Arthur Ashe. (“Except for the paycheck” - carpballet)
The 80/20 Drummer I did watch the video in its entirety Clickbait! Because yes you’re sharing your warm ups please know even a thumbs down feeds into your channel in a positive way while still allowing us to express our thumbs
I'm a clinical psychologist, health researcher, and professor. I've also played the drums (amateur) for over 20 years. Your analysis is good--skills are acquired through direct instruction and deliberate practice with immediate feedback. Messing around for a long time or repeating the same easy warmups does not result in improvement as quickly as practicing deliberately (e.g., focused, intentional) in the "zone of proximal development" (where things are hard but not impossible), especially when combined with feedback (e.g., attending to the details of what you're doing or recording yourself). Also, placebos are great until they become a nocebo--an inert thing that causes unwanted side effects. There will never be a randomized clinical trial of drum warmups, because why bother, but I agree with your assertion that warmups can be helpful or unhelpful depending on the function they are serving.
I think you need to know what you gain from warm ups. I look lessons for 11 yearsI was just taught the basics and would help on self improvement. I stop taking lessons after high school since i was moving. I moved back and kept playing drums for up until now and still doing so for 24 year in total. Also my friend who is in a metal band is away from his kit. So he is doing singles, doubles and double stroke rolls to keep his chops. It also keeps with 2nd nature in your brain. Plus on a cold marching comp back in high school we did better than most since we air drummed to warm up. Thous tricks always help and I always play better warming up.
I was taught '20 minutes a day' and 'practice time management' when I was a student. If you can focus for 3/4 minutes each on nothing but 4 or 5 rudiments, you'll get much more out of it than sitting around playing the same thing over and over for hours. I've always been heavily against things like the concept of watching TV and practicing that a lot of people seem to advocate for example, because it's not mindful or productive practice. In terms of 'practice time management' it's a question of not getting bogged down on the kit so you don't end up needlessly playing stuff you already know. If you're not making mistakes, you're not learning!! Most of us don't have enough time to devote to just playing drums all day, so that practice time has to count and you can get through quite a lot of material in an hour if you need to! There's a word that I think is missing a lot from this conversation though, and that word is 'discipline'. How many people time what they're playing and play to a click? How many people have a schedule for the next year of stuff they want to improve? Even impossible stuff becomes easy at some point, how long it takes to get there is down to discipline and drive. People need to understand that the time spent on accuracy and dynamics is an investment; the speed comes for free!!
@@jadedbreadncircus9159 You should be able to play tension free. Somebody famous said you should hold the stick like it's a baby bird; gently enough that you don't crush it, but light enough it doesn't fly away. What finger do you use for your fulcrum with your thumb? If you use the index finger, it's very easy to get into the 'death grip', if you use the middle finger, it's almost impossible to grip the stick too hard.
@@jadedbreadncircus9159 Have you ever had a teacher, or a technique teacher? Which grip do you use the most?
French grip is like extending your hand as if you're about to shake somebody's hand and closing the bottom 3 fingers around the stick with the pivot between the thumb and index finger with the two hands perpendicular to the drum and facing each other. German grip is holding your hand like you're about to knock on somebody's door, with palms down and the sticks fitting in there at at about 45 degrees so they look like they'd be at about 20 to 4 on a watch face. Hybrid/American is a mixture of both French and German with the thumbs pointing to about 10 'O clock.
Each grip has its strengths and weakness. French grip is really good for finger control, quieter dynamics and fast tempos via the fingers, but it's very difficult to generate power without lifting your whole arm to make a stroke. French grip pretty much makes the wrist joint redundant, so it's not a useful technique to employ all of the time. Germanic grip is very powerful and loud because it utilises the wrist, but not the fingers nearly so much. As a result, it's difficult to play with as much subtlety as French grip. Hybrid grip is a hybrid of both French and German grips, but I think it's important to master both grips individually before converting to hybrid.
In terms of the ball bouncing, it's more like 'following' the ball. You throw the ball down and you hand follows the motion, you don't throw the ball and your hand just stops dead. As the ball bounces back up, because your hand is tracking the ball you should be able to catch the ball with literally no tension. Your hand and the ball should meet when the ball is at the top of its arc and your hand should be following the ball back up to a point where they meet with almost total neutrality. The ball is doing all the work, you're just providing that initial impetus. If you throw a tennis ball at the ground, you don't throw it down as hard as you can, you throw it with just enough force to get it back to your hand, right? It's the same with a stick. If you try to throw the tennis ball faster, you don't really change the technique you're throwing with, you're just throwing the ball a shorter distance so you use a smaller movement and smaller amount of power with the same technique. If you're dribbling a tennis ball an inch from the table top, that distance and power needed to maintain the dribbling is much, much smaller, but the technique is still the same otherwise you'll catch the ball in the wrong part of the bouncing cycle and that ball's going through the window!!
Does that make sense?
@@jadedbreadncircus9159 Awwww, man. I hate it when I do that, especially in Facebook!!
Have you ever watched the Jim Chapin "Speed, Power, Control, Endurance Instructional Video
" at all? It's here on CZcams if they haven't taken it down yet.
I would strongly advise you to find a good local teacher, even for just two or 3 sessions. If you're hitting the wall at 200ish then a couple of lessons just to help you analyse your technique with them might really help give you a leg up over the wall!
"But it's in 4" I don't think I've ever related to something so much in my life lmao
I have to say that as a 54 year old drummer, when your younger warm ups(for the sake of "preparing the muscles") are kinda pointless but as you get older and because you want to play as relaxed a possible(especially in jazz), they start to become really essential. Why? Because like beef, as we get older our muscles become more dense and tougher...requiring more stretching and more blood flow to work as desired. Plus, I also find warm ups remind your muscles to move in a desired motion so you don't have to think about that motion or worse, fall into that old undesired motion out of muscle memory. All in all, I've found that warm ups are more to refine your technique and train your brain and muscles to move in a desired way. What I usually do as warm ups is practice playing rudiments on a pad as lightly as possible to a metronome. Then when you can comfortably play said rudiments quietly and with speed and control introduce a new rudiment or sticking pattern.
marc777danielle I can’t relate to this, but it makes sense.
@Jesse Olsson Enjoy your tender, nimble lamb muscles while you can.
Cause one day they'll be all tough and stringy like yesterday's mutton... And all they'll be good for then is to be boiled up in a stew and fed to poor homeless children.
And once the children finish their drummer stew, they'll be infected with the rhythm of your old, tired drummer muscles. And your drum spirit will have found new life in the bodies of the poor waifs that consumed it! They won't be able to control themselves, they'll be compelled to exorcise the beats flowing inside them. And they'll all start a band together, every single one of them playing drums. And they'll tour the country like a huge, rolling juggernaut of skins and brass. Unleashing a sonic assault on the cities that formerly shunned them and relegated them to a life of street thuggery.
@@jesseolsson1697 are you above or below age 21? haha
Makes me feel better about not really warming up most of my life.
I understand your point with the "eating disorder and 'cutting'"-part. But as someone who has struggled with mental health in my life i thought that point could be dealt with more gracefully.
If you're gigging a lot, you stay fairly warm all the time anyway. With that said, warming up and stretches are the difference between being able to hit the ground running in the first tune or somewhere around the third/fourth tune. For gigs, I use Moeller triplets and move through the accents as I speed up and some some doubles and singles and flams. It's quick and easy. For kit practice, I have a pretty short routine; I play straight single 6's, single 9's and single 5's and then single 7's onto longer triplet rolls. From there I segue into triplet 6's (RllrrL), then break the 6's into 3's (Rll and rrL) and move around the kit with them while improvising. Then I knock out a decent tempo Samba to get the feet working and add a little solo. Simples. It takes about 12-15 minutes. Warming up is something that needs to be done. It's not a lunch date, so I try to be as efficient as possible.
I take a fairly dim view of moving warmups around the kit. Unless you're physically learning to conquer the space/time it takes to get to a different part of the kit, orchestrating doesn't really help. Your body already knows how to move from snare to rack tom(s) to floor tom, because you're using big muscle groups (relative to warming the hands and feet) to do that, so you're just repeating the same warmup three or four extra times and not really adding anything your previous stretches didn't take care of. For me, it's just a bit of a time-stealer...
Who needs more bloopers?! I surely do 🙃 love you Nate
Bro, I love your humble delivery and the content is some of the best I have seen (I'm a veteran of 25 years of drum DVDs and VHS tapes) Don't give it up!
Love the outtakes, a good laugh is great medicine. Thanks.
Incorporate your left hand into the right hand/foot singles warm up (at the same time instead of alternating), and you'll be on your way to blast beats. :)
When recording drums nowadays, I usually nail it in one to three takes, and I never warm up at all. Whenever I used to warm up it was always some dumb routine for my hands on a practice pad, which neeeever correlated to the feel of an accoustic kit of drums. LOVE the bloopers btw :P
One often underrated tool, take a little break! If you've really been pushing yourself very hard sometimes the best thing is to come back fresh after a day or two.
I'm also a big fan of taking some time to reflect on your session after you wrap up. What did you like? What didn't you like? I generally try to have at least 1 thing that improved from the day before, even if it seems small.
Warm ups ensure consistency & execution!
Great video, very impressed with the placebo discussion. Interestingly, there have only been 3 comparative surgery outcome studies like the knee surgery you mentioned (At least since I last checked). The first one looked at a common surgery done to relieve angina symptoms and the other looked at using stem cells to treat parkinson's disease (or was it Alzheimer's, I forget). All of them showed no difference between the placebo and actual surgery. Of the 3, only the knee surgery is still done.
As for my experience with warm-ups, I have found them more useful as I've gotten into my mid 50's. Although the music I've played during that time has concurrently become more demanding.
Great analysis as always.
Always look forward to your new vids. And your sign off whistle is endearing, don't change it for the world
I never really warmed up before playing show or recording. Until about 2013 (I was 29) when started noticing that my wrists were feeling really heavy. I warm up before the show or recording but only in the playing style. After 2013, I tried warming up for a long time (about an hour or so) before the show few times. It helped a lot with positioning the hands and withstanding the wild kind of playing (crossover thrash/heavy doom metal) but it was lacking the "vibe" if that makes sense. It just felt like I was just playing along the band without any soulful approach to it. I feel like warming up (with a practice pad) is good as a self discipline. But I don't see myself haivng a warmup as a mandatory thing. I feel like playing at a soundcheck or playing the kit before the show suits me more as a warmup than shredding on a practice pad.
Great episode, as always, Nate!
for me, playing metal, my warm up is about getting my body ready to hit immovable objects with great force haha. really i just play a few songs that are slower and dont require lots of speed and that gets my blood flowing and my muscles ready. one or two songs later im ready to practice or
perform
you’re just the best drum lesson channel ive seen. no question in my mind.
Because there are so so many ways to warm up what I do (because I consider warming up a necessity) is change the routine often. One month it may be Stick Control's first three pages at full strokes at varied tempos followed by taps and vamps a varied tempos then another month I might do the warm up exercises Sonny Igoe taught me or the exercises Spivak taught and so on. That said if I notice in playing out that something is awry or just doesn't feel right (maybe the press roll seems too choppy) I'll work on that on a pad but that isn't warming up, it's practicing to improve of facet of ones playing. Lastly guys like Louie Bellson, Steve Smith and Steve Gadd always warm up and they do it for one reason...to stay loose and at my age staying loose takes warming up. I enjoy your vids Nate but what you described as your warmup seems more like a practice you're doing to improve that aspect of your playing.
You studied with Sonny Igoe and Murray Spivack?
@@Triggagnomic Actually I studied 5 years with Gary Chester and then around 2 years with Sonny Igoe. The Spivak things I got second hand from people who had studied with him. I also studied with Allen Herman and he had studied with Joe Morello so through Allen I got a lot of Joe's things.
@@macvoutie That is pretty damn neat!! Gary Chester was a monster! I haven't really come across Sonny Igoe as much as his son Tommy, but I guess the apple doesn't fall far from the tree! I got involved with Allen Herman's Facebook pages/groups for a while, but he just seems a bit 'my way or the highway' for me. Which is not to say I don't respect his teaching or playing but I couldn't get on with his teaching style in his videos. I do enjoy his playing though!
That's some pretty wicked teachers you've had there!
Excited to give these warm ups a go. And very inspired by the discussion running in tandem. Thanks Nate!
A lot of those intro examples were actually just rudiments practice. For me, a warm up means getting your body ready to do whatever it is your about to do.
StraightNoChaser And because drumming is a full body instrument, stretching, calisthenics, etc., should be part of “warming up?”
Yeah this video is confusing, a warmup for me is also getting your body and muscles ready, "warmup" does not mean playing rudiments to me
@@carpballet stretching and range of motion exercises for the arms for sure.
Gotta try some of those drills. A lot of food for thought in this video on so many levels.
In my opinion, my recommendation would be that the best warm-up is to sit on the drum kit, start with a rhythm that we like playing (softly) preferably something complex so that coordination is practiced at the same time
, alternating from hi hats to ride cymbal, keeping the same volume, and as our body begins to warm-up/ lose tension in muscles, that's when we start to add drum fills giving strong hits and more notes on the bass drum etc.
It is also important to maintain a constant, natural breathing, as well as staying hydrated. It is very helpful for building endurance.
Something else i would like to add is practice with heavier drumsticks,
Something I like to do is play in the air following the music, it is very useful to learn a song without the need to lose energy. Of course it is not the same but it helps to learn the patterns before the transition
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It’s meeeeeee!!!! 0:04
NICE :):)
The 80/20 Drummer I love your videos!!
Good topic. My warm ups are pretty short and using just involve me doing the main motions with my hands and feet to get them ready. I would like to do more little stretches first. I’ll start today.
Warm up 5: In Metal we call that a European blast beat, though we try and maintain that for upward to an entire section. It is one hell of a work out, and gets the blood flowing fast. also, it gets very difficult the faster you go.
I've personally never understood the warm-up thing myself - at least inside the practice room - as I've always viewed long warm ups as a time waster. I just found a song or 7 that I can play cold without worry of pulling something, that will undoubtedly get the blood flowing by the end of it. However, stretching and breaking the adhesion in my wrists and ankles I find to be very valuable.
When you are in your 20’s and 30’s warmups are not necessary, but as you hit your late 30’s, 40’s and 50’s, they are, so it is a good idea to get into the habit of warming up when you are younger. Most CZcamsrs will show “warm-ups” that use fast singles. Those are not warm ups! It will do more harm than good. Start off with slow, relaxed movements, and gradually progress to playing faster. Warmups are not about playing fast; they are about gently doing range-of-motion so that your muscles are not shocked when you start playing. Also, don’t overstretch before warming.
lowkey giving out life lessons man...
I feel like yeah the warmup is no good when it feels like a ritual instead of an exercise, but you kind of glossed over the real point of the warmup-getting your body loose, getting your blood flowing and just easing into playing without taxing yourself too much in the beginning.
Agreed. But I suppose, if one is going to warm up, why not do an actual exercise, instead of just noodling around?
So thankful for this channel!! Helping me to switch to playing legr handed kit to develope my left hand leading!
Playing open handed also helps to develop your left hand leading
@@innie721 wow, that literally never occurred to me to try that! Lol I just set I my gig kit lefty, I just want to break some bad habits I picked up being self taught!
You used blue devils as an example for clean playing awhile back. They use “warm ups” to an extreme. What are your feelings in that specific genre?
Try something, as soon as your wake up, I mean as soon as your conscious come back start running or doing push up. If you're young enjoy it while it lasts 😉
1. Drumming is not crossfit, and there's no rule that you have to play 150% from the first note (unless you're playing bast metal, but even those guys have technique so they're not using 100% muscle and brute force)
2. czcams.com/video/wiUw7c_NiXY/video.html - "warming up" may be overrated/misunderstood even with regard to rigorous exercise
Hey Nate, what do you think about idea of Indian musicians that you don’t have to warming up , you just have to play the music? I think Bernard Purdie demonstrate perfectly this conception on the drum-set. Have you ever seen him do warmups or playing exercises? I’m not . And he told on Drumeo that he warming up by playing grooves for 20 min.
Sergey Shevelev yea I think nobody but 60-plus year olds playing metal actually “need” to warm up. Everybody needs exercises. But we have to make the distinction
Holy shit, the cutting. I had a girlfriend who did that. Attention seeking with a weird compulsive aspect to it. My first introduction to it was the 2am phone call saying "I hurt myself" and me racing across town. We went our separate ways after a while and she's doing much better, but man, what a time that was...
Warm-up and practice in general are boring and I play drums for fun. Yes, it'll holds me back ever becoming great, or even good. But I warm up playing some fun beats and paying attention to what I do.
I'm reluctant to weigh in. Sorry you/she had to go through that. I'm (obviously) a drummer, not a psychological professional :P
@@8020drummer No sweat, neither am I. I just experienced it from up close. She has learned to deal with it, but the scars are there. I think you're spot on that there (often) is a compulsive aspect. Like your earlier 25 minute warmup. ;-)
I thought the point of a warm up was to warm up, not to get better at something. For me, I really do need to limber up and get the blood flowing to my hands. If I want to do doubles at 180 bpm or faster, I can't do it (not now anyway) cold, but I can work up to it in a few minutes once I get the blood flowing. I have noticed that as I get better, I require less warm up to do certain things, but this still points to a warm up making comfortable things even more comfortable compared to coming in cold.
Yes. He's missed the point completely.
Revealing!! Thanks!
A little off topic but I would be furious if I got a placebo knee surgery. Like oh here a 6-inch scar for life here you go🤣
Very thought provoking. Thanks for all the great content. Respectfully, your practice room looks like a dirty prison cell. Is there a method behind this madness?
Im renaming you the Pessimistic Tapper'
Stretching is quite important, everything else... not so much.
Where’s the line between warmups and legit practice exercises? Because it seems to me that this entire segment you’ve been discussing the actual exercises, in terms of effective / ineffective, improving / not improving, waste of time or not. But the warmups aren’t supposed to get you improved. You’ve got exercises for that. Warmups are what they’re named - warm-ups. They’re supposed to stretch your muscles, get the blood flowing, wake up your brain from the night’s sleep, etc. And they don’t have to be effective in order to achieve that. In fact, it’s okay when they’re dull and repetitive, because they’re supposed to be short. So if your warmups last 40 minutes, those are probably not warmups, you’re already exercising when you’re doing them. Am I wrong?
Interesting, right? I think you've hit upon a worthwhile dovetail, which is that exercises utilize that deliberate practice thing to actually work on a skill, whereas pure "warmups" operate on the premise that your body is "cold" and not ready to play until you put it through the motions. I think I concatenated them because I had the instinct you might as well kill two birds with one stone, and utilize real exercises to "get the blood going". It's this idea that we need to play singles on a pad to "get the blood going" I'm really taking issue with, I guess. Why couldn't improvising lightly on the kit also "get the blood going"?
@@8020drummer Hey Nate! Big fan. Question! Do you ever hit the drums really hard? Pretty banal question, but sincere! I identify with the "clean" execution concepts you have talked about and I LOVE playing quietly and cleanly. I studied jazz with Quincy Davis!
The reason I ask is I find that playing wrist strokes as hard as I can, with a towel on the drum, really gives the best mileage on actual musculature endurance, and a great warm up. I never see you smack the shit outta the drums, and some of your (and my) heroes definitely do that! Like Eric Moore! Anyway. Was just curious!
maze runner i love it
A warm up (since drums are just physical in that sense) could be biking, running, and or jumping jacks. Not nessesarily rudiments
"cool video keep up the amazing work" seriously.
I never got why a warm up should be some rudimental stuff that you only do with your hands. cause when i'm not warm i'm not learning new stuff with that, so i practice rudiments when i'm already warm and it really makes sense to me, just to pick a groove and play a groove for 5 to 10 minutes to warm up the whole body and not just the hands and wrists. Also playing a groove is way more musically to do so, this ist still music and not a sport, otherwise you'll end up like the guy in whiplash, wich also is not good for the mindset in my opinion.
Sometimes I warm up and play shit, other times I just straight in and everything seems to flow. I actually think my playing is more affected by mood/nerves, than whether I'm warmed up or not.
check out Mark Morley-Fletcher, he has a free eBook about the whole premise of the mental side of music. it's actually really good
If you want to be mediocre yeah you don’t need to warm up
If you want consistency & delivery every time, warm ups help.
I totally understand click bait :)
jambajoby32 so if you get called for a gig and you don’t have 25 minutes to warm up beforehand, you’re not the guy? You can’t sound good from the jump?
The 80/20 Drummer don’t need 25 min to warm up! I believe we should all have a few different levels
The quick 2-5 min warm up
The 10 min
Then the full length warm up
The 80/20 Drummer I play several instruments and yes I can get going right away but I find a warm up gives me confidence to play things I’m usually not comfortable played ie new ideas/patterns/rhythms
What if you do a warmup that's actually a "workout"? I do one with a ten-minute timer and it's at the tempo where by the end my arms are burning. Every once in a while, I can increase the tempo to keep it challenging. Ever since the first couple times I've done it, I've been convinced that it leaves my muscles looser and more agile.
Called muscle memory. Also regular memory.
I only warm up to songs
Before practice time I never do warm-ups. I just start with simpler exercises and slower tempos. Before gigs warm-ups have sens, because most of the time we don't begin show by easiest or slower songs.
Those slow exercises you do are indeed the warm up.
@@StraightNoChaser86 Yes, but this exercises belong to the topic which I working on at present. For example: When I have only one hour to practice, and I want to spend it to develop my groups of three I don't play paradidle for 15 minutes it order to warm-up my arms it's kinda wasting my time, especially when I have limitet time to practice during the day.
@@JachimW Yeah but you tailor your warmup to suit what you're practicing. That's smart practice.
I was going to post this as well. There's not much point to warming up before practice, unless you want the "start" of your practice to sound better, which doesn't really matter. Just jump in and cut yourself a little slack for the first 10 minutes.
The ritual you do because of "covid" is OCD
Your sign-off squawk is mal-adaptive.
You should see my hair
The 80/20 Drummer To be clear, I’m referring to the snap, tap, whistle, tic-like, thingy. Book cover judging aside, I like your lessons. Having given up drumming long ago and moving on to theater tech (I’ve built A LOT of scenery), I still love watching, listening and learning. Oddly enough, over decades, I have applied much of what might be considered the psychology of craftsmanship to my work. Just like you do with learning an instrument (drums). Discovering your videos reinforced the notion that any long-term human pursuit entails a fully rounded approach. One last thing ( (“Oh come on carpballet, enough already”), “Hang in there. It will be worth it, I promise’), as hackneyed as it may be, “Success is a journey, not a destination. The doing is often more important than the outcome.” - Arthur Ashe. (“Except for the paycheck” - carpballet)
Opinion. Hitting each and every stroke in the exact or near exact center of the drum make a boring drum sound.
This is so wrong and I’m a Jazz Drummer.
How?
The Jazz Drummer argument is invoked so often it should be classified as a formal fallacy
Thumbs down instantly
ouch. I've earned zero trust with all my previous videos, nor the fact that I still warm up and I'm sharing all my warm-ups in the video?
The 80/20 Drummer I did watch the video in its entirety
Clickbait! Because yes you’re sharing your warm ups please know even a thumbs down feeds into your channel in a positive way while still allowing us to express our thumbs