Boyd's Bondi Beats...

Hey guys, welcome to Bondi Beats. Boyd here, hope you're all doing okay. Just thought I'd share with you today an exercise I've been using since I've been away on my travels, just to keep— maintain my hands as I don't get a chance to get on kit that often. Got this exercise as I kind of got inspired by Joe Morello. Yeah, that's right. Who sadly passed away earlier this year. If you're not familiar with his stuff, do check him out. He left us a load of great music and some great educational material as well. So this exercise is based on an exercise from Master Studies called the Stone Killer, which George Lawrence Stone passed on to him quite some time ago. Basically what we're doing, the first part of the exercise is just to warm the hands up. So we're starting off just single-handedly, and what we're going to do is we're going to do a group of 16th notes with the right hand and a group of 16th with With the left hand, and we're going to do that for 1 unit of time. We'll say that unit of time is a minute, so it's basically going to look like this. We're then going to do 2 groups of 16ths for 2 minutes. It's going to go something like this. Next thing we're gonna do, you've guessed it, 3 groups of 16ths for 3 minutes, and then following that we're gonna do 3, uh, 4 groups of 16ths for 4 minutes. And in total that gives us a 10-minute exercise. And when you put the whole thing together, it's gonna go something like this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10. What we're doing there, basically warming the hands up gradually, giving them a bit of space in between. And if we play it through, it makes a 10-minute exercise from top to bottom. So we just So we just have our stopwatch there and our metronome. Play at a speed you're comfortable with, and when it goes to the next minute or to the next change, just add on your extra group of 16ths. Now that's pretty easy on the hands. Like I say, it's a good warm-up just to get the blood flowing. The next step of the exercise is where we're going to interlace the groove. So what we're going to do, if we were playing 4 notes in one hand and 4 in the other, we're still going to play the same, but we're going to interlace them and then just tag a note on at the end. So I'll show you what I mean. By tagging on the extra note gives us the opportunity to switch the leading hand. So what this is doing is giving the left hand a also like a leadership position half the time. So we really get to work both hands out great. The way I work on this is in terms of keeping track of it. For the first minute, we play along three clicks. So one, two, three, one, two, three, one, two. 1, 2, 3, 1, 2, 3. For the next— for the 2-minute section, we're going to play along to 5 clicks like this. 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5. For the 3-minute and the 4-minute, we're going to play along to 7 clicks and then 9 clicks. What this is doing here, like I say, it's really working on our endurance because we only have a small amount of time to pause. The left hand also gets a good workout because it's leading half the time, so it's not just the right hand by a second. As with any exercise like this, what we always want to make sure is that we've got good form, good shape, good control, so we're not playing too quick and we're all over the place. So work on your control first, and then over time as you get comfortable, build the speed up. And, you know, you can double the length of time you play these things for, make it a 20-minute exercise, or if you're in a rush, you can halve it and do 30 seconds for the first group of 4, then a minute, then a minute and a half, and then 2 minutes. And that gives you a 5-minute exercise all in. And Combine the 2 bits, 20-minute exercise or 10-minute exercise, depending on how you want to play it. Go, Boyd! Guys, I hope you got all that. Any questions, drop me an email, info@drumavoid.com. Check out the website. I'm gonna go for a surf now, so keep drumming, stay safe, try and stay away from the sharks, and I'll see you next time. Bye.