Ideas on Improvising

For many drummers, improvising can be intimidating at first. Over the years I’ve had many students recoil when I mention trying some improvisation. Personally I’ve found the best way to venture into improvising is by putting guardrails on the exercises. I do this successfully with students, and also apply it to my own practice when working on adding new vocabulary into my playing. The idea is to create exercises that put strict limitations on the vocabulary we’re “allowed” to use in our improvisation. A classic one I do with my students is by limiting it to accented 16th notes only, and we do it on the practice pad. Limiting the improvisation to one surface is a great guardrail as well. So the only rule is that the steady stream of 16ths must continue the entire time. The accents can be placed anywhere (even “randomly” at first), and we can always return to the steady stream of unaccented 16ths if we are unsure what to do. Take a minute, reset on the rhythm, and then bring the accenting back in. The bars don’t have to be full of accents either, one or two per bar, especially at first, is totally acceptable. 

Once comfortable with this, the student can then go to the drum set and apply the exact same exercise, except now the unaccented notes are all played on the snare, and the right hand accents go to the floor tom while the left hand accents go to the high tom. This is enough to get a student moving around the kit, and effectively, improvising. From here they can continue to try new ways of moving around the drums, different combinations, and ultimately become comfortable improvising fills freely around the drum set using accented 16ths.

I’ve seen great results doing this exercise with my students, whether they came into it with a fear of improvising or an excitement to try it. I’d love to hear thoughts from other teachers and students on their experiences improvising. Sharing and discussing our approaches to improvising will surely benefit us all as we continue down the path to true improvisatory freedom!