A return to form (I guess)

It's hard to remember how sick I was of drumming only a couple of months ago.  Or, maybe not so much the recollection of it, because it is still somewhat easy to recall how it felt, but why I felt that way.  Drumming, no fun?  Preposterous!  

Now, there is material that is very interesting, so much so that I have to make decisions that aren't simple.  What to do, what to skip during the hour or so after I grab my sticks.  Some nights, I try each of them. The warmup with the accented section that seemed impossible in March is now mastered, for the most part anyway.  

I learned that it's easier to place the accents while playing with the accompanying music than with a metronome.  I can remember where they go in the song, while with the click track I'm left trying to count to four and to five and play the beats accordingly, which is not difficult at a slower tempo, but jamming a five-count in the limited time at 137 bpm has stymied me again and again.

The Simon Says ear training lesson wasn't difficult to keep up with.  There were a couple of lines that I'm sure I didn't match, but for the most part I could copy and reproduce the desired patterns.  Satisfactory and satisfying.  

In the current set of Drumeo Method lessons, I heard the instructor talk about phrasing, but in an abstract sense that left me unsure of the meaning.  At least, that's how I remember it; maybe it was too much in one lesson to digest it all.  That's because tonight, I played along with a short "workout", a bite-sized lesson focusing on one element.  

At one point, I realized that the loop in the background lasted four bars, and that to fit in with it, a fill needed to be brief, and I played around with the half-bar "Pat Boone Debby Boone" fill.  It felt like it worked, and I believe that it was an example that I would have appreciated in yesterday's lesson.

I'm learning the difference between playing what's on a page and playing something that isn't a cover version, making it up as you go along within the guidelines of a drummer's role of keeping time and mostly remaining in the background.  As much as I'd like to play exactly what Hal Blaine did on Rikki or Bernard Purdie's part on Home At Last, between a simple beginner's beat and the advanced level of the master musician there are intermediate levels of play that wouldn't sound out of place to a casual listener, even though they leave out the more difficult sections the session men added in.