Where I am now

OK, this week it's on to Building Speed using those Moeller techniques I (supposedly) mastered over the past several weeks.  Lesson 1 sets the goal at 150 BPM.  Unless that's measuring the beats a different way, I am currently doing well to get halfway there.  70 is safe, but at 75 I start to go off the rails.  I know at that point to go back to 70 and increase BPM by 1's instead of 5's.  But I also know to do it only 10 minutes at a time, so fatigue doesn't undo my progress.  

Try again tomorrow, and begin at 70, then try 71, then 72, and so on.  I don't see me getting to 100 by the end of the week, and so what.  I'll do what I can for a man of my advanced years.  

Next, pocket practice.  I could play the 1st exercise, but was using my wrist on every hi-hat hit.  They say to use the 2-stroke Moeller in those situations, so I began again and learned that I'd have to start as slow as a beginner, one beat at a time.  But a couple of YouTube videos opened my eyes to something.  

Words, vocabulary, have never been difficult for me.  Now I realize that no one taught me to do it, but even as a child I was using "chunking" to learn challenging new words.  Breaking down the word, syllable to syllable, until I could speed it up into a full word.  

Now I find out that drums can be learned in that same way.  Not individual strikes, unless absolutely necessary, but smaller pieces of the whole.  So the first measure of the pocket groove is a simple money beat, except I want to learn how to use Moeller on the hi-hat.  Down on the hat plus kick on 1, up on the hat on and, down on the hat plus snare on 2, up on the hat on and.  Try to learn that part before going to the 3 and 4.  By the time my 10 minutes was up, I could do it a couple of times in a row.  That's where I'll pick it up tomorrow.