Why do we keep failing to become the player of our dreams?
You might think it’s talent.
Or that “you missed your opportunity” / “this is a young person’s game.”
In my humble opinion, and in the opinion of my past students, you’d be wrong.
I’d always believed intermediate drummers could “break through” and change the trajectory of their playing with around six months of focused effort.
What I didn’t realize until I actually coached students was how quickly and inevitable the changes were.
If that sounds controversial, think about it this way:
How many times have you decided "this is it," and marshaled all the will-power you could muster to go into the shed, take charge, and become the drummer of your dreams...
...only to hit a rough patch, or have "things come up," and have the dream kind of... fizzle out.
How much further could you have gone had you simply stayed consistent through the hard parts?
To say nothing of having a specific routine that targeted your exact weak points, and evolved with you as you developed…
…or a supportive community.
And here’s the other thing that shocked me: it didn’t take monumental changes to anyone’s schedule. Simply by getting consistency, specificity, and accountability, most of my students made transformations practicing just 5 hours a week in average weeks.
Let’s explore how…
Remember when drumming used to be “easy”?
Everything you worked on seemed to produce results, and every time you sat down to play, there was no pressure.
I remember when I first put “boom chick” together. It felt like the whole world opened up.
I could now spend hours playing along with my favorite recordings in the bedroom. Practically everything I practiced made me better.
Paradiddles? Forget about it! Coordination? Yes please!
If you’re like many of my students, you remember when drumming was easy. Maybe you even got pretty good, played in bands, did gigs, etc.
But then, at a certain point, it got harder
Maybe “life” intervened. That’s a common one.
When we’re younger, we’ve got a ton of time to rehearse and gig, and zero pressure. But then “life happens” — and I mean positive things: family, career, other life goals.
But those things inevitably take us away from drumming. And even if you continue uninterrupted, you’re eventually going to encounter the other thing that stops drummers in their tracks.
The “intermediate rut” — when everything is suddenly hard
Whether you took some years off and are coming back to drumming, or you’ve been playing consistently…
…there comes a time when the “easy wins” aren’t so easy anymore.
And those days of “fun, no pressure” change into self-consciousness and “toil.” I call it the intermediate rut.
Part of it is that as we get more experience, our taste evolves. And with every great drummer we’ve ever heard of — and plenty we haven’t — doing daily Paganini-level virtuosity on Instagram, it’s gotten way easier recently to compare ourselves to others and feel bad.
But the main reason is plain-and-simple diminishing returns. That’s a fancy way of saying most of the “easy wins” are already out of the way — the big “zero to one” from not practicing rudiments to practicing them, or from not knowing how to play “boom chick” to knowing it.
The “I hate my drumming” negative feedback loop
And that sucks, because it can add up to drumming becoming a negative experience. We’ve got all these great drummers in our heads. We sit down to play, and we don’t sound like them.
That makes us feel negatively about practicing or playing, so we do it less. That, of course, compounds the issue and adds guilt on top. So we’re simultaneously not playing and also feeling bad about it.
And this is what gets me so fired up about teaching. Because it doesn’t have to be that way.
People ask me all the time, “Nate, is it always going to feel like chasing a receding goal-line?” The answer, surprisingly, is no.
Yes, of course we’ll always compare ourselves to our heroes and find more work to do. But in my experience — and that of many of my peers — there is absolutely a threshold above which drumming is fun again. And that “hate my playing” negative feedback loop turns into the “hey this is fun” virtuous cycle.
The “hey this is fun” virtuous cycle
When you enjoy playing again, you start to trust your voice and your ideas. You experience “flow” — the feeling of being an unconscious conduit for music. (Even if fleetingly, at first.)
Because it feels good, you want to do it more. And that makes you better. And it sustains you through the inevitable hard stuff.
And full stop — that’s the entirety of what I’m promising to a drummer who’s at the right stage, with the right “raw materials.”
I will take you by the hand and pull you across the threshold, into the future. And, for the right drummer, I’ll make it impossible to fail.
