Build drum independence, one exercise at a time
Keep a steady hi-hat or ride pattern going while your kick and snare work through numbered exercises.
Independence is one limb keeping a pattern while the others play something that changes. It comes from slow, patient repetition, a small change at a time, and that’s what the Independence Trainer is built around. It’s part of GrooveDojo, free in your browser, with or without an electronic kit.
Choose an ostinato and the exercises
The ostinato is one beat, repeated on every beat, on the hi-hat or the ride: quarter notes, eighth notes, 16ths, upbeats or one of three other patterns. With the ride, you can add the left foot on the hi-hat pedal, on every beat, on eighth notes or on the upbeats.
Under it, the exercises are numbered kick and snare patterns, in two groups. In Fatback 1, the kick moves around beats 1 and 3 while the snare stays on 2 and 4. In Fatback 2, the kick stays on 1 and 3 and adds notes in the beat after the snare. Each group goes through every combination of 16ths in turn, so choose the numbers you want to work on, from one exercise to all of them. Straight or Shuffle sets the feel.
Playing through the exercises
Each exercise is one bar, the pattern twice under the ostinato, and the notation shows where you are while the click keeps time. You decide how each exercise moves on to the next:
- After 4 clean bars in a row. With a kit connected, a bar is clean when every hit is within your Timing mark window and nothing is missed or extra. If you set one, a number of bars moves you on anyway, so a hard exercise doesn’t hold up the run.
- After a number of bars, at the bar line, clean or not.
- When you press Next.
With a kit, every hit is marked on the notation as you play, gray within your window and colored when it’s early or late, and the trainer counts your clean bars. Without one, you play along on whatever you have and choose Next when you’re ready, or let a number of bars move you on (practicing without a kit).
Seeing your progress
When you stop, the session’s review opens with Your practice: how many exercises advanced, how many bars were clean, and which drum slipped most. Practice next offers to continue where you left off, or to practice the exercises that didn’t advance.
Below it, each exercise you played lists whether it moved on, and with a kit, a square for every bar: clean or not. Choose a square to see what happened in that bar. You can listen to it as you played it or as written, with its hits marked on the notation.
The trainer’s page shows your latest sessions and how far you’ve got with each exercise, so you can pick up where you left off.
In a practice plan
A setup can be a step in a practice plan, beside exercises and your own grooves: Add to plan… on the trainer’s page puts the ostinato, the exercises and the feel in one of your plans, with its own duration.
More ways to practice
The Independence Trainer is one part of drum practice in GrooveDojo, beside the built-in exercises and your own grooves. With a kit, timing feedback and session review explains what the marks and results show.