Sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something.
Learning rock songs on the drums is slightly more difficult than anticipated.
Stacy and I left Lake Nacimiento on New Years Day with full hearts and full bellys after an awesome weekend with our dear friends. Many laughs were had but Jeff had the quote that stuck with me. He referenced an obscure cartoon called Adventure Time, which he paraphrased but absolutely conveyed the sentiment.
Sucking at something is the first step towards being sort of good at something.
I have no recollection of the context or conversation because I was so impressed by this sentence’s profound simplicity.
This perfectly summed up my new found inspiration for doing things that I am not great at and working on them, anyway.
Cherub Rock is testing Jake the Dog’s theory.
This innocent enough text officially put a deadline on the calendar for the first band rehearsal.
I have been chipping away at these two songs for 30ish minutes each evening this week.
The problem with drums is practicing can be really annoying to anyone within a three block radius; regardless of how much your wife claims she doesn’t mind. So I try to limit the practice time.
Tomorrow came fairly easily. That was one of my favorite songs growing up and is pretty straight forward. Plus, let’s be honest, Silverchair was comprised of three 16 year old Australians when they wrote that. How hard could it be?
Cherub Rock on the other hand, I was much less familiar with. I had no idea Smashing Pumpkins drummer, Jimmy Chamberlain, was so damn good.
It could also have something to do with me letting my drumming skills deteriorate down to the same three beats and fills for the last 15 years.
The internet deep dive.
Turns out there are drum covers on youtube for every song you would want to learn. Including Cherub Rock.
This one is my favorite.
Damn. This dude is pretty good. I need to take this in bite sized chunks. Sadly, Jimmy decided not to use any of my three basic beats from my repertoire, so I have to actually learn something new.
To conquer this I turned to the world wide web. We have officially reached the point where everything is available on the internet. Including obscure drum tabs in a super user-friendly interface.
For free.
After hopelessly stumbling through these songs a few times something amazing happened. I got slightly less terrible at them. Practice actually helps when learning something.
Maybe it is my innate millennial need to relish in every small victory but I must say, it felt good to see progress. And wildly motivating to keep practicing. Unfortunately, the progress wasn’t moving quite as quickly as the week and Saturday was going to be here in no time.
At the very least, I had enough handle on the songs to at least fake my way through them.
Saturday was here. The first practice.
Expectations were low as I tried to keep Jake the Dog in the back of my mind. After 10 minutes of setting up, it was time.
Want to start with ‘Tomorrow’?
Turns out when you only practice along with the real song and then you get to band practice without a vocalist it is really easy to get lost without vocal cues. Johnny and I definitely stumbled through this a bit. [Lauren hasn’t gotten her bass yet, so we’re a two-piece band for the time being.]
This ‘no vocalist’ hurdle did actually occur to me on Saturday morning before we met up. I did listen to each song a few times through with instrumental versions I found on youtube, but it was a little too late.
After a frustrating few run throughs of Tomorrow we decided to switch to Cherub Rock.
Definitely my less confident of the two songs. And with how Tomorrow went, we could be headed for an early retirement to the living room with beers.
Luckily, my marginal gains throughout the week actually helped. Progress showed its elusive face in the garage, once again. We were actually grooving along.
And is was fun as hell.
I am pretty sure no one was mistaking us for the Smashing Pumpkins as they walked by but damn, we were playing; and it was awesome.
After about two hours of playing and successfully making it through both songs all the way through a few times, we patted ourselves on the back and went in to get [the minimum amount of] praise from our wives.
We have a long way to go but I take a lot of comfort in knowing that we have taken the first step [sucking] towards being kind of good at this.
The next step.
We need a band name.
