Lesson 3: Playing to a click

The drummer is the clock. Everyone else in the band is allowed to drift; you are not. So from lesson three on, almost everything you practise is against a click, and the sooner it stops feeling like an enemy the better.

Watch first

Slow is harder

Set the tempo trainer to 60 BPM. That is one click a second, and it feels like an age between them. Fast tempos hide your mistakes because there is no time to drift; slow ones show you exactly where your time goes. Start slow on purpose.

Play quarter notes on the snare, one per click, nothing else. Listen for the moment when you cannot hear the click any more because your snare is landing exactly on top of it. Drummers say the click “disappears”. That is what locked in sounds like.

▶ Play60 BPM−5+5

Then the beat

Now the money beat at 60. The hi-hat eighths fall on the click and exactly halfway between; the snare on two and four sits on the click. If the “and” notes rush, you will hear the whole beat surge ahead between clicks and stagger back on the next one.

▶ Play60 BPM−5+5

Two settings in the trainer help. Subdivision: eighths puts a quieter click on the “and” so you can hear where the hat should sit. Once that is comfortable, turn it back to beats only and see if your eighths still line up without help.

What “boring” means

When a tempo feels boring, that is not a sign to stop; it is the sign you have been waiting for. Boring means your brain has spare capacity, which means the beat is under control. Nudge the tempo up five and it will stop being boring for a while. Sloppy but exciting teaches you to be sloppy.

For members: the gap click

The trainer’s gap click drops the click out for a bar and brings it back. If you are still on it when it returns, your time is real; if you are not, you now know by how much. It is a free member perk and the single most honest exercise on the site.

Practise

Ten minutes on quarter notes and the money beat at 60. Then 65. Then stop; more than fifteen minutes on this in one go stops being useful. When you finish, the trainer will offer to save the session into your practice log with the tempo already filled in.