The drumming thing and what happened yesterday. It has nothing to do with my ability to PLAY but my ability to LEARN!
Telling me “it’s early days”. I KNOW THIS! I am NOT expecting to be Cherisse after three fucking lessons!
But…what WOULD help immensely is a kit set up to my level of comfort. Being able to practice on kits is invaluable but also feels like folly right now, given where I am at financially. I am spending £16 a week having two hours of practice each week. I walk 6 miles each time too…walking to the local train station, and then walking to the rehearsal studio…and back again.
I am dedicating time, money and effort to this thing! I wish I could do more.
Every week there is some kind of set back…crappy uncomfortable drum set ups…cancelled trains that make me late and eat into my practice time…yet MORE crappy drum set ups!
How do I explain it? I dunno. You’ve been asked to run a marathon, but all you have is trainers that are both left feet. I dunno. That’s a crappy analogy.
I’ll watch videos so I can set the kit to how I want it…but no matter what…it’ll eat into valuable learning time. And it alters my mood and it just makes me feel instantly on the back foot.
Another is…CCTV. There’s a CCTV camera in every room. I can’t tell you how much that makes me self-conscious…to know there could be someone watching how crap I am going. I try to put it to the back of my mind…but the reality is is I am a 48 year old woman going into a rehearsal studio on my own and it makes me feel like an idiot.
On weekends the music complex is really busy and that also adds to the self-conscious idiotic feeling. Seeing young-uns come in and just…it’s deflating.
Nothing comes naturally to me. I feel DIRECTIONLESS. I don’t feel like I can “just experiment” and “bash away”. I feel daft! There’s a reason why people have lessons and tutors…FOR GUIDANCE AND STRUCTURE. If I thought I could teach myself?! Great. Not a problem! But at this age? That is highly unlikely. I cannot see it happening.
I’ve booked another two hour slot for Sunday. It’s too easy to give up, I guess. So let’s just keep on squandering money and deluding ourselves this will end up going somewhere, shall we?
Every great drummer started somewhere, right? But most of them started out VERY young. Perhaps one day I’ll hold some kind of ridiculous niche of knocking people out with my drumming prowess by them discovering that I didn’t start learning until I was 48. Pffft. Yeah, I’m not convinced either.
At the end of the day there is a distinction between WANTING to be great, and having the aptitude to BECOME great. I suppose I just have to give it time…time to convince myself that it’s too early to judge now. Is it? *shrugs*
I am so scared that two years down the line what I will see for my effort is, well, nothing. A badge that says “well, at least she wasn’t a quitter”.