thoughts on knitting and drums

I've been taking lessons on the drum set now since January, and I'm getting to the point where I'm starting to learn improvisation. I'll do these repetition exercises, but instead of just playing what's on the page like I have been, my teacher, David, has set up these areas where I have to plug in some of the other beat combinations that I've been practicing, without stopping to think about it. This all comes back to him teaching me from a jazz angle. He always says, "If you want to just bang out a rock beat, you can find someone to just teach you how to do that, but I don't approve of that, and I don't teach students who only want to learn that." He has a very methodical way of teaching someone. I am at the point now where I can play a whole snare drum solo, reading music and everything! It's amazing to see how far I've come in only about 9 months of irregular lessons. (I have to keep skipping because of my work travel, so it's not as regular as I'd like.) I'm still working on learning a song, but my skills are getting much more confident and sharper. Anyway, David teaching me about improvisation makes me think about knitting.

There are a lot of similarities between drums and knitting. You can follow a bunch of sheet music or you can veer off into a wild drum solo during a jazz song, just like you can follow a pattern, or do some crazy improvisational knitting piece. In each instance though, you take the skills you learn--knit, purl, cables, stick control and coordination--and you put them to use either following someone else's direction, or going your own way.

When I started knitting, after I got really comfortable with the movements and the basic stitches and had tried my hand at a few basic patterns, I started reading knitting blogs and joined my knitting group, becoming a "knitter" per se and joining the knitting community and the wider conversation about knitting. And many of the bloggers, and even some of the people in my local knitting group, started becoming dissatisfied with just following other people's patterns. The trend was to start learning to design your own stuff, be that garments or toys, or bags, or socks. I never felt that urge. All I wanted was to get really skilled at following a pattern, and being able to tell where it needed to be adjusted, either for my body type or for a yarn substitution and that sort of thing. I wasn't really into the idea of having no rules and just making stuff up myself. I like to have guidelines and directions. That's just how I am. But I end up questioning that a lot as the people around me are all happily releasing patterns or are noodling around with new lace or cable swatches just to learn stitch patterns.

So when I'm in my drum lesson and David's telling me that the next step is to leave the written music on the page and learn to adapt the combinations we have been learning in new ways that are totally made up by me, it sounded eerily familiar already. Written music is the pattern for the drum, or for any instrument, really. You follow what is there and you come out with a song. But there's no rule that says you have to do that. As a musician, you learn the basic skills, and the innovation comes with applying that in new ways, that move the conversation forward. To me, though, that's terribly frightening. Especially since it's still so new. I don't want to let go of the music on the page! But he's baby-stepping me through it, and it's getting easier.

That's why I think it would probably be a good idea for me to explore creating my own pattern. So I'm going to commit to that for 2011. I'm going to make something up. Even saying that is giving me the heebie-jeebies, but I think it will be good for me! A learning experience, right? I don't know what yet. Probably a scarf or hat or something fairly easy, but still... everyone has to start somewhere, right? And pretty soon you'll see me at Small's, banging away during my drum solo. Well, probably not, but maybe I can make it all the way through a simple rock song without stopping.

Let's hope so.