Hey drumming friend!

Recently, I started thinking more about how the acceleration of AI technology can be harnessed to help with drumming. This came about after discovering some updates to ChatGPT.

The technology is developing rapidly and - like it or not - is here to stay. Whilst that may cause concern for some, I’m more minded to embrace the change and look at how it can help me either to progress further, make my life easier by taking care of mundane things or just generally act as an accelerator.

A recent addition to the ChatGPT feature set was the ability to upload an image, have the AI interpret it, and taken action based on your “prompt” (a prompt is essentially just a statement or instruction that you make to the AI to have it produce some output).

I’ve been working through “Rainy Day” by Dave Weckl recently, so I thought it might be a fun exercise to screenshot the first page of the chart provided with his book “Contemporary Drummer 1”.

There’s not a huge number of playing examples out there, but here’s one example to demo the track (for trivia fans - featuring a young Sheryl Crow).

Using AI with images to interpret the chart

I asked ChatGPT to take a scan the chart and was interested in having it point out the main features to look out for. Additionally, I gave the AI a pointer about the bass line as written and interpreting it for the drum set.

The response given by the AI was surprisingly good! 🤖 

At this point, I’m trying to figure out what this actually means for me as a player and student of the drums.

Where I’ve landed is that this is incredibly useful, but as a supporting tool to studying with a teacher, augmenting my study. I could see me using AI in such a manner if I wanted some pointers between lessons or was stuck with something.

But it’s not like the AI can demo the piece to me, watch me play it and give feedback etc. The AI didn’t give any further insights over what I discussed already with my teacher, but between lessons there’s nearly always that “what did my teacher say about this part again?” and I could see this addressing that fairly quickly.

Scheduling Practices

A common problem with one of my bands is organizing practice schedules. With this particular band, we don’t get together regularly, so it can be awkward to herd six people together with conflicting schedules.

I mean, it has worked but it’s a little confusing. For example, deciding to include the 1st and 14th which don’t meet my criteria for excluding any days with less than 5 members.

Let’s discuss this in an annoyed tone.

Now, it’s listed me as available on the 2nd even though I’m not - however the total column is correct.

We got there in the end, but I was hoping that this would be a very quick, and more importantly reliable means of sorting out our schedule in conversational natural language.

If I have to check each time and enter into more fine-grained prompting, then I might as well use a tool like Doodle.

A bit of a fail for AI here, though I do expect output from interactions like these to get better.

Mentored by the world’s finest

Based on it’s data and model, can ChatGPT teach me using assumed personas of some of the world’s best drummers? Could it put together my own personal “board” of drummers that can guide me?

I came up with four areas that a drummer might want to focus on over a two week period.

OK, so far so good. It’s subjective, but I wouldn’t complain if this group was working with me!

Let’s see about a two week schedule.

A bit lacking in real detail, and using the same approach every day of the week - though some might argue that’s not a bad thing. The nice thing with ChatGPT is that this is a chat, so the AI can “seemingly” recall the conversation history as you continue to chat, meaning you can continue to prompt and tweak.

As an example of this, the AI actually knows about my newsletter work, so it has dropped in a reference to working on it with Anika. Clever. (And a bit scary? 🎃 )

I mean, this isn’t too bad, but again this lacks a bit of detail. As a rough schedule and some pointers to material, it’s decent.

Also, there’s no need to state the obvious in that Dave Weckl is not actually providing this info. Though, some people do eat detergent capsules, so there is that.

There’s always going to be limitations in that there’s no way the AI can demonstrate anything or provide materials directly.

Let’s ask one final thing - “what am I missing?”

These are all decent suggestions!

There’s many more things I could ask based on the above response, but as an experiment and for the purposes of the newsletter, we’ll leave it there.

Future Testing

I’m going to continue to look for further uses for the technology, I’ll update as and when I experiment further.

At the moment, ChatGPT at least does not support video upload and analysis, but it will be fascinating to see how that develops as in my opinion this is just a matter of time. For example, would I be able to upload a video of my playing and have the AI critique it?

I don’t think this will ever be able to replace a teacher, but as a supplemental tool to assist in learning, make suggestions or answer questions, I think this is great.

For now, just don’t put too much trust in the answers.

Aaron Spears, Steve Riley

Another sad loss for the drumming community this week with reports on Monday that Aaron Spears had passed away at the young age of 47.

Hugely respected in the drumming community, and a thoroughly nice guy by all accounts, there are many tributes appearing on social media.

Steve Riley, drummer for W.A.S.P. and L.A. Guns also passed away recently.

Condolences to family and friends.

💾 Grab a copy of Todd Bishop’s “Rhythm Cycles” practice sheet

❤️ Check out Hudson Music’s tribute to Dom Famularo

🥁 Read about a musical supergroup formed by drummers

🎂 Celebrate with Ernie, who got back behind the kit for his 100th birthday!

🇯🇵 Learn more about taiko drumming