Through all the years of private teaching as well as my own playing and practicing I’ve found that one of the most difficult challenges facing drummers is being able to take the things they learn in the practice room, and then being able to use those things with other musicians. Many attempts have been made through the years to solve this problem by including CD’s or mp3’s with recordings of bands and rhythm sections that the drummer can play along with. I’ve found though in my own private teaching practice, that this method is usually very ineffective when working with students. Most of the time the songs are played too fast, and the student can’t keep up when learning to play new grooves and material. The solution is simply for the student to be able to speed up and slow down the material as they’re comfortable, just like they do when they practice with a metronome.
Therefore, some of the examples in these lessons and courses include two versions. There’s a player on the website so you can immediately listen to the mp3 example. There is also an MIDI file. You can download each MIDI example and then play them in a MIDI player, which will enable you to slow them down and speed them up as needed. Although this doesn’t give you as high quality of sound as recording actual audio files, it’s much more efficient than practicing with a CD or mp3.
After you’re comfortable with the material, you can then work with CD’s and other recordings for additional practice.
MIDI Players
Here are a some suggested MIDI players for practicing with the examples. Again, these will allow you to slow down and speed up each example, enabling much more efficient practice.
Note: When playing the MIDI file set the player to play the loop over and over for easier practicing.
- SoundFont Midi Player-This is the player I’m currently using. It’s completely free and is available for PC. There are lots of videos and instructions available for this video. To practice the lessons on Brad Allen Drums, all you need to do though is load the file, set the player to loop, and speed it up or slow it down as needed. It’s very simple.
- Sweet MIDI player is available for iPad, iPhone, Mac, and PC. This player does cost money, but is very versatile.
There are other free apps available for playing MIDI files too. I can’t recommend any of those simply because I haven’t tried them yet.
MP3 Players Update – February 2018
Since I first started creating lessons for Brad Allen Drums, there have been new technological advances in audio tools that were invented recently, or that I just became aware of. There are now a number of apps available for both Android and Apple devices that allow you to slow down an mp3 track without changing the pitch of the music. This is actually a better solution than using MIDI files and a MIDI player. Going forward I will be recording all examples as mp3 files rather than MIDI. So for all examples on the site, I recommend downloading the mp3 files so that you can slow them down and speed them up at will.
The app I’m currently using is called Music Speed Changer App. Here are the direct links.
Android App
Apple Products App