About The "Infinite Coordination" Project / FAQ
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About Vol 1: “Complete Coordination Training”
About Vol 2: “Layering Rhythms”
What is the ideal curriculum for learning drumming skills?
I had a vision of eventually providing an answer to this question, because I was continually running into it making decisions as a drum instructor. With experience, I came up with lots of attempts at answers… the best and most basic one was:
First focus on training your physical and mental skills thoroughly, so you can depend on your sound quality. Then you can focus on exploring the creative side of drumming more freely, without feeling limited in your abilities.
So, I decided to create materials to help drummers master the ‘sport’ side of drumming, easily and systematically. Many unique innovations and breakthroughs went into creating this PHYSICAL TRAINING SYSTEM FOR DRUMMERS.
Currently there are two books in the series, Volume I, “Complete Coordination Training” and Volume II, “Layering Rhythms” A third book, “Layering Rhythms II: Creative Coordination In Odd Time” will eventually join the series. The books work great in a drum lesson atmosphere as well as at home, and are very useful for all ages and styles of playing.
The original and current purpose of the INFINITE COORDINATION project is to help drummers improve quickly.
One of the major foundations of both books is the ‘coordination notation‘, which is a language for quickly learning drum patterns that have complicated sequences of movements.
Both the books employ this notation heavily, as a means of accelerating the learning process.
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Images from “Complete Coordination Training” |
Image from “Layering Rhythms” |
 
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About Vol 1: “Complete Coordination Training”
About Vol 2: “Layering Rhythms”
Frequently Asked Questions
Here are some common inquiries:
Why the ‘coordination notation’, and what is it?
Is this system suitable for beginners? Professional drummers?
If I’m starting from scratch and want to learn drums, do I need other books besides yours?
Do I need to take drum lessons?
How do I use the Permutation Window in Volume I, and the Layering System in Volume II?
What is the best order in which to practice this material?
Why are the coordination boxes black in “Layering Rhythms”?
Why and how did you come up with these materials?
Are more books being written for the Infinite Coordination Series?
Why the ‘coordination notation’, and what is it?
Answer: There is a post specifically on the notation here.
Basically, coordination notation is a language to represent the actions of your limbs. It works very well for its intended purpose- which is to make learning efficient, easy, and even fun, when the material challenges your coordination skills. These books would not be possible (or effective) without it.
This notation is based on a box that visually represents the four limbs you use for drumming.
Is this system suitable for beginners? Professional drummers?
Answer: Yes! All skill levels, truthfully. These books include a range of exercises from very easy for beginners, to very difficult for professional drummers, and everything in between.
This material has a very simple way of communicating drumming actions. The material itself is not inherently over the heads of younger students (nor is the material in many books). Show a groove written in standard notation to a seven-year-old, and they will probably have difficulty deciphering each note – but when shown coordination boxes and linear coordination boxes, young students understand the material quickly and are able to practice useful coordination moves from the beginning of their drumming career.
Besides, in my experience young students ENJOY using coordination boxes, especially the ‘arrow-boxes’, and ask for them regularly in lessons! Overall, there is a large variety of exercises in these books which is suitable for beginning drum students.
As for professional drummers, there could be no better resource for bridging the gap between technical mastery and creative mastery…
When a drummer is committed to their craft, and to building an overall drumming ability that can perform expressively, effective technical ability is a necessary step – not an end goal. These books provide tools for mastering physical skills to a great degree, so one can efficiently FINISH the work on the technical side of drumming, and move on to be consumed by the ART FORM of drumming and music. There is no point in struggling to accomplish what should be easy and strategic, in the ‘sport’ category of drum skills… it’s not that hard to develop blistering speed or other technically proficient abilities!
Musicality is what impacts an audience by far the most. My plan in creating these books was to give every drummer tools for strategically tackling the ‘sport’ side of drumming, with the intention of eventually raising the overall musicality in the world.
If I’m starting from scratch and want to learn drums, do i need other books besides yours?
Answer: If you are just starting out on drums as a beginner, then yeah, i’d recommend at least one book with an assortment of basic useful grooves and fills, and at least one book that teaches you etudes of rhythms that may or may not include rudimental skills.
Recommended basic texts: “Drumset Essentials” by Peter Erskine, “Complete Funk Drumming Book” by Jim Payne, “Alfred’s Snare Drum Technique” by Dave Black and Sandy Feldstein, “Stick Control” by George Lawrence Stone.. I also use “Progressive Independence” by Ron Spagnardi, for developing coordination with swing grooves.
If you are a professional, then… i’d still recommend having an assortment of drum books and collected print-outs in your library. Absorbing other material is a fast-track to having a large and useful vocabulary.
Mine aren’t the end-all-be-all, throw-away-everything-else-because-these-just-arrived type of books. They are TOOLS to use, there’s nothing else like them anywhere on the market, and if you use them thoroughly you stand to blast your improvement through the roof.. but don’t limit yourself! There are many great drum instruction books on the market. I’m still researching to find the ones I like to use.
Do I need to take drum lessons?
If you’re starting out, don’t waste your time with wrong turns! Go to a PROFESSIONAL instructor at least for a few lessons, to learn basic grip / technique guidelines and some timing exercises and stuff. So YES, it helps immensely and saves TONS OF TIME to get yourself steered in the right direction.
If you’re ‘self taught’ you CAN be careful enough to acquire high quality drumming skills and habits. There is one major risk of being self-taught: learning abilities and physical habits that work to a degree, but that prevent you from achieving your full potential. That’s how I screwed up originally, and it took me a couple years to retrain myself with more useful techniques. There is WAY too much you can mess up with your initial habits, not only with technique but also practicing… in my opinion it’s not worth it to take a guess, if you want to become a great drummer. I wish I would have had professional instruction when I was 10 and starting out; i’d be light years past where I am by now.
How do I use the Permutation Window in Volume I, and the Layering System in Volume II?
Answer: There is an explanation of the permutation window with the Volume I description, here. The layering system is described here, in writing and with videos.
There is also plenty of information and guidance within the books – the layering system has instructions in Vol. 2, “Layering Rhythms”, and instructions for the permutation window are in Vol. 1, “Complete Coordination Training”.
What is the best order in which to practice this material?
Answer:
A good rough guideline is to go from the easier to the more challenging. In Volume I, that means start at the beginning of the book. In Volume II, try starting with the first grooves in each time signature for layering purposes.
In general, the best way to practice material in these books is to work on your skills one at a time. This material can be used flexibly; it is designed more as a whole ‘field’ of resources than as a specific path. A good initial method is to start with a sample of each book and each section, trying a few exercises to see what they are like. Then use the materials in any order you want, according to the level of challenge you want.
Why are the coordination boxes black in “Layering Rhythms”?
Answer: In case you are curious why the notation is black in “Layering Rhythms”, it is because the graphics on the pages of rhythm need to interact with the transparent ‘groove cards’ in a certain way – I needed the square dots below the rhythms to indicate a space when black.
When I tried my original idea, which was to have the black square dots show up in a light-colored box, I realized that it made postitioning the transparent card difficult. In that situation it was necessary to have incredibly precise positioning in order for the dots to show through the right area of the card. So with black coordination boxes, the spaces are black and the notes are white, and there is some margin for flexibility when positioning a card over a page.
Why and how did you come up with these materials?
Answer: Why? Because I’m a drum instructor, and I like to design and improve things. There was no clear way I could find to improve coordination, no books with a great strategy for it that everybody was raving about in the drumming community. Meanwhile, exercises and materials I was putting together for my students had promise and potential. At one point I noticed I was well on my way to having a professional book completed, so I decided to finish it. (and it became two books.) That’s the ‘why’.
As far as ‘how’, the first seed was born in lessons, when I was helping a student with coordination difficulties. I found myself narrating which limbs should hit for each note- “left hand and left foot and right hand” to describe one sixteenth note, and there was a full measure ahead- it was WAAAAY too much talking. So i drew the first coordination notation, which was a stick figure with its arms and legs flying out, and circled limbs to show the student which ones to use. From then on I left out the stick figures but kept the circles ..
Then i got really carried away- I pulled out a notebook and sketched all the possibilities- to determine how many of these figures there could be, then how many transitions between 2 of them were possible, then how many sequences of 3 (different) boxes there were.. (the answers by the way being 16, 240, and 3360, if you count the box with nothing in it as a legitimate character. Otherwise, the answers are 15, 210, and 2730).
I figured.. since these transitions can be used to describe all existing drumming.. if i can master all 2730 or 3360 transitions and be REALLY comfortable with them even at high speed, i won’t be likely to find any coordination challenges anywhere!
Great! That’s Just Fabulously Awesome!
Out of determination I soon realized how to reduce that number of exercises. If a three-part sequence is repeated multiple times, then it covers not just the sequence A-B-C, but also B-C-A and C-A-B. So I wouldn’t need 2730 seperate exercises, only 910. Furthermore, I decided I would be willing to read each exercise backwards as well, so I would only need to print half of the 910.. which is 455. This is the magic number I started with. I remember the MOMENT when I arrived at it, it was powerful and I knew it. 455 exercises is managable for human digestion, at least over time.. so I got on microsoft Paint and created ‘em all, and printed ‘em all out and got right to work.
As i cracked my knuckles and started playing the ULTIMATE COORDINATION EXERCISES, I was disappointed to discover that many of them were kind of lame.. such as the ones that only had one dot in each box, and the ones that had at least one dot in the same place in all 3 boxes.
So I started with that original foundation and worked the material to be a) reasonable, b) user friendly, c) fun, and d) effective. It took about 4 years to go from the original brainstorm to self-publishing.
Are more books being written for the Infinite Coordination Series?
Answer: Yes, one more, and it’s halfway done. It’s called “Layering Rhythms II: Odd Time Coordination”, and I’ll try to get to it ASAP (in the next couple years). The original “Layering Rhythms” covers rhythms that are 3, 4, 6, and 8 counts in length… so it was logical to fill in the 5, 7, and 9 count-length rhythms, so between the two books, the layering system will have the full span of 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, and 9 counts covered. What a dream! Watch for this book in the future.
