Matt Cleary-Smith - Infinity Drumming

Hey there!

Happy 2025! Hope you had an awesome time with family and friends over the holidays.

I've been deep in goal-setting mode with my students lately, and I wanted to share something that's been working really well for us.

Here's the thing about yearly goals - they're just too big and vague. But 12 weeks? That's the sweet spot.

It's long enough to make real progress, but short enough to stay focused and motivated... And to easily measure progress.

Quick question for you:
What would you love to nail on drums in the next 3 months?

Not sure where to start? Try these questions:

What songs or parts are giving you trouble right now?
Got any shows, exams, drum cover ideas or projects coming up?
What's that one thing that keeps frustrating you when you play?

Still not sure? Try recording a quick performance of a song, and a quick drum solo... What weakspots do you notice that need addressing?

When you're thinking about this, consider these three areas:

Technical Elements
- Hand and foot technique
- Speed development
- Kit mobility
- Touch timing and dynamics

Vocabulary
- Rhythm and reading
- Sticking patterns
- Coordination
- Your own creative ideas

- Musicianship
Ear training
Song analysis
Understanding what the music needs
Playing with feel and groove

Here's a pro tip: Figure out which of these three is your weakest link right now. That's your main focus area for progress for Q1.

This doesn't mean abandoning the others, just that you will start addressing and improving your weakspots this quarter.

Mix in some easier wins too - it keeps things fun while you tackle the bigger challenges.

Want help putting together your Q1 plan? Just DM me and tell me a bit about where you're at. I'm happy to bounce some ideas around with you via messenger.

Thanks for being here, whether you're one of my students or just someone who enjoys these posts. Let me know what topics you'd like me to cover - I'm all ears!

Let's smash 2025 together! 💪

Talk soon,
Matt

I know it's been a very long time since you have heard from me, I stopped posting for a while now, and am going to begin posting more regularly again.

So, on to something valuable to you drummers and musicians today. This may or may not apply to you, there will be plenty more I'll chat with you about, just drop me a line with your questions by sending me a message or replying below.

Today I am talking about being able to play by ear, as it is something on the top of my mind and I know could really help a bunch of you to become a "natural" player.

Do you ever feel confused about what fills or grooves to play to music?

If you are like most drummers, you are learning a ton of fills, grooves, and songs, maybe surfing YouTube and getting lessons with a local teacher, and still feel lost as to why you can't confidently flow and jam, and writing your own drum parts leaves you drawing a blank.

I am just finishing up my LTCL (equivalent of a degree) in teaching an instrument, and one of the things I was talking about with my mentor recently, and we got to talking about aural skills.

If you don't know aural skills are all about developing your ability to hear, identify, and internally imagine sound accurately.

So, out on the internet you find all technique videos, songs, grooves, fills etc...

On and on it goes, but because no one is teaching you how to develop a good musical ear, you end up stuck, and unable to make up your own ideas easily, and unsure as to why to play certain things along with music.

The reason the answer was right under my nose was because I didn't account for my background BEFORE playing drums, and how essential that was to my results.

So, as some of you may know, 4 years before I picked up drumsticks, I was singing in a church choir. This was an outlet for me after my Grandmother passed away, and changed my life... Because the musical foundation I gained from this was phenomenal.

I was singing 4 times a week, and learning so much about melody and harmony. Being as I am not much of a visual learner by nature, I used to really struggle at first with the reading. So I had to make up for it with my ears.

So while everyone else was reading, I would do my best to catch the intervals I was looking at, but mostly I used my ears to replicate the note microseconds after hearing it.

I got so good at this, that I started to be able to make it look like my reading skills were all good, because my musical memory, and ability to quickly react to what I was hearing made up for my lack of theory skills.

My voice broke very young, so as of the age of 12 I was singing Tenor (thing Pavarotti), and a few months later Bass... So before I was a teenager I had sung 3 different parts of very intense choral harmony, with little to no knowledge of any of the theory behind it.

What happened as a result was that any record or song I heard I could identify scales, chords, basslines all by ear. This led to what I call "pattern recognition".

So think about this. If said the words "super-cala-fragulistic-expiala-docious" you may struggle to say that back immediately (if you haven't seen Mary Poppins).

However, with a couple goes, by breaking things down, you would soon be able to say it back to me... But it would take some time.

However, if I said something like "double paradi**le, flam paradi**le di**le" you might be able to say that back much quicker, and more accurately, as you are already aware of these weird words we drummers use.

This is pattern recognition.

Familiarity over time turns in to seemingly genius level recognition. But what it really is, is simply conditioning.

This means if you get to singing as much as possible, you are becoming a better improviser, communicator and jamming drummer.

This also means you will be able to learn any song SO much quicker, and connect to and lead the band where needed with total confidence, even if you don't fully know the drum part.

As if you know the SONG, you can find your way once you understand this principle and practice it.

When I started playing drums I could already hear very quickly the rhythms I needs to play, the melodies I needed to link what I was playing to.

I could clearly understand WHY I was playing certain things, because I understood the connection between parts, and how they worked together.

All this knowledge made learning so much more fun, and allowed me to run free with any new grooves, rhythms etc I was studying, and just enjoy the art form.

I didn't need things explained to me much at all, so I looked very bright and "gifted", but really I just had a much stronger set of ears to help guide me through the learning process...

And this meant I was a very musical drummer from the beginning, which in hindsight I now know is a big part of why I ended up playing in a professional band by the time I was 15.

So the lesson here is to include singing in your practise. It is really the mother tongue of all of us.

And I hear you saying now, "I can't sing"... As I tell all my students, singing out of tune is way better than not singing at all. Remember, no one is going to hear you singing while you play the drums...

But they will hear the MUSIC in what you play ON the drums.

Plus you will find as you develop the ability to sing various things, you will much more quickly be able to respond to what you hear musically, as you will understand the essence of what is being played to you.

Well... I hope you enjoyed reading this post, as I said there will be more to come.

Talk to you again soon!

Matt
P.S Big thanks to David Beeby for not only giving me such an awesome foundation in music, but also supplying me with this photo here of me with St Peter's Choir... (That's me looking pretty serious there in the middle sporting curtains for a haircut... haha)

New podcast out on how to become a "natural" player, and how the typical approach to learning drums, i.e. learning beats, fills and songs might actually be getting in the way of you ability to play confidently by ear with other musicians or to your favourite songs...

How to become a "natural" ear player on the drums without hours of boring tedious exercises... by The Infinity Drumming Podcast In a world full internet videos teaching thousands of fills, beats and songs online... Drummers aren't getting taught this one key skills that is really the core game changing skill that allows you to play musically confidently, and learn songs rapidly by ear...

Hey drummers, aspiring drummers friends and fam...

A little reminder that mastery is all about building a world class foundation in the basics.

For example, with drummers, our hand and foot technique is one of our biggest priorities...

Even after 25 years of drumming, I am still practising and improving singles and double strokes with both hands and feet in all kinds of variations... Just this one concept is virtually endless.

No matter how good we are at these fundamentals, they can always be improved, and those incremental improvements in the fundamentals change EVERYTHING...

Because almost everything we play as drummers is some combination of singles and doubles played either in linear or in coordination!

And applied in grooves and in fills and solos.

A late friend of mine called Austin who sadly passed recently was good friends with Gavin Harrison of Porcupine Tree... Austin told me the best and most consistent single stroke roll he ever saw up close was Gavin's...

He said, just watching Gavin on a pad was a testament to his discipline with the basics.

For those who are in to mastery, it's always about returning to fundamentals, again, and again, and again.

To master them, we need not only focus on speed... But quality... I call these the 4 QualiT's

Technique, Timing, Touch and Troupe...

These 4 qualities are our "tools of the trade" to develop nuance,

I have a pdf that breaks down all of these 4 qualities that I have been giving to students for a very long time now, happy to drop it to any of you if you want a copy to print and put up on the wall while practising.

Drop a comment saying "mastery" below if you want me to send that over to you.

I always recommend to students to focus on this for at least the first 5 minutes of learning any new groove or fill while repeating it over and over at a slow tempo (normally around 60bpm) to set a strong foundation of a high standard of sound before speeding up...

Interestingly, this without fail always leads to people being able to play the idea fast immediately afterwards, simply because after that 5 minutes they normally have played the idea approximately 100 times...

Which means it is conditioned in!

So this patient approach, is actually the fastest way I now of to learn.

Remember, when it comes to learning a new idea...

Practising slow, means learning fast (and with high quality of sound) and practising fast means learning slow (and with a low quality of sound)

Again, drop a comment saying "mastery" below if you want that pdf breaking down the 4 Qualities in detail.

Thanks for reading! Hope you enjoyed it!

Big love!

Matt

P.S. We start week 2 of the FREE 4 week hand technique course I am running in my free "secrets of drumming" group, come join us if you want to improve your hands!

Hey there ya drummers, friends and fam!

I've got a little story to share with you today about how I nearly ended my drumming future after just a year of drumming… by attempting to balance on a basketball… (funny/not funny).

Many of you know me for having pretty fast hands, but don't realise I actually have a severe disadvantage when it comes to hand technique. My left wrist is long term messed up.

At the young age of 13, I attempted to balance on a basketball (I lasted about 0.1 seconds 💪) and dislocated and broke the bones in my wrist all at once. (Yeah… in my head it seemed like a good idea at the time).

This has led to my wrist still being out of place even to this day.
8 years after the injury, further keyhole surgery was required because of the damage to my tendons and afterwards this was still unable to rectify the pain I felt when playing completely.

Would you believe it if I told you that this setback actually made me a BETTER drummer?

Despite the damage, I learned to adapt my hand technique and found a way to play what I needed to.

But it also required changing my mindset on hand technique.

It taught me to value hand technique and warm ups far more, and to learn all about it much earlier than I would have.

I had to come at my hand technique from multiple angles and learn all the key building blocks of hand technique, like different types of wrist strokes, finger stroke development, bounce strokes, push-pull Moeller...

You name it...

I overhauled it all to maximise my options, and overall skills. This gave my wrist new ways to move.

I learned to RELAX my grip! And stop making all that kinetic energy find it's way back up my arm!

On top of that I realized that taking care of my wrist outside of the drum kit was equally important.

I dove into learning about wrist care, exercises, and techniques to support my wrist health, and had to return to this topic multiple times over the years.

I had to look at nutrition too. A big part of recovery.

It wasn't a one time thing. I still continue to keep tabs on this more than 2 decades later.

So here's my message to you all: Do not let injuries discourage you.

There's more often than not a way around it. (And also, do what I should have done from day 1 at the time and seek out great physiotherapist or specialist in recovery!)

Stay persistent, keep searching, keep learning, and you'll find the answers waiting, as long as you are willing to try new things until you find what works…

And persist in better habits long term.

To all the drummers out there, remember, our journey is filled with highs and lows, but it's through these struggles we find our voices as players, and in our problems, that we find new answers and directions that sometimes become a defining part of our playing.

Big love.

Matt (aka wonky wrist)

P.S. If you would like help with your hand technique, just write HANDS below and I will send you access to a full 4 week course for free!

FREE 4 Week Hand Technique Course starts today... Come join us and get personal feedback in a live group zoom call!
Link Below 👇🥳👇