I'm all for funky exercises, but I think some warm-ups really can't be 'groove-ified', they need to exercise certain parts of drum theory and get your hands used to doing them, day in day out, robotically. But that doesn't mean they should be boring. Eight on a hand is an exercise that takes about a minute to learn but a lifetime to master. Every time you do warm-ups you should analyze every part of your technique, and your accuracy and precision in playing in time with the met/the rest of the line. As for other things, like accent, roll and flam pieces, try them out at different tempos, and reversed stickings, one of the most fun and challenging things I think is taking a grid exercise and running its phrases forwards and then backwards, then forwards, without stop to see how well I can adjust. And remember, keep working on and examining your technique and timing, there's always that last tenth of one percent of perfection to strive for. DCI world championships have been won and lost by those kinds of margins. =0

I would tell them to grow up....playing clean as an ensemble should be fun enough.

The problem with my line is that there isn't a whole lot of talent. Now I'm not proclaiming to be a brilliant drummer; I'm just ok in the scheme of things, but my line plays oversimplified exercises that don't help us improve...

I am of the opinion that people have gotten way to concerned about whether or not something has a 'groove' to it rather than if it works a specific issue. All people wanna do is play something that is groovin' rather than playing an exercise that will actually help them more. Of course everyone wants to have fun...but what ever happened to having fun playing clean and musically? If you want to play something that grooves then write a cadence....

Warmups are meant to warm up. Not groove and draw a crowd. That is the purpose of a cadence, or maybe even an onfield (with the exception of Grevious Groove - it's a misleading name).

Warmups and exercises are designed for just that...warming up and developing techniques. There is no point in handing out "cool" warmups if it is beyond the grasp of the individual players. You'll do more harm than good.

That being said, there have been some good ideas presented so far. I personally like playing music during the warmups, but you have to do your homework before hand. Know what songs you are going to play and what tempos you need. iTunes has a column that will let you input the tempos. Go to www.all8.com/tools/bpm.htm and find the tempo of your music. Remember to use lots of variety in you selections.

Next, write some of your own exercises, or better yet, have the members of the drumline write and submit exercises. My criteria for submissions is that they have to play ALL the parts for me themselves before they are considered (this avoids writing stupidly hard parts for the sake of writing stupidly hard parts).

I thought I should add something I discovered while playing some of our new warm-ups with a snare player after practice today. If you have a tap accent exercise, and it is boring and everyone plays the same accent pattern, have different sections play different accent patterns. We have this in a new tap accent exercise, and it is extremely fun to play!

Yea thats exactly what we do...it makes it way more interesting