Resurfacing an old chestnut, a piece entitled Careers in Jazz, by Seattle pianist Bill Anschell, which I visited briefly in the first year of the site, with a post called Making any money in jazz. […]
Paradiddles with Bellson
Throwing a bone to fans of Louis Bellson’s Modern Reading Text in 4/4 here, with an easy paradiddle system. Most of these things happen naturally out of my teaching, or my playing; here I just […]
Very occasional quote of the day: loud and musical
“I am comparatively a heavy drummer. I like to play heavy, and I play forceful, and sometimes I tend to get loud, and it might be overbearing because I’ve seen some customers who sit close […]
Subtractive method in 7: fills
Continuing this item from the other day, introducing some light fills, or general variety of texture, to that bossa type groove, in 7/4. This is actually really, really good for getting a basic creative playing […]
SITE NEWS: Video activities, Germany
NEWS: You may have noticed the rumblings, some stuff is afoot: CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER! on TwitchThis week I’ve been doing some video streams on Twitch— nothing serious, just getting myself on camera playing some of […]
Teaching songs
Up front: it’s hack teaching, don’t do it. If you already do it, no judgment, just… stop doing it. I’m surprised I’ve let this topic slide this long, the approach is very common, and it […]
Eight stroke rolls?
Reading George Lawrence Stone’s Technique of Percussion, in a 1953 International Musician column he discusses “compound” rolls— rolls including two accented singles. The six stroke roll is most familiar of that type, the 10 stroke […]
Songo moves
Variations on a songo rhythm, hands only. The usual groove is kind of a set thing, that can be a hard thing to break away from, so this page forces the issue, opening it up […]
Bossa loops embedded – 01
Here’s a set of moderate tempo bossa and bossa adjacent practice loops, embedded for your convenience— check out the other embedded loops here. And here are my bossa nova materials in case you don’t have […]
Answers from Reddit – 02
I’ll keep going on this. For some reason a lot of the comments I make on Reddit stand pretty well on their own, out of context. By contrast, my stuff on Bluesky all goes like: […]
Pataflafla builder
Exceptionally granular page of exercises developing the pataflafla, a drag variant, and Steve Gadd’s pataflafla-ed 6 stroke roll— you can hear that in his solo on the Tom Scott record here. Usually I would walk […]
Subtractive method in 7 – 01
Extending our previous hard form of this subtractive method— in which we read rhythms from Syncopation, and voice them on the snare and bass drums according to an underlying 8th note pattern, BSSB-SBBS. We could […]