Page of warm ups working out the coordination for playing straight 8ths within a swing feel. Straight 8ths and 16ths are a normal part of jazz, if you put on a record, and listen to […]
Video rant: Why do these guys suck so bad
Though I’m not sure if something can be called a “rant” when you spend >50% of it in dumbfounded silence. Edited from a Twitch stream, here’s little video of me talking about those drumming YouTubers […]
Chop busters in 7/8 – 01
A page of technical phrases for snare drum, in 7/8 time, after Ron Fink’s book of the same name. One thing I admire in anything technical is good structure— I talk about it, meanderingly, in […]
Roy Haynes on some young drummers
“There’s one guy, Donald Bailey, who plays with Jimmy Smith. He doesn’t play many solos, but I really like what he does with the group. I like Billy Higgins a lot. He thinks about drums […]
Reed tweak: endurance exercise for improving singles
This is a real straightforward exercise for improving short single stroke fills, using unisons. Based on a normal interpretation used with Syncopation, by Ted Reed— playing the book rhythm as accents on the cymbals (with […]
Confusion without end
I’m talking about time signatures, of course. Meter, in music. What else is it, ever. At times a slippery subject, not least because so many people are so vocally and defiantly wrong about it. Or […]
Stick Control in triplets redux
Rewriting something from 2012, that is really unreadable: the first page of Stick Control in triplets, in two voices. I was really unkind in the early years of this site, really jamming a lot of […]
The sheer amount of stuff
My materials have gotten denser of late— more patterns on the page, more junk to play through. More things to feel bad and inadequate for not having worked out. I have my reasons for writing […]
Making rock fill phrases
A couple of very dense pages here, giving every step of, and a number of possibilities for, turning some basic rock beats into figure and fill phrases. This should be the kind of thing you […]
Notes from a Louis Hayes clinic
I attended a Louis Hayes clinic in Seattle on Tuesday, and have written some impressions of what he said— I’m also reading a Modern Drummer interview from the 80s, in which he goes into greater […]
Cymbal & Gong in Seattle TODAY
I should really give more advance notice on these things. I’m going to be bringing some choice Cymbal & Gong cymbals to Seattle TODAY— there’s going to be a little gear swap at the Seattle […]
Listening to Houses of the Holy
Yes, listening to the one band people will not stop listening to, and talking about, because they know no other music. It’s just one of the things that drives me nuts. YES, we’ve heard of […]