Let’s start a little series here: some full page syncopation exercises, each designed for a special purpose. Good for fluency and ease of practice with certain practice methods, good for a particular challenge with others. […]
Month: October 2019
Very occasional quote of the day: let go lightly
“When I let go of what I am, I become what I might be.” — Lao Tzu, Tao Te Ching “I used to call myself a free jazz drummer, now I just want to play […]
Common time
The pedant is a disturbingly-slender, reedy-voiced, scrutinous man. There’s a lot of confusion about rhythm, making the subject an easy target for low-grade, often barely-informed pedantry. See any internet music forum, or rehearsal of college […]
Four drum solos
After Ginger Baker finally died the other day, I was thinking about his playing, and the playing of some of the other big drummers to come out of the late 60s. I listened to a […]
Bill Bachman news
The drummer, clinician, and technique expert Bill Bachman has just shared on the Drummerworld forum that he had a stroke recently, which took out his ability to use his right hand. For a drummer, that’s […]
CYMBALISTIC: Cymbal day, 10/4/19
UPDATE: Oops, I’m an idiot— I uploaded the unedited video from the meeting, which has lots of inane conversation on it in between playing cymbals. Below is the correct video, with times matching the cues […]
CYMBALISTIC: Cymbal day today – Seattle event coming up
At the Cymbal & Gong foundry in Istanbul UPDATE: Found some really great Holy Grails— 22″ and 20″ (x2) jazz rides, 17″ (x2) and 18″ crashes! Videos coming soon. A couple of cymbal-related items: • […]
An EXCELLENT time to support the blog
UPDATE: I’m going to keep bumping this to the top of the site this week, but I will be posting every day, so scroll down for new content. It has been a long time since […]
Practice loop: Chenrezig
Some of my practice loops are as much for inspiration as they are about learning a style or practicing drum ideas, or whatever— for example, the Sivad loop or the Attica Blues loop. Here’s another one […]
Uptempo bailout drill
I’m not great at playing superfast tempos. I can sound really good at the magic Roy Haynes tempo (half note = 143, which sounds very cooking to normal people), with diminishing results as we get […]