I’m at the point where I’ve published so much stuff on the site, I’m a little embarrassed. I don’t want people thinking I’m just fascinated with writing patterns. I do practice this stuff, and otherwise […]
Year: 2021
The three bloggers listen to Milestones
Yer Three Bloggers— myself, Ted Warren @ Trap’d, and Jon McCaslin @ Four On The Floor— decided to listen to Milestones by Miles Davis, and make whatever comments occur to us. It’s one of his […]
Backsticking drill for switching grips
I use matched grip virtually all the time in playing, but about every 5-7 years since ~1986, I make a serious effort at getting my traditional grip happening. When I have it conditioned, I can […]
Daily best music in the world: Al Harewood fast
Digging around for some Al Harewood— I mostly know him from the 60s Blue Note records he’s on, but he was active into the 90s— I found this killing live track from George Benson, in […]
Reed interpretations: new uptempo method
All right, I found the way to use Reed at faster jazz tempos. My “the way”, anyhow. I’ve mostly been winging my uptempo jazz comping until now— I never had materials I really liked for […]
Very occasional quote of the day: style
“My style is copying the style of the people I love and the way I combine it and that’s nothing more.” – Ralph Peterson, interview with George Colligan
Transcription: Art Blakey – This Is Life
From maybe the first jazz record I ever checked out on my own, Golden Boy by Art Blakey. Kind of an obscure record on the Colpix label, that I dug out of my dad’s record […]
Cymbal sounds: Tony-like
I was rooting around in my music listening to ride cymbal sounds, and was surprised to find, in pretty short order, a number of things similar to Tony Williams’s famous cymbal— similar to it, or […]
From the zone: Zappa transcription project
Daniel Bédard in Montréal did a really cool project: “I challenged myself in trying to transcribe one FZ song a week for a year. That year came to an end last September and due to […]
The three bloggers: the left foot, the hihat
New series: Fellow drumming bloggers Jon McCaslin (Four On The Floor), Ted Warren (Trap’d), and I are colluding on a series of posts, in which each of us independently write about the same topic. Whatever drumming-related […]
Service announcement
Sorry for the lack of posts– I have a ton of stuff lined up, including a big sale on cymbals, but there’s a massive internet service outage in Portland thanks to an ice storm. And […]
New rudiment: Swisscues
New rudiment time: a flam rudiment combining a Swiss Triplet and a Flamacue. It’s so basic I can’t imagine it doesn’t already exist somewhere, but I’m not digging through the lists of 50,000 hybrid rudiments […]