Looking at two little books co-authored by Peter Erskine and Dave Black— The Drummer’s Lifeline, and The Musician’s Lifeline, subtitled, respectively, as Quick Fixes, Hacks, And Tips Of The Trade, and Advice For All Musicians, […]
Category: best books
Best books: Working Space
Here’s an old favorite, by the painter Frank Stella, who died this week: Working Space— you can read it online at that link. It’s pretty dense, but there’s a lot to learn about art in it. […]
On Effortless Mastery
Service announcement: the next couple of months will continue to be very busy for me, so I’ll be posting irregularly for awhile longer. Quality of language will be unpolished, wisdom coarsely hewn, logic poorly articulated, […]
Practical comping lesson with Rothman
Joel Rothman’s books don’t get a ton of attention in the jazz drums-learning world, but they’re good. I like the comping materials in his book Basic Drumming (duplicated in his book Drumming And All That […]
More on New Breed
Since that last piece about the book The New Breed, by Gary Chester, I’ve been working with that book fairly seriously— I can already play the drums, it won’t kill me to spend some time […]
Book review: Note Groupings and Combinations for Drumset
Giving a shout out to, and a few comments about, a new book by Jeff W. Johnson: Note Groupings And Combinations For Drumset. Johnson wrote another good book, The Level System— pretty much the definitive […]
Surveying styles of drum notation
I was recently critiqued on my notation style, by someone who knows their stuff— who also knows their stuff— and I got paranoid that I was writing in a stupid way, so I went to […]
Wilcoxon’s Junior Drummer
I’ve had this copy of Charley Wilcoxon’s book The Junior Drummer* lying around for some time, let’s take a look at it, see how it holds up for modern usage. I have the Ludwig Masters […]
Best books: revisiting Rubank
The matte industrial looking horizon blue cover has that depression era band room reek. A fresh look at the very old, very turgid Rubank drum method books. Rubank, a series of method books for all […]
Get it while you can: Different Drummers
4/23 update: It’s gone. You can try reaching Mr. Mintz through his website, to purchase a copy of the book, if he’s selling it, and/or send him some money for the illegal download. Now available […]
Best books: The Art of Modern Jazz Drumming – Dejohnette / Perry
“As our mental image becomes more precise, we are better able to select muscle movements which will achieve our goals quickly, efficiently, and accurately.” I’m surprised I haven’t written much about this book already— The […]
Freehand sketching
A couple of interesting art books available “free” on Scribd, for anyone interested in art, or in getting into art, and trying some non-music related creativity. … which I highly recommend. I gave myself permission […]