I was going to include this as an example in the jazz percussion post, but it really needs its own entry: It feels wrong- totally point-missing- to bring it up, I couldn’t help noting the […]
Category: drums
Six stroke rolls around the drums
I’m just cranking them out today. I’ve been using the last paradiddles around the drums thing so much I decided to write up something similar using another familiar solo pattern, the six stroke roll (as […]
VOQOTD: Mel Lewis
“…you should start with a crash and end with a crash. I see drummers ending with a crash cymbal, but then choking it. When you hit that big chord at the end, let it ring. […]
Kernels of Cascara
My students have been doing so well with my “kernels” concept that I’ve decided to write up a real challenge for them: cascara with the clave in the left foot. It was the hip thing […]
Bob Moses on “dependent” drumming
Or as he called it a little later in Drum Wisdom, “non-independent” drumming. This is relevant to some of the things I brought up both in the ECM feel post and the open-handed post: “I […]
Son Ship 1952-2011
Oh, man- I was surprised/delighted today to find an early-80’s Charles Lloyd record featuring the great, under-rated drummer Son Ship for $4 at Crossroads Music. I got the thing home and while I was listening […]
On “open-handed” drumming
Fine, now spend another hundred years learning to do it almost as well with your left hand. This is a discussion I have to re-litigate on the internet every six months or so: the “open […]
MD column: hi-hat technique
OK, I’m not meaning to turn this into a fair-use abusing, exclusively old Modern Drummer stuff blog, but a longer post is taking its sweet time getting finished, and this is just what I happen […]
Go watch now
The Max Roach story, at Four on the Floor. Here’s part 1/7:
1984 MD interview: Ronald Shannon Jackson
Here are some excerpts from an interview I reread many times on the long bus rides on drum corps tour, about the great avant-garde (that’s where he’s typically filed, anyway) drummer Ronald Shannon Jackson. From […]
First-inversion paradiddles around the drums
2024 UPDATE: Wow, this page looks like crap. See my new bigger and better page of this. This came up in my own practice today— straight conditioning movements around the drums, using the very traditional […]
More on Pinstripes
The distressed font indicates rockingness to me. Ever since reading T. Bruce Wittet’s piece about the drumming equivalent of the fusion mullet, the Remo Pinstripe, I’ve been sort of half-determined to try to them out […]