The true struggle comes in the practice room, facing those drums everyday for 10 hours. — Famoudou Don Moye When I was in college I decided that, at some point in their career, everyone who […]
Category: practicing
Erskine on practicing
An exchange about general practice topics, from Peter Erskine’s 1978 Modern Drummer interview with Gary Farmer. GF: [W]hat would an ideal practice routine consist of? PE: When I work on the snare drum, I try […]
The hard stuff
Do we have to? Because I’d really rather not. No one would ever accuse me of being a simplistic or non-technical drummer, but my philosophy has always been Do Easy. I spend a lot of […]
Various internet drumming misconceptions complained about
What I want to do to the internet sometimes. I wrote this as I was finishing the 2017 Book of the Blog. Getting a book ready for publication means having a lot of frustration to […]
The hard way
Lately I’ve been noticing a lot of talk about doing things the hardest way possible— among drumming students there’s a great fear of “crutches” and “cheating.” The path of least resistance offends people’s protestant work […]
What’s the point?
Yeahhh, you probably don’t need to bother with this one.* * – Not a terrible book, actually. Since we here at CRUISE SHIP DRUMMER! dump countless pages of quality practice materials onto the internet annually, […]
Buddy meme
This Buddy Rich quote, embedded in a meme, has been kicking around the internet awhile: “You only get better by playing.” Uncontroversial to people who can play, but it has generated a small amount of […]
Things other people say that I think are stupid
T.H.I.S. S.U.C.K.S. I’m sorry I said stupid. I just wanted you to read this. If you hang out on the internet a little bit, you start noticing patterns in people’s views about drumming, and that […]
Keith Copeland lesson plan
This is the type of thing I like to share on the blog— a little piece of oral history posted someplace obscure, that could easily be lost, or extremely difficult to find again. This was […]
Han Bennink practice tips
Not a lot of action on the other drumming blogs these days, but Ted Warren of Trap’d has this amazing thing for us, courtesy of Jon McCaslin of Four On The Floor, courtesy of some […]
Death march life advice
“I made a decision to set goals for myself. I’ve got to make it to that herd of caribou. When I got to that herd of caribou I would establish another goal for myself. I […]
Dahlgren & Fine practice order
The “harmonic” coordination exercises from Dahlgren & Fine’s 4-Way Coordination is one of the more daunting collections of junk in the drumming literature. For many years I resisted using the book at all, but I finally got […]