“Technique we always think of as being a thing having to do with fastness, [but] technique is, in its highest sense, is the ability to handle musical materials.” “You could get to a point where […]
Category: teaching
Very occasional quote of the day: gabby pupils
An extended quote— extended is the only way to quote him— from George Lawrence Stone’s Technique of Percussion, which has been on my mind a lot lately: An instructor inquires what to do with a […]
Todd’s methods: accents to funk
This is an item for teachers, I suppose. It’s good to have more than one way of teaching things. There’s no reason for a student to have to struggle with something just because your preferred […]
Leave them kids alone
Dumbest, wrongest quasi-educational thing I could find to illustrate this post. This little rant has been kicking around my drafts folder for awhile. I wasn’t even going to post it, but then I had another frustrating […]
Basic drum set coordination – 01 – alternating
A page for teachers, for beginning through intermediate level students. I want them to have total clarity on what it feels like to play all the major limbs, and unisons between limbs, and the basic […]
Protecting your business
Maybe not. This is a situation I had recently, which is common for teachers working with music stores, teaching studios, or other services. Many of those businesses require teachers to sign contracts to keep them […]
First jazz lesson
Here’s an item for teachers. This is a process I improvised in a lesson with a 6th grade student yesterday, to introduce him to playing the jazz rhythm on the drums. We did this verbally, […]
Hackwork
Apropos of no particular part of this post, these are remarkably similar to many drum teachers I’ve encountered. A short beef about the nature of teaching. Maybe I should’ve included this in my recent post, […]
Enough with the prodigies.
Impressive technical abilities for a child, still a hack painting. The universal plaintive cry is “If they’re that good now, imagine how good they’ll be in ten years!” Well, maybe. There’s a great article on kids and […]
Jazz language?
Great blog post by Bill Plake: “The Problem With Studying ‘The Jazz Language’”: The other morning I was giving a first lesson to a jazz guitarist ( a university student) and was struck by something […]
Sharing information: two views
“Those who know don’t tell and those who tell don’t know.” — Timeless wisdom from the East, attributed to Lao-Tzu. “All the pros I know freely share their prime locations, techniques and business practices.” — […]
Truth and negativity
This has been sitting in my drafts folder awhile— some thoughts on an older piece from George Colligan’s Jazz Truth blog, a collection of thoughts about negativity, positivity, realism, “telling it like it is”, and […]