This is one of the more memorable quotes from the pianist Kenny Werner’s book Effortless Mastery— I think a lot of people noticed it, and fully embraced it: Once after playing a concert an interviewer […]
Category: technique
Survival chops: right hand lead
This is the second in an extremely short series covering the bare essentials of what you need for “drumistic” fill, variation, and solo material across a variety of styles— you can read the intro to […]
Crossing accents
This very simple idea occurred to me while I was working on an Elvin Jones transcription today— either I had an insight into an underlying concept in his playing, or I was just daydreaming. What […]
Pad practice caveat
As someone who comes from the land of the Tea Party, Glenn Beck, and the rest of that nightmare, it’s kind of quaintly Canadian that he calls this a “rant”, but Ted Warren says something […]
Three Camps round up
I recently picked up a stack of Mitchell Peters books, one of which contains several variations on this classic, and it seemed like a good time to round up the various sources and variations on […]
Jazz Truth interview: Jack Dejohnette
This is unusual: an interview conducted by a non-drummer geekishly opening with a discussion of bass drum technique. Here’s George Colligan of the Jazz Truth blog speaking to Jack Dejohnette. As usual, I’ve edited out […]
Something stupid
I hope you’re ready for a descent several circles deeper than usual into pure drumming geekdom today, as I’ve been fooling with devising a sticking system for all limbs, and combinations of limbs. I don’t […]
Double paradiddle thing
Matt’s Paradiddle Thing has been so useful to me, that I decided to apply the same methodology to double paradiddles. Don’t be put off by the amount of ink on the page- the system is […]
Matt’s paradiddle thing
This is a straightforward paradiddle exercise I wrote up for one of my students. It ends up a pretty robust page of stuff when you run it in the sequences. Practice each measure individually, then […]
Cherished notions bite the dust
I need a bushier goatee for this gig. I’ve been experiencing all kinds of growth with my playing in recent years, which I attribute partly to me forgetting things I for years thought were really […]
Best books – Chop Busters by Ron Fink
OK, the title is a little goofy- a lot goofy- but this is an excellent, fun book of snare drum exercises written by North Texas State University instructor Ron Fink to “uncover weakness in basic […]