I’ve been looking some piano literature lately, reading an old book called Practising the Piano (British spelling) by Frank Merrick. You can get it on Scribd without having to pay anyone but Scribd. Another site […]
Category: teaching
Accents in Reed
TOTAL nerd stuff here. I use the accent pages in Progressive Steps to Syncopation (pp. 47-49) with my students for convenience, but I find them be a pain. They’re thorough, but poorly balanced— so if […]
Three bloggers: technique
“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 […]
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, […]