Ahhh good times here in the Pacific Northwest, with the forests burning, and the entire city blanketed in smoke so it looks like we’re in Blade Runner, or the Mexico sequences from Breaking Bad, with […]
Very occasional quote of the day: prove to yourself you are a drummer
“The first thing I’d say is forget about making it big. If you’re that good and it’s in the cards for you to make it big, you probably will and no one can stop it. […]
Three Camps for drum set – 01
I like the traditional rudimental snare drum piece Three Camps as a practice format because it’s simple and finite— you can play the piece a few times and be done. You’ve done your work on the […]
Roy Haynes waltz lesson – practice suggestions
So, I wrote that Roy Haynes waltz lesson in about ten minutes— I just listened to the tune and picked out the most obvious possible ways to cop the basic thing he’s doing there. And […]
Let’s talk about Billy Cobham
I was working on this post about Billy Cobham some weeks ago, and felt I couldn’t finish it— it’s not that easy to write a complete portrait of the playing of a great drummer. Try […]
World’s shortest Roy Haynes waltz lesson
UPDATE: See the page of practice suggestions for more on this! Someone on the internet asked me to explain what Roy Haynes is doing on the Chick Corea tune Windows, from the album Now He […]
Syncopation in 5/4 – another format
A little throwaway item, as I continue working out the formatting for my upcoming book, Syncopation in 5/4, to be released God knows when. The problem is how to deal with phrasing the measures 2+3 […]
Transcription: Elvin Jones – Survival Blues
Hey, we haven’t done any Elvin Jones in a while. This is the beginning of Survival Blues, from McCoy Tyner’s album Extensions. I started where McCoy begins the vamp, and did as much as I […]
Three little-known books
For a long time Steve Weiss Music has been my go-to site for unusual and hard to find drum books. Their warehouse must be full of stuff that never quite caught on, that has been […]
Chapin exercises in 5
This is what you do during quarantine when it’s too hot to practice or doing anything else serious: capture jpegs of a well known drum book, open it up in Paint.net, and cut it up […]