When someone starts to learn the drums, they come to my studio and I show them the first beat in the style of music they’re interested in. Usually, it’s a rock beat. We go with a simple pattern, not too many limbs, not too fast with no dynamics. They are oftenRead More

Suppose you have decided to learn the piano. Good! That’s a great idea. Suppose you don’t have a teacher. Ha! Could be a problem. You go online, find a few tutorials, a few ideas, a few songs, you get yourself going. Again, great! And then you hit a wall, a hard one:Read More

Once someone has studied an instrument for at least 2 or 3 years, they can usually play a few songs well, they understand what a tempo is, what a metronome is, they know how to read a few written notes, they can deal with an accompaniment, a song structure and a few other thingsRead More

I noticed something peculiar among my students. But first, let’s set it up correctly. I teach all ages and all levels. My youngest one in my schedule right now is 4 and my oldest one is probably 65 (This is an educated guess). Inevitably, the younger they are, the moreRead More

The first example of efficient drumming I experienced was when I saw Doctor Feelgood, one of the greatest English bar band of the 80’s.   The drummer laid the beat in an obvious and minimalist way. He played the beat and the fills, and rare fills at that, and that was it. IRead More

There are all sorts of drummers out there. Hold it! My first sentence isn’t exactly what I mean, I need to rephrase that: there are all sort of performing drummers out there. Not quite the same thing, because one is about the instrument, the other talks about the instrumentRead More

The Chicago teachers are on strike right now. They have been for awhile. We are on the 9th day without school. Parents are not happy. They cope with it the best they can, but the ones I have the pleasure to see because I teach their children, are voicing a certainRead More

They say we need to run for cover. They say we are headed for economical bad times. They say the economy is about to turn. We’re going to suffer. I do not know if any of it is true. Really, I have no idea. They talk about the yield curve. Ah! Oh! Wow! And that’s aboutRead More

Because the Chicago Teachers are on strike, I decided last Friday to take my children, now teenagers, to the Museum of Science and Industry. We always enjoy our visits there. This time we went through an exhibit called “The old street” or something like that.Read More

A quick trick here for the drummers who hit the cymbals hard but don’t want to spend a ton of cash replacing the ones that break. Try to swish your cymbals instead of hitting them. It means that instead of going full dead on, you hit them “sideways” if I mayRead More