Blog

I went to Boston for Easter vacation. It was nice. I went with my family. Great people. The best on earth. I remember Boston very well. That is where I studied. At Berklee. That is where I discovered America. I was fragile at the time. I didn’t know if I could make it as aRead More

Is there a case made for the dirty playing, the sloppy technique, the approximate sounds you can get from an instrument? Yes. One name: Theolonius Monk. Another name: Singer Louis Armstrong. And Bob Dylan. Yes! Yes! Yes! We love those sounds. They create emotions from their veryRead More

Let us be, for a moment, a fly on the wall and witness a typical rehearsal. Whether it’d be in rock, jazz, country or blue grass, doesn’t matter. We have a few instruments, a rock quartet, for example. Bass, Drums, Piano, guitar, and a few singers among those players. Good! ThoseRead More

The modern world doesn’t have any patience for patience. It is also losing patience for repetition. But the job of the drummer is repetition. We take a pattern, any pattern, we repeat it exactly. That is, as a matter of fact, how you create a groove. Only that moto doesn’t fitRead More

A written classical music piece of music must be played exactly. That’s the premise. The composer worte the notes, you have to play them. All of them. And, you do not mess with the notes. What the composer has written, you play. Nothing less, nothing more. Right! I’llRead More

I am thinking about Chopin, Johann Sebastian Bach or Mozart. They made the effort to pass on their knowledge to the next generation. Bach, famously, wrote a whole book for his wife, some very simple pieces that every piano student has studied at a moment or another. Mozart alsoRead More

I remember when I first started, back when the dinosaurs were not yet created, I didn’t have a pad. I had a pair of sticks. That’s it. Sticks and nothing else. I traveled light. But everywhere I would go, I would be drumming. There was always a surface, flat or not so flat, toRead More

As a drum teacher, I often get ask how to build a right foot, a bass drum foot. The subject is extremely important because the bass drum is one of the prominent voice of almost any rock/funk groove and requires a lot of dexterity. To play singles, the training is fairly simple:Read More

Young pupils should be taught music with games. And, the younger they are, the more playful the games. I was almost ready to write : “the younger they are, the silliest the game”. Yet, I am convinced that is the best way to learn, when we don’t think of a task as a chore, a duty,Read More