Tag: Chicago drum teacher

  • Few concepts on one rock beat: 3

    Anchor points: In the rock beat accent the hi hat on the down beat (Which goes great for many rock songs.). Or accent the up beat (For a song like Heavy cloud no rain” by Sting.). Drummers should really understand what are the anchor points they need to emphasize in the beats they play. It’s…

  • Few concepts one rock beat: 2

    Dynamics 1: The simplest way to approach it is to go from soft to loud and back while doing the rock beat. But playing soft is very difficult. Most of the time, the beat will lose its energy, its drive as the player struggles to feather his strokes. One way to sidestep that land mine…

  • Few concepts on one rock beat 1

    One rock beat: 8th notes on the hi hat, snare on 2 and 4, bass drum on 1 and 3. Use this beat for all the different concepts. Simultaneity. This is when two or more sound sources happens at the same time. In a simple rock beat it means the bass drum and the snare…

  • When you know

    As a self employed person, I am constantly hit by questions only I can solve. Questions about my schedule. Questions about my teaching concepts. Questions about my budget. My hopes. My plans. My relationships with people. Because everything affects everything, because all in my life is interconnected, I am obliged to think through all that…

  • Old turf

    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 a…

  • Who’s got dirt?

    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 very sketchiness, the very edge of mistake they walk…

  • Why can’t we all get along?

    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! Those people, to warm up, will…

  • Owning it.

    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 fit the era we live…

  • Is classical music up for interpretations?

    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’ll take a famous work from Mozart: Sonata…

  • From the great ones

    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 also composed some short pieces. But his…