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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

I was talking with a student about speed. Here is someone who began playing the piano six months ago and was getting frustrated at the slow pace of his speed. I am not talking about the slow pace of his development, that’s another matter. I am talking about just the speedRead More

So this guy wants to become a pro musician. He grew up with a traveling family, military people or some such, and went from one big city to another: San Francisco to New York, to L.A to Chicago. At best he lived a couple years in the suburbs, but never more than a few miles awayRead More

What is the worst enemy of a drum set? Look at the title of this blog and you got yourself the answer: water. I have seen some great drum sets completely ruined because they were in a basement that flooded. The mounted toms usually are ok, and so is the snare. They are elevated.Read More

Drums can be made of all sorts of material. The most common one is wood which, in itself comes in different varieties. But it can also be made of metal. Snare drums in particular, can be manufactured in steel or brass, for example. A drum set can also be made in unusual material,Read More