Tag: Drum lessons

I spend a lot of time these days gauging the efforts of my students. When I conceive a page of exercise, I think of them as stones my people can walk on to cross a river. If I put the stones too close together, they are making no progress and it becomes boring, and if…

I am not sure why I am a musician. I don’t think it was because of my talent. I don’t think fate had anything to do with it either. My parents didn’t push me to become a drummer or a piano player. My friends either. One strong reason maybe: I like music. Correction: I love…

I just talked about chaos and it pitfalls, let’s now talk about its counterpart, perfection, and what damage it can do to a budding musician. I know a lot of people who want to study an instrument. It could be drum or piano, which are the instruments I happen to teach, but many are attracted…

Nature seems chaotic. To every semblance of logic and order, there are millions of situations that seem to be left to chance. This fish is supposed to eat that one, but just got gulped by a seal. That person rushes to her appointment, one that would decide her fate, but doesn’t make it because the…

I have been reworking on my lessons. It has been a very long process. It has taken a lot of effort, a lot of thinking and a lot of work, but I am extremely happy with the results. More importantly, the students are very happy. Let’s take a style like Bossa-nova. If you know a…

I have just changed my teaching style to a much more approachable and fun way of learning the drums or the piano. I just finished writing close to 1500 new exercises with the songs that accompany them. People are describing the new approach as “very easy going”, “simple to follow” and “super fun to do”.…

Once you have covered the basics of drumming and you’re playing in a band, you quickly realize it’s not easy to put your own signature to a song . First, you might say, it depends on the material. Then you might follow that argument by stating that a simple rock song calls for a simple…

Survival is not for the faint of heart. We are all experiencing its very meaning at some level right now. Now, of course, I could tell you that it is important to keep hoping no matter what, to never give up. And, in some ways this blog will be about that. It is true that…

When I came out of Berklee College of Music and started to teach in Chicago I wrote a lot of exercises to prepare my lessons. It was, a the time, done by hand and I had to make copies at the local copy store. It was long, cumbersome and expensive. But, like most of us…

This has been a very trying time for the music world. I have seen Paul Simon singing against a white wall by himself with his guitar, with no accompanying musicians. I have seen the streets of my city empty from the festivals and block parties that we used to have during the summers in Chicago.…