My weekend of reflection

Well, over the weekend I found another talented "new" drummer... new to me that is. Emmanuelle Caplette. Based on my youtube subscriptions and viewed videos, one of her videos was recommended. She has a youtube profile which I am now subscribed to. She is a fantastic drummer, with great stick control and speed. Most of her videos are covers of fairly straight forward 4/4 popular songs, but on a few, she really demonstrates her jazz percussion training, with paradiddle variations and two surface riding.

Also based on my subscriptions and viewed videos, Vic Firth has posted many of the videos from its website Vicfirth.com. In particular, I've been re-watching Sergio Bellotti lessons. The lessons are based on simple concepts, but he takes those simple concepts and plays them on the drum set in a way that make them sound new and different.

I was in St. John's last week and bought a Pearl C-1000 stand for my 24" Zildjian ride. I'll try to post some pictures of both my setups. My next purchases are hopefully going to be a new drum throne and some Evans heads.

Also, I've been going back through some drum instructional books that I own and have decided to start running through them entirely. As I go I'll post my results here.

Open Handed Playing

I have started trying to play open handed, as Claus Hessler demonstrated on several of his Youtube posts. On top of that I have started playing along with songs on my iPod by hooking it up to the mic input on my Roland V-Drum sound module. This has made me realize how crappy of a drummer I really am. A word of advice to anyone who is thinking about stopping drumming for whatever reason... DON'T. I, for the life of me, can't get comfortable playing a smooth fill. Keeping a beat is not a problem.

So it's back to the basics for me.