A Percussionist's Notebook

Because of the Covid-19 pandemic that has affected everyone and more specific the private lessons, I have been using Skype in lieu of having my students come to my studio. I then tried a group meeting with everyone together. Re-heading a drum is a time intensive procedure and although I've done this a few times during a lesson, I don't like doing it because it takes at least 45 minutes to do it correctly not just the procedure but to answer all of the questions from the student. As I expected it took about an hour because of the many questions from the students. During our weekly Skype session my brother suggested that I include this on one of my posts for this blog. I initially dismissed the idea since there is a wealth of videos on You Tube about this subject. The idea stayed with me so I decided to watch those videos to assess their value. The result was that only one of the videos had good information and the rest had moderate to even misleading instructions. The result is...

After 4 weeks of Skype private lessons, I finally tried my first group Skype lesson. There are a number of topics that lend themselves to a group lesson and one of those is how to re-head a snare drum. I've done this during individual lessons in the past but it normally takes more than a half an hour to do it properly and I've always felt that it shouldn't be during an actual lesson. However, the times that I have done this, the student has brought his/her drum to the lesson with a broken head and it needed to be repaired before they could continue to practice. For this lesson I had scheduled it for a time well in advance so that everyone had it on their calendar. I sent an email to them with an attachment outlining the process with drawings and a step by step order. They had the sheet printed out and in front of them while I went through the actual procedure of re-heading one of my drums during the lesson. Twice during the procedure I stopped and asked for questions to ...

Families refer to the children as Big Brother/Sister or Little Brother/Sister. My mother passed away in 2004 when I was 57 and she still referred to me as 'My Baby".  Regardless of science's theories of time whether it's relative, linear, constant or whatever, families seem to be caught in a Time Warp. I'll always be the Little Brother. My Big Brother is celebrating his birthday in April so I made him a card. He started out as a Math Major in college and has continued to have a love of math. The Front The Inside

The Youth Symphony posted the audition music for their 2020-2021 season. One of the requirements for snare drum is to perform the Four stroke ruff. This is how I explain and teach it to my students: The traditional way of playing this figure is to play alternating grace notes starting with the Left hand and ending with the primary stroke on the Right. For many young students, the idea of playing a series of single strokes fast enough is difficult because they lack the ability to utilize 'finger' control on the stick. This ends up sounding stiff and too slow for the proper execution. For this reason I offer an alternative version to playing it. The concept is to think of it as starting with a Left ruff followed immediately by a Right tap. Another way of thinking about it is to think of it as an aborted 5 stroke roll. The regular 5 stroke roll is played (rrllR), an aborted 5 stroke roll would be (rrlR). Either way should produce the correct sound of the Four stroke...