I hate drum machine jazz!! Ok .. now that I’ve got that out of my system, I can continue in a more civilized manner.

Well, it’s not to say that I’m some elite purist or anything, but I just can’t stand to listen to some really great horn player blasting away on top of pre-fab, pro-tooled tracks. Ugh. I don’t feel threatened by drum machines or anything. I mean, people don’t want to see a drum machine take a solo, so I’ll always find work, but it’s just that I can’t stand to listen to music that at it’s very heart is meant to be organically played with emotion and passion. Maybe it’s an economic thing .. I dunno. But to replace the guts of a classic tune with mechanically sounding rhythm parts so a soloist can crank out another record just flies in the face of everything I believe in about music. (more…)

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I just picked up my very own copy of Jim Chapin’s Advanced Techniques for the Modern Drummer. This book, just like Stone’s Stick Control, is one of the true monuments in percussion methods, but I can’t believe it’s taken 20 years to finally own a personal copy. It’s one of things that my instructors or peers always had ready and I would copy certain pages to work on a particular exercise or etude. The book always seemed manageable by looking at one or two pages at a time, but now that I have a full copy, I’m truly astounded at how much knowledge and expertise is crammed into so relatively few pages. (more…)

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