Learn to play the drums

Been practicing off and on around an hour a day. Found a website called drummerworld that has some good resources on it. Found a video by New Orleans drummer Stanton Moore. He demonstrates the use of sticking RRLRRLRL and I started practicing that with fabulous results. He has three books out with DVD that deals with the history of New Orleans beats and how they apply to funk and jazz-fusion. Exciting stuff. I ordered two of them. They should arrive by end of next week.

Also found another website called icanplaydrums.com. This is an ecommerce site where this guy is selling some sort of software drumming lesson. Looks okay, but only works with PC. Ech! As an incentive, however, he offers over 60 lessons free. First few have been helpful in helping correctly set up the drums and some basic holding and sticking fundamentals.

Hope to get a band going within the next three months. However, Mardi Gras time is here and there’s lots to do.

Got out of the shower yesterday, toweled off and since there was no one home played drums naked. Then my friend showed up and busted me. :)

Tonight, played for about an hour straight and a few minutes here and there throughout the day.

Right now, I’m experimenting with what sounds I can make depending on where I hit the drums or cymbals. Trying to mess with the beats and the timing. I definitely can hear the hip-hop influence in my playing.

My left had is waaay less coordinated than my right or my feet. I’m having a tough time getting it to do anything more than a basic snare rhythm.

I know I shouldn’t have such high expectations, cause I have only started, but I feel like I’m pretty damn good at this shit and I want to get up on stage and rock out with some other cats as soon as possible.

I love this shit!

Yeah! All that knee slapping and table tapping over the years. Not to mention a few thousand dollars in dance lessons finally paid off. Within just a week of starting out, I’ve got the basic back beat rhythm of most rock songs down. It’s so damn fun!

Forgot to mention how it is that I have a drum kit. My sister dates a musician, the famous trumpeter Maurice Brown (goto www.mauricebrown.net. there you go Mo, some free pub). They thought they had lost everything in the flood and bought all new stuff. They decided to move to NY and couldn’t carry all their other crap that it turns out didn’t get flooded, including, you guessed it, a very nice Yamaha drum kit! yes indeed. What a great life.