Practice

Time to get the ball (the snare?) rolling, and what better way to do it than to talk about one of my favorite topics: Practice. For me practice often means sitting at the kit with a pair of in ears and an ipod. I have playlists of different types of grooves and different genres, often organized by tempo, so that I can sit down and focus on one thing without much searching. A far-too-small percentage of my practice involves working out different fills and grooves with a metrinome at different tempos. In the past year or so I've spent a healthier amout of time working out of a few of my favorite and/or reccommended books and working to expand my rhythm vocabulary and the communication between my hands and feet. In teaching drums to new drummers, the way that people approach the kit for the first time has always been interesting to me. More often than not I have trouble convincing students to sit down with a pair of headphones and just PLAY. When I started that was all I wanted to do and it wasn't until later on that I grew into an appreciation for learning new things that were realy challenging to me. How do you practice? Of the differnt things you do, what do you enjoy the most and what do you gain the most from? This is just the tip of the iceberg when considering this topic, but hopefully a good start to many discussions to come.

Welcome to the Music City Drummers Blog!

I thought I should start off by introducing myself and the idea behind this blog. I'm Jacob, a 4 year resident of Nashville Tennessee. I've been playing drums for a little over 13 years, so since Christmas of this year (and until my birthday in June) I've been playing drums for exactly half of my life. I Love to play. I take lessons, I give lessons, I practice, I play in bands, I read about drums and spend money on gear. If it has to do with drums I'm in. There are plenty of great resources on the web but my friend Kurt and I have been kicking around the idea of a blog for a couple months now. We don't want to do this to promote ourselves and we don't have anything to sell. We just want to help and be helped, to share and to listen to the ideas and stories of the greater online drumming community. We'll be inviting other contributors from time to time and we hope that you'll leave comments and interact with us as well. We've been brainstorming lots of ideas for the blog and we think we have a lot to share, so stay tuned. For now, welcome to the Music City Drummers blog!

Slow Funk

Meet Kurt :