The Converge Nouveau is coming! :P

Ooooh YEAH!!! This, my friend, is going to be one amazing album, I can feel it. This kind of heaviness and blasting around is a very very good sign that, by the end of this year, Epitaph will have treated us to some great music. I am so excited!!

Free drum lessons!

I really miss formal musical education, like I said already, but there are things on the net that come quite close to a formal teacher/student learning process.

NO, It's not a chat room where you talk to drummers live and play together via webcam... this could be very interesting, but extremely difficult to manage and supervise. And music is one of these things you either learn by yourself, or with someone with whom you have to work "live", or else it's just distracting...

HOWEVER, I really like this website Free Drum Lessons.

It offers very high quality drum lessons. From beginners to polyrhythm masters, anyone can learn on this site. There are a few e-teachers on this project, and all of them seem quite passionate about teaching drums.

Each lesson looks at a particular aspect of drumming. You find everything on there, from drum tuning to music notation, from dynamics to rudiments, or counting in 5/4. You can learn rock drumming, jazz drumming, latin drumming, and double-bass. you name it they have it. Each lesson is also associated to downloadable sheet music of the stuff covered in the video, so you can print it out, jot down a few things from the video, shut down the computer and PLAY!.

BUT WAIT, THERE'S MORE!! If one day you just don't feel like "learning" (in the formal sense) all that much, but still feel that urge to play for fun...you can conciliate both! Because free drum lessons has a whole bunch of pretty cool play-alongs, and you can download the drumless audio-only mp3 track for free as well!

Ex. of a play-along: 

So yeah, just thought I'd share this with you ;-)

I'm a drummer

Hi again, this is my third post today, my first day of blogging. Hooray! :D

I figured you maybe wanted to know more about me. (yes I'm quite the egocentric ^^) After all, you are reading this blog, you might as well find out, piece by piece, who writes it. 

So as I was saying, I am drummer. I have been one for the past two years, and this puts me in the "just-past-beginner" stage. I try to drum as much as I can, unfortunately I don't have loads of time nor a very easy access to drums where I live. I'm hoping next year to find some sort of local music centre where you get a 2€/h drum set and rehearsal room to play with friends, rather than the putrid cave I've practiced in several times this year (for 50€/ year) where the drums are always conveniently stored as a puzzle. :'(

My stage experience is rather short. I must have played a grand total of 3h30 in concert playing things I can't honestly say I enjoyed. Next year (a year of great expectations indeed lol), I'm going to see if I can get my band mates to write music together, or at least choose the stuff we play together... 

Maybe I can also hook back up with a teacher to formalize my learning process. I started with a great teacher the first year but then left for my studies, so I started self-teaching myself. It works. You do grab a few techniques, tips and cool riffs here and there, but I feel it really isn't enough to achieve better independence, agility, dynamics and so on. Practice makes perfect and nothing beats, in my opinion, spending 2h a week with someone who knows how it's done.

If you're a drummer too, please contact me, share your experience and techniques, I'm eager to learn!!! 

 

I will be posting more about drumming, most probably, and about music in general... ;-)

Thibs