Having a blast learning drums. Huge breakthrough this week in playing double stroke rolls. They were my freakin nemesis for a year after I started on snare technique. It’s taken me months to learn fives, sevens, nines and elevens. Not the playing of them so much as the reading of them. Fucking things all looked the same. I had to write in what they were and just read my scribbles if I had any hope of keeping in time. But this week I concentrated on thirteens and nailed them – both in the playing and the reading. And now that I got it, I can’t stop playing the exercises that mix them all up – 5s, 7s, 9s, 11s, 13s. I can now play about 3/4 of this book straight through.

Now that I have a kit I can play on all day, I’ve gotten into this new paradiddle book with a vengeance. The exercises aren’t that hard, but holy shit… when you get the technique going on a full kit it sounds like somekind of Acid/Latin/African/funk/jazz thing. It makes everything else sound like child’s play. Huge, huge fun.