Jack

Jack was very motivated to play his four beat pattern today. It was encouraging to see his willingness to incorporate bass drum into his new beat. We will build upon that momentum to start talking about how to go from one drum groove to another. Then we will start creating phrases of a song.

Nova

We continued working on INSOMNIA by Eve. We were able to work through the groove from intro to verse. However, I encourage Nova to practise it more just to make sure it is dialled in. I have printed the rest of the page. I would like Nova to try out some of the fills as well.

Adam

Adam showed great progress on Enter Sandman. I have notated more of the song on the handout. When practising at home, I encourage him to use the Drumset Musician sheet to warm up. The latter part of Enter Sandman is more or less very similar material, with slight shift in the bass drum to fit in with the guitar rift. For this week, practise the new beat notated at the bottom, and try to play it in repetition. If Adam doesn’t quite understand how it works, he can listen to around 1:10 on the song as a reference.

Nicolas

Nicolas is showing great discipline with learning the xylophone. Recently we have been starting each lesson with some scale practises. I have pointed out to him that rather than using his arm, he should look to engage his wrist movements more. In the meantime, he should also think to keep his hand low, so the ball of the mallet is closer to the keyboard, improving accuracy. Additionally, I encourage him to practise scales more at home, while paying extra attention to his movements. It is always the best time to improve your technique when doing the easier stuff. Then we moved onto Hymn of Freedom, which I encourage him to zoom down to smaller trouble spot then playing the rest together. There is no point always starting from the beginning. If you end up hitting the trouble spot and playing it wrong again, pause there. When everything is fluent and locked in, play the whole thing, with repeat. THEN see if anything is not flowing properly and fix that next spot. Repeat that cycle and the song will be mastered in no time.

Jonah

Jonah is swift to learn Fly As Me. We have been warming up with rudiments in class, and Jonah is very good at all sorts of flam rudiments. However he has a tendency to want to play it faster, but while doing that, he tenses up quite a lot. I encourage Jonah to aim for relaxation when practising rudiments, as that is what ultimately takes the speed up a notch while improving the sound quality. This class we worked on the Middle 8 section. Jonah was fast to identify that the underlying groove is the same as the previous few, except the material are assigned to different instruments. With that in mind, I would like him to keep that similar feel to the groove, light and laid back. Additionally, pay extra care and attention to bar 45 and 49 as those two are quite some tricky licks. We will work on outro chorus next class. We will also introduce some improvisation exercise.