frozen octopus

Doing a little reorganization for my daily drum task, which was practicing a randomly generated drum pattern for five minutes. I have been noticing that I am slightly practicing them a little less lately, which means it is time to put new tires on the drum practice system.

So I am going to do a little self-A/B test to see if it affects my playing or not. I am switching to one pattern a month for a while. I am very curious to see if unconsciously practicing this pattern only gets it so deep into muscle memory that it comes out while playing a show. Have it be the default pattern to tap when pushing a shopping cart, riding the train, waiting for files to upload.

The Pattern

• RLLRRL

For May, I am going to work on a Six Stroke Roll. It is actually a legendary pattern for doing drum fills. They sound amazing when you loop a couple of them. They sound even better when you move them around the drum kit.

• RLLRRL RLLRRL

Splitting this one in half, looping one of the halves, and then playing the fill pattern is a cool option too. It gets your hands a little time to get ready to do the fill pattern.

Expanding on the Pattern

• RLL RLL RLLRRL
• RRL RRL RLLRRL
• RRL RLL RLLRRL

I rely on an Apple Shortcut to get the current album I am listening to into a .csv that I use to import into this blog. It's been working like a charm so I thought I'd share it here for anyone that needs this. You'll have a log of all the stuff you are listening to in a file you can open up in Numbers or whatever.

Steps

First, add a "Run AppleScript" action and add this AppleScript to it.

on run {input, parameters}

set formattedDate to do shell script "date '+%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S'"       

tell application "Music"

set trackArtist to artist of current track

set trackAlbum to album of current track

return formattedDate & "|" & trackArtist & " |" & trackAlbum

end tell

return input end run

Add an "Append to Text File" action that gets the results of the AppleScript. It up to you to figure out where the file lives.

A week or so into having a MacBook Neo A18 8GB 13” to go along with my MacBook Pro M3 36GB 14”. So far, bouncing between the two feels really seamless. I like having the smaller size for moving around our place to do random things in different places.

The only times, so far, I can notice a difference between the two is booting it up when it is powered off. It takes a lot longer logging in and connecting to the Wi-Fi.

I thought not having the keyboard lit up would bug me more. I got the indigo one so the keyboard is a little dark at night. Daytime it is totally visible.

I’d recommend it for sure to friends/family. Neo is going to rule for traveling with. We were a little anxious traveling with the fancy Pro. This little laptop feels made to toss in a backpack and go. Bonus points for not having a massive power brick.

Spent some time at the rehearsal space last night getting warmed up for a show tonight. Finally got around to practicing a thing I stumbled across online. You play steady 16th notes on the hi-hat with the snare on two and four. With your kick you cycle through placing a kick in each possible slot. It was interesting seeing which patterns were problematic. For me “-ooo” was really rough on the kick drum.

I am really starting to respect exercises where you need to cycle a kick or snare through all the possible notes in a measure. When I was studying jazz comping, there is a similar exercise. I go back to it almost every day when I am practicing on my legs or desk.

These kinds of exercises are wonderful because they expose the small wrinkles and help you iron them out in your playing. Pretty much instant results in your normal playing when you work on these cycles.

Recommend

Play each one slowly for a while and relax. Let the muscles get used to doing each one. 

Positions

Key: o = hit drum, - = rest

o---
-o--
--o-
---o
oo--
-oo-
--oo
o--o
o-o-
-o-o
ooo-
-ooo
oooo

Some call it runway and 10,000 feet. Some call it earth and stars. Some call it trees and forest. It goes by many names, but they are all ways of symbolizing perspective.

Coming up with the theme is the fun part. Actually taking the time to do the perspective work is the hard part. I use the GTD system, which has around five horizons of focus that I am supposed to review.

I have them dutifully set up in my tasks app, which I dutifully skip every time they come up. Then I feel guilty about not taking stock and planning ahead. I think the hurdle for me is actually asking myself the questions. I love reviewing, thinking, and planning. But being the interviewer and also the interviewee at the same time is too much for my brain.

I've been messing around with Claude Cowork lately. So I decided to build a skill for maintaining my horizons of focus (perspective). I'm have it scheduled out to ask me the questions I need to answer to figure out my horizons of focus. It then records my answers to a simple text file that is the source of truth for my perspective.

It has instructions to always read that text file before helping me plan my day. The results so far are when I get my daily briefing, it is adding notes to the tasks I need to do with things like "this task aligns well with something you mentioned in Horizon 3: Goals and objectives".

Being reminded of the horizons like that is giving me a little boost to get that one done or going. This is a work in progress, but it is fun slowly building this robo-friend.