frozen octopus

A few days into focusing on Six Stroke Rolls (RLLRRL). It's going pretty well actually. I haven't done it at a show yet but it'll get there.

One thing I've noticed is that if I play the chunks from the back of the pattern and work to the beginning, it is a little easier than from the beginning. Who knows why? It could just be me.

• RL
• RRL
• LRRL
• LLRRL
• RLLRRL

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.