frozen octopus

RLRL 
K HK

I ran across this drum micro-pattern and it’s been burning in my mind the last couple days. It looks simple but the last half of it is quite rough at first. When I think about my limbs trying to do it, they don’t want to do it. If I can get my mind to zone out on something else, I can suddenly do it.

Gotta remember to hunt for more of these micro-patterns. 

On the train home from our show last night, I saw someone who had on socks that said, "You are what you love."

I was walking down a crowded sidewalk, running over the new song we were going to rehearse later on. I had to take a right to the studio, which disrupted the stride of someone behind me.

They sighed a huge sigh, and that made me slightly forget the song for rehearsal. That pissed me off, which made me completely forget the song.

So I let the sigh of some random person who could’ve been having the worst day ever, unrelated to me, make me forget going to play drums.

Not worth it.

Rehearsal today, and I am coming in with a triplet beat to share . I discover a lot of new beats to bring to rehearsal by learning from the past. Not copying the past. Learning from the past.

If I study some old technique, beat, idea, or pattern on drums, the same pattern occurs at practice when I am alone. I try to learn some old beat or fill as is, getting to about 50-75% close to it. Then my style gets antsy and wants some attention. I combine what I am trying to figure out with what I usually do, and it becomes a new thing I can do in my playing.

It happened that way with linear drumming. It happened that way when I tried to learn jazz drumming. It happens that way when I try to learn some legendary old beat.

Not being able to learn a beat completely isn't a fail. Coming out of a rehearsal understanding the idea or concept behind a beat is a huge win.

I can't play the half-time shuffle in the song "Fool in the Rain" note for note. My ghost notes noticeably leveled up from the fifteen minutes I sunk into figuring out the pattern. That's a huge win.

: RLR LRL (RLR is floor tom. LRL is on snare)

This year, I switched from storing individual notes in separate text files to a centralized system using Drafts and Dropbox. It's working so well that I am going to keep going with it for 2025.

The problem with my previous system was that I was spending too much time organizing and became anxious about the ever-growing number of files.

For my new system I need something that was as simple as possible. So I created a folder in Dropbox for each life context and set up a Drafts action to store thoughts with tags, dates, and locations in a single text file.

When I need to find something, using a text editor to search for information in a smaller number of files is so much easier. Using an app like nvAlt or Obsidian was working with the old way but the sheer number of files was making my brain hurt.

The benefits of this year's method is it's easy to find information in a manageable number of files. I've also been allowing myself to fix/tidy one or two things during each search session. That gives me that little jolt you get when you organize but I don't do it for hours like before.