I am on to Chapter 2 of The Art of Bop Drumming and I noticed there are micro patterns occurring in the comping exercizes. When I get hung up on a part of a beat in the book, I go to these micro comping examples to isolate the issue. After looping a micro pattern for a while, the comping exercise is a lot less daunting for me.

Downloads:

I got myself a book called The Art of Bop Drumming because I have heard it referenced by at least three drummers on Youtube in the last year.

Brought it to the rehearsal studio and after about an hour, I had a beat going that sounded like an amateur jazz drummer.

I was hanging on for dear life but got it to new born deer trying to walk level. Very fun!

Also fun was taking the jazz pattern and flattening it to punk. Stoked to next 1000s of cats rehearsal.

I was searching around to see if someone has already come up with a text file based way to do music notation before I start to mess around with a way to do it in Text Expander or Shortcuts.

While I was looking around I found Lilypond. It's an open source text based way to write sheet music. It's a little bit more than I need but I got it setup on my laptop for the future. It's going to be very cool if I need to make some drum tabs in the future.

It's very nerdy but very powerful. After ten minutes of playing around with it, I decided to put it away because I need to get drums practiced.

TL;DR: Discovered music at a Denny's and found sushi I need to try.

1. I saw someone with a Chris & Cosey shirt on at the local Denny’s yesterday. The name sounded familiar so I made a note. Turns out they are members of Throbbing Gristle after they split up. Stoked to add it to the MusicBox app which has become a staple app in the last month.
2. We were watching 孤独のグルメ (Kodoku no Gourmet or Solitary Gourmet) and the protagonist of the show ordered some sushi the shop ran out of. As an apology gift, the chef gave him a special roll with saba and gari (pickled ginger). Now I am obsessed with trying it.

A magnitude 7 earthquake off the coast of Ishikawa today at around 16:15. Our place was moving and we're all the way in Tokyo so you know it was a big one. Tsunamis around 1 meter have been hitting the west coast still and it's been three hours after the first quake. The aftershocks seem to be slowing down but there were aftershocks around every 10-15 minutes for a while. Things look pretty beat up there on the TV news. On a day where people are normally partying with their families, everyone had to evacuate to higher ground to wait things out.

Hope everyone is hanging in there on the west coast of Japan.

避難(ひなん)する = to take refuge