One of my nods to an album that is genius is to switch from Music to Podcasts.

My note using voice dictation in at a noisy show says "Make candles out of old bananas". Took me a minute or two to remember that I wanted to make handles out of old bandanas last night.

RLRL R (single stroke) - Crash on right side 
RLRR L (paradiddle) - Crash on left side

Right out of the gate for 2025 is that. It is so easy to be lazy and do the first one. The second one is elegant and energy-saving. Gotta stop reaching my right-hand across to hit a thing my left hand should be doing.

The drum thing I am celebrating for 2024 is the letter B. B is for both. Things can be both.

I started off the year studying jazz drumming. I started noticing in the lessons that with the hands, things seemed to be Left, Right, or Both. So all my notes started to have "B" along with "L" and "R".

Slowly "B" began to creep into all my other areas of drumming (band, shortcuts, etc.).

I haven't abandoned LRK or LR. Just have the new options of LRKB and LRB.

From the outside, scraps of paper as the thing of the year seem laughable. It is laughable. I am laughing on the inside at it too.

I have a habit with paper that I got in control of in 2024.

The first is accepting that notebooks are cool, but I am not good with them. Either the blank page stops me from writing a thought down because then I need to fill the whole page with things. Then I need to fill up the whole other side before moving on. So I found myself not noting things from "page pressure".

Cut up the notebooks into index card-sized pieces.

There was less pressure, but there was still unused space to fill. I had all these half-used notecards hanging around, which felt like there was a ton of unfinished to-dos.

Then I cut the notecard-size pieces into business card-size pieces. It was like a logjam in the mental river was released. It is the perfect size for a single thought. I don't feel like I am wasting paper because the piece is so small.

Now instead of pausing at a blank canvas, I grab a scrap and write a quick thought. A bonus that happened as well is the thoughts are s.｡oO sortable and rearrangeable. The fluidness rules. I am not reading old thoughts while composing the new thought. The momentum keeps moving forward.

All the thoughts get processed during processing time.

• Sort: All the scraps are sorted by context (person, music, computer, etc.).
• Read: Spread out all the scraps in the context and read them.
• Process: Look for patterns, combine any redundant, put tasks into the to-do app, store non-tasks into a reference text file (one for each context).
• Crumple: Crumple is the new cross-out. Very satisfying crunching a processed thought.
• Throw: Throwing away a handful of crunched thoughts is also satisfying.

So cheers to you, humble scraps of paper, you are the non-drum thing of the year.

Cleaning

The end of year in Japan means it is （大掃除）time at our place (and everyone elses too). The big clean to refresh the place for the new year. My plan is to set a timer for 20 minute intervals. Twenty minutes computer time and then twenty minutes clean time. Makes it a little more fun. Throw on some music and get things in order. My mantra for the day is "what is it? where does it go?" then wipe and put it in its spot. We have a small place so it isn't so daunting.

Computer

At the end of the year, I think back on what was a work thing that could be down easier/lazier for the next year. Then I get the fancy app that solves the problem as a self present. The rules are it need to be/feel like an Apple app and can't have a monthly subscription. Past examples are apps like MindNode for mind mapping, Text Sniper for copying text, and Name Mangler for bulk file editing. Each one makes getting things done less of a chore. 

This year I got Retrobatch for bulk image editing. Stoked to play with it and get some workflows happening. Just typing this has my mind planning one for responsive images. Stoked!

I finally had a chance to work on the drum micro pattern I mentioned in a previous post. I had a couple new songs to work out that pushed this pattern to the back burner for a couple weeks. The funny thing is the concept I was trying to workout from this pattern works perfectly in one of the new songs.

Pattern

RLRL
K HK

Very cool pattern. A struggle at first for sure. I couldn't do the hi-hat at first. I had to split that out, get used to it, and then I could do it.

Steps

This..

RLRL
K    K

Then this...

RLRL
K H

Then both...

RLRL
K HK

Reasons

The reason for focusing on this little pattern is getting my feet separated from my hands more. If the feet are on auto-pilot then I have a little more brain to pay attention to the hands. I am shooting for "complex simplicity". Meaning I just want to be able to drop a single hi-hat "chick" whereever I want whenever I want.

Another reason is subtle. When I play a beat on floor tom or ride, it sounds good. When I play the same beat but add the hi-hat with the left foot, it elevates. It's hard to describe the dimension that tiny "chick" sound adds. It's like when I hear chefs talk about adding Bay Leaf to their dish.

If it isn't there, the beat still holds up. The song goes on. When you add it, it sounds/feels more complete.

I went to check out my blog posts from the past year. I found myself staring at a page of teasers, thinking, “I wish I could read all these posts quicker instead of clicking into each one.”

I love those little decisions on this blog and how it slowly morphs over time.  So the front page is now full of full posts. ( ^_ - )y

As the year winds down, I am getting to one of the dreaded tasks. There are a few blogs and podcasts that I have subscribed to that I never got to.

Clicking the unsubscribe/unfollow button is a tough click. Giving future me a cleaner list in the future is a big gift, though.

My trick is to not forget the blogs or podcasts. I just need to store them somewhere better. I note the name on my someday/maybe list and then remove it. It's still somewhere. Just a better somewhere than in my face every day, making me feel guilty for not getting to it.

Been noticing lately with my scrap paper memo pad that there is a perfect amount. More like a satisfying amount. Having about 10 sheets is better than having a 5 cm tall stack. Getting through the 10 sheets and filling the clothes pin back up with paper is having a "check me out...I have so many ideas" effect.

Yes...my mind is that easy to game. Go to know both positively and negatively.

The "converting rants/complaints into personal notes instead" thing I've been practicing lately is starting to take hold in my mind.

For example, "That x is totally a y because x did z!!" becomes a note I append to a text file saying "X was a total y. Don't do z.".

Reviewing (and laughing) at all the "deep" thoughts at the end of the week is turning out to be one of the most entertaining times of the week.

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.

I was hearing a weird voice mumbling something while I was doing some free-writing. For a second, I thought someone was talking loud through the floor, on our veranda or someone was talking on a mic outside.

Finally figured out it was someone on a Jazz album I am listening to is humming on the recording.

Watched a punk band, called Lolita #18, play their 35th anniversary show last night in Hibiya Park. It was around two hours, outside, and about 5°C / 41°F. Totally fun but my nose is paying the price today. I want to see them in a toasty live house next time. I am fancy like that.

It's weird how janky Shortcuts is at getting what you are currently listening to. I've never gotten the actual Music shortcuts to work on desktop. There is an option for getting what is currently playing with a Shazam shortcut but that doesn't give you the album name.

Shortcuts does run Applescript though. I did a little searching and found the script for getting what you are listening to. Very cool how quickly it grabs the result.

tell application "Music"
    if player state is playing then
        set currentTrack to current track
        set albumName to album of currentTrack
        set artistName to artist of currentTrack
        set albumYear to year of currentTrack
        set albumGenre to genre of currentTrack
        return "Currently listening to: \"" & albumName & "\" by " & artistName & " (" & albumYear & ", " & albumGenre & ")"
    else
        return "Music is not currently playing."
    end if
end tell

Getting this working is inspiring me to use Applescript more with Shortcuts in the future.

It went from hoodie to jacket here all of a sudden. It's almost hoodie in the sun, jacket in the shade but not quite. Winter is knocking. I will answer the door but will only talk with it at the entrance. Not quite "please come in" level yet. Autumn is still hanging out at our place.