I’m still plugging away with my drum lessons at home but I thought I’d take a second to mention some recent news regarding one of my favorite drummers from one of my favorite bands, Dream Theater. If you’re a fan of DT, you probably already know that founding member and one of the driving forces behind the band, Mike Portnoy, decided that he was burned out on DT and needed to take a break. He wanted the rest of the band to do so as well but when they refused, he decided to leave the band as opposed to holding them back. Mike’s one of my favorite drummers but in a way I think this may be a good thing as Dream Theater seemed to be in a bit of a rut lately and I’ve been disappointed with some of their recent releases. I’m really curious to see who they get to replace Mike, what their next album (they’re supposed to enter the studio in January 2011) will sound like, and if Mike will ever return to the band. I’ll post soon and give you an update on my drum lessons progress.
I started working on the second drum rudiment today: the Single Stroke Four. This is another pretty simple one which I picked up pretty quickly. It seems to be incredibly useful though as I’m running into it quite a bit in the songs that I’m learning, particularly some of the My Friend Of Misery fills. I’ve got most of that song down, now I just need to work on the outro part which has quite a bit going on. I was looking to try something new in between working on that though so I decided to give Don’t Tread On Me (also from the Black Album, of course) a try. It’s in 12/8 so it will be my first time playing something in a meter other than 4/4. I’m used to odd meters though from my time playing Dream Theater and similar stuff on guitar. I actually picked up the intro, verse, and chorus pretty quickly but I need to really polish it up now that I have a rough idea of what’s going on. Other than the time signature, the whole song seems to be simpler than Sandman and Misery but we’ll see how it goes. ‘Til next time…
, it's the exact same drum kit that I am teaching myself to play on. Check it out if you want to learn to play drums at home too...it's awesome and Amazon always has the lowest price for it. I did a ton of research before I bought it.