Berklee paradiddle + kick drill 🦶, PDP Concept Maple CM7 verdict 💰, Dany Kufner's tom tuning numbers 🎯, Kembely's 'Human Nature' pocket ✨

@Kembely Almeida

Kembely Almeida takes on Michael Jackson's "Human Nature," reimagined through the irmasongs arrangement, and her pocket on the reel is worth a watch. The groove sits soft and conversational, leaning into the ballad's hush rather than dressing it up, which is exactly why it travels. A reminder that the right ghost notes can carry a cover further than any chops display.

@Sam MacKenzie - Session Drummer 🥁

Sam MacKenzie reimagines Kirk Franklin's "Love Theory" as a live drum take from his Wellington kit, layering gospel chops into the song's pocket. The Instagram reel is short, loose, and built around that hypothetical "if I played it live" framing, which lets him stretch the groove without overplaying.

@DW Drums

Eric DiCarlo walks through his current DW touring kit while out on the road with Face Yourself, giving a close look at how the rig is dialed in for the band's live show. It's the kind of artist breakdown that rewards pausing the clip, with each piece of the setup framed in the context of what it has to do night after night.

For DW watchers, the appeal is hearing a working touring drummer talk shop about his own configuration rather than a showroom demo. If you're curious how a modern DW kit gets specced for a hard-touring act, DiCarlo's rundown is a quick, useful window.

The PDP Concept Maple CM7 makes a strong case as the mid-range maple kit to beat, and Gideon Waxman's review zeroes in on why: there's real DW DNA baked into this seven-piece. The dual turret lugs echo Drum Workshop's look without copying it outright, and the matching snare ships with the same MAG throwoff found on full DW snares, which is a notable trickle-down at this price.

Across roughly eight minutes, Waxman walks through shell sizes, runs a tuned sound demo, and digs into hardware and build quality before landing his verdict. If you're weighing a seven-piece upgrade and want an honest read on how the CM7 shells actually respond, rather than a spec sheet recap, this one is worth the watch.

Avallable on Amazon.

If your warmups still drift into whatever your hands feel like that morning, The Drummer's Rudiment Reference is built to fix exactly that. It's a 4-page printable sheet covering 30 essential rudiments, each with sticking patterns, BPM targets, and skill tags so you know what you're working on and where it should land.

Tape it to the wall above your kit, pick a rudiment, hit the tempo, move on. At $4.99 it's cheaper than a pair of sticks, and it turns "I should practice rudiments" into a concrete daily plan. Singles, doubles, paradiddles, flams, drags, rolls — all in one place, no more guessing what's next.

@Pavel Mamonau

Pavel Mamonau is back in his Berklee method series, and today's drill is a single paradiddle with accents layered over a bass drum that fills every gap between the hands. Walk away knowing how to wire your feet into a sticking you've probably played a thousand times, and turn it into a coordination workout that actually moves the needle.

Here's the shape of it. Right left right right, left right left left, accent on the first note of each grouping. Now drop the kick into every sixteenth where a hand is not playing, so the bass drum is literally filling the holes. The result is a steady stream of sixteenths between hands and foot, with the accents popping out of the top. Start slow. Eighth notes at 60 to 70 bpm on the metronome, counted as sixteenths, is not too slow to begin. The common trap is letting the accented hand get louder by tensing up and letting the unaccented notes get sloppy. Keep the taps low and quiet, and let the accent come from a higher stroke, not a harder one. Isolate the feet first if the coordination scrambles you: play just the kick pattern against a hand ostinato until it locks, then add the paradiddle back on top. Once it feels clean, lead with the left and run the whole thing mirrored.

@Dany Kufner

Dany Kufner cracks open his rack tom tuning notebook, and the takeaway is simple: if you want repeatable, recorded-sounding toms, tune to numbers, not just to taste. He's running Tama Walnut/Birch shells with Evans EC2S heads and a Tune-Bot, and he publishes the exact frequencies he lands on. That alone is the lesson. Stop guessing, start measuring.

Here are his targets. For the 8x6, batter sits at 143 Hz and reso at 160 Hz. For the 10x7, batter is 111 Hz and reso is 123 Hz. Notice the pattern: the resonant head is tuned higher than the batter on both drums, which gives that quick downward pitch bend and the controlled sustain you hear on modern pop and rock records. If you want to try this today, clip a Tune-Bot (or use a tuning app) to your smallest rack tom, get all lugs within a couple of Hz of each other first, then dial the overall pitch to the batter target before flipping the drum and doing the reso. Match lug to lug before you chase the global number, or you will fight yourself. Start with EC2S or a similar two-ply head so the readings are stable, and detune any nearby snare wires while you measure.

The big idea: tuning by frequency turns a vibe into a recipe you can recall next week, next gig, next session.

Pick up a Tunebot here.