Dennis Chambers at NAMM 🔥 double-kick fill lesson 🦶best headphones for drummers 🎧

@Pearl Drums Global Official

Dennis Chambers turned the Pearl booth at NAMM 2026 into a clinic, and Pearl just dropped the footage of him locked into his Masters Maple Gum kit. It is the kind of pocket-and-power display that reminds you why Chambers has been the gold standard for decades. Three sentences in, you will already be reaching for sticks.

@Nate Mueller

Nate Mueller spotlights II by Sleep Token as a paradiddle-diddle masterclass hiding in plain sight, zeroing in on the second verse where II's hands go to work. It's the kind of deep-cut appreciation post that rewards a second listen, and Mueller's breakdown makes the sticking pattern impossible to unhear. Worth the 60 seconds for any drummer who loves rudiments dressed up in atmospheric rock.

Kristina Schiano puts the Yamaha EAD50 through a four minute verdict, and the appeal of this little module is still the same pitch that made its predecessor a hit: one stereo mic and trigger unit clamped to a kick hoop, and your acoustic kit suddenly records, monitors, and streams without a full mic locker. The upgrade question is whether the new effects, sounds, and app workflow justify the price over the older EAD10.

Schiano's take is worth queuing up if you're an acoustic player eyeing an all in one capture rig for YouTube covers, practice sessions, or in ear mixes. She runs it through the kind of rock and punk material the EAD line tends to flatter, so you get a realistic read rather than a showroom demo.

Gideon Waxman lines up six contenders for the most underrated piece of gear in your kit bag: a pair of headphones that can survive next to a cracking snare. The Beyerdynamic DT 770 anchors the shootout, and the rundown weighs the trade-offs drummers actually care about, isolation from cymbal wash, comfort over a two-hour rehearsal, and whether the low end holds up against a kick drum in the same room.

If you've been making do with earbuds or borrowed studio cans, this is a useful primer before you spend. Waxman's picks lean toward closed-back workhorses built for tracking and practice, not audiophile listening, which is exactly the distinction most drummers miss when they shop.

Our favourite is definitely the Beyerdynamic for it's comfort and sound quality. And it's currently on sale!

Keith Carlock unloads in this archival solo pulled from his Hudson Music DVD "The Big Picture," and even at just over eight minutes it's a clinic in how he weaves linear phrasing, ghost-note chatter, and that signature ride-cymbal logic into something that feels composed rather than improvised. The clip is worth sitting with because Carlock's vocabulary rewards repeat viewings: the way he resolves a buzz-stroke flurry into a backbeat, or smuggles a hi-hat foot pattern under a tom run, is the kind of detail that gets lost on first pass. If you've never dug into "The Big Picture" itself, this is a fair preview of the full five-hour set.

Ilan Rubin sets up at Studio 606, Dave Grohl's Foo Fighters compound, for a near 30 minute deep dive with engineer Darrell Thorp (Radiohead, Beck) and Lauten's Johan Svala. The hook is the mic locker: a full Lauten capture on Rubin's kit, including Kick Mic in, Atlantis FC-387 out, top and bottom snare, tom mics with rim mounts, an LS-208 on hats, LA-220 V2 overheads with an Eden LT-386 mono spot, and stacked stereo rooms via the Atlantis up high and LA-320 V2 down low.

If you care about how a modern rock kit gets imaged in a legendary live room, this is worth the full 30 minutes. Thorp's choices and Rubin's playing make the signal chain conversation feel like craft, not catalog.

@DrumsByDavid | Drummer + Educator

DrumsByDavid drops an intermediate coordination drill that is worth saving and grinding for a week. The takeaway: limb independence does not come from playing fast, it comes from playing one stubborn pattern slowly enough that your hands and feet stop fighting each other.

Coordination drills like this usually pit a steady ostinato in one limb against a shifting figure in another. The work is in the seams, the moments where two limbs land together and your brain wants to glue everything to that hit. Set a metronome at something humbling, around 60 to 70 bpm, and loop four bars without stopping. If a limb collapses, do not push tempo, isolate it. Drop the hi-hat foot and play just the hands. Drop the hands and play just the feet against the click. Then stack them back together one layer at a time. The most common mistake is rushing to full speed before the pattern is actually locked, which trains the unevenness into your body. Once it feels boring at slow tempo, that is the signal to nudge the click up five bpm, not before. Apply it to a real groove the same day, something with a busy left foot like a linear funk pattern or a half-time shuffle, so the drill does not stay an island.

Slow it down, layer it up, then put it in a song.

@Jeff Randall

Jeff Randall has a quick lesson on how to weave double kick into your fills, and the takeaway is simple: your feet are another voice in the kit, not just a rumble underneath. Walk away knowing how to break out of hand-only fills and start orchestrating ideas across all four limbs.

The concept is straightforward. Take a fill you already play comfortably with your hands and start substituting kick notes for some of the hand notes, or layering kicks underneath to fatten the rhythm. A common entry point is alternating singles between hands and feet, so a sixteenth-note fill becomes RLKK RLKK or RKLK RKLK around the toms. Start slow. Set a metronome at 70 to 80 bpm and play the pattern as straight sixteenths on the snare with the kicks landing cleanly between hand strokes, then move the hands around the drums once the spacing feels even. The most common mistake is letting the feet flam against the hands, where the kick lands a hair early or late and the fill turns to mush. Record yourself on a phone and listen back. If the kicks sound louder or quieter than the hands, that is what to fix first before you speed it up.

Try it on something you already know, a simple half-bar fill into a chorus, and just replace the last two snare hits with two kicks. That one swap is usually enough to make a familiar fill feel new. Hands and feet, one voice.