Dirty Loops goes orchestral 🎻 metal hand warmup 🔥 Anika Nilles in Rush

Steve Ferrone's pocket on Michael Jackson's Earth Song is a masterclass in restraint, and Stan Bicknell captures the whole thing with just two mics on the original kit. Sixty seconds of deep, unhurried groove that begs to be played along with. Drop in, lock up, and feel where Ferrone sits behind the beat.

@Chris Johnson

Chris Johnson locks into a pocket so deep you can practically feel the floor flex, riding a fresh Sabian setup that suits his snap and shimmer perfectly. The groove is loose, funky, and conversational, the kind of thing you'd loop for an hour just to study his ghost notes. A short clip, but a clinic in feel.

Zildjian's brass cymbal keychain is the kind of small, stupidly satisfying object every drummer should have on their keys. It's a two-inch miniature of the real thing, weighted and detailed enough that reviewers say running a finger across it feels like sitting at the kit. Stocking stuffer, gig bag charm, quiet flex at the day job. Essential drummer hardware in pocket form.

Tama's Imperialstar in Electric Yellow gets a proper studio audition from Gideon Waxman, who runs the full five-piece package through his Earthworks DK7 mics with only light processing so you actually hear the shells. The configuration is the classic rock setup: 22x18 kick, 10 and 12 rack toms, 16x14 floor, and a 14x5 snare, bundled with Tama hardware and Meinl HCS cymbals.

What stands out is how well it tunes up for an entry-level kit. Waxman makes the case that the Imperialstar punches above beginner expectations on build and sound, with enough headroom that a developing player won't outgrow it in a year. If you're spec'ing a first acoustic kit or recommending one to a student, this is a useful 7-minute reference point.

The black oak wrapped version can be purchased here.

Jeff "Tain" Watts tears through an eight-minute solo feature from the 2011 Modern Drummer Festival, freshly pulled from the Hudson Music archives. It's vintage Tain: that loose-limbed, polyrhythmic swing he honed with Branford and Wynton Marsalis, churning under a band that has to ride the wave or get swept under. The cymbal phrasing alone is a clinic in jazz independence.

Worth sitting with for the way Watts treats the kit as a conversation rather than a showcase, building density without ever losing the pulse. If you've only studied his playing through transcriptions, watching the actual mechanics up close fills in everything notation misses.

Neil Peart, pulled from the Taking Center Stage archive, breaks down three things every working drummer eventually has to reckon with: stamina, balance, and how to actually rehearse. It is roughly seven minutes of Peart in teacher mode, the same mindset that made his clinics and books required reading, now uploaded by Hudson Music in April.

The value here is hearing one of rock's most disciplined players talk about the unglamorous infrastructure behind a three-hour Rush set. Stamina is not just cardio, balance is not just posture, and rehearsal is not just running songs. Worth the sit-down if you are prepping for a long tour, a demanding setlist, or just trying to make your practice time count for more than it currently does.

Anika Nilles, now behind the kit in Rush, gets a four-part breakdown from JP Bouvet, and the lessons are worth stealing whether or not you care about prog. Bouvet zeroes in on her tone and dynamics first (the way she lets ghost notes breathe under a backbeat), then her creative orchestration around the kit, her "swanky" beat feel, and her linear groove vocabulary.

The most useful takeaway for the practice room: pick one Nilles groove and isolate the orchestration before you worry about tempo. Move the same sticking between snare, toms, and cymbal bells and listen to how the dynamic shape changes. Bouvet's section on linear grooves starts around the 20-minute mark and is the cleanest entry point if you want a single concept to work on this week.

66Samus drops a 52-second hand warmup aimed squarely at metal players, the kind of pre-blastbeat routine that gets your wrists and fingers cooperating before you ask them to gallop through a set. It's short-form, so the value is in the demo: watch the motion, mirror it on a pad, and loop it for a few minutes before you sit down to play anything fast.

Worth bookmarking as a daily five-minute primer, especially if you're warming up cold in a basement or backstage. Even outside metal, the fundamentals translate to any style that leans on sustained sixteenths and double-stroke endurance.

Jeff Randall breaks down 16th-note beats in a 162-second short, the kind of bite-sized lesson that's easy to loop on the practice pad before a session. The hook is hand placement and counting: locking your "1 e and a" so the kick and snare sit cleanly inside the grid rather than rushing the off-beats.

If you're newer to 16ths, treat it as a permission slip to slow the click way down, voice every subdivision out loud, and only add ghost notes once the spacing feels mechanical. Funk, pop, and modern R&B all live in this vocabulary, so the time you spend here pays off well beyond the exercise itself.

Janathan Karunakaran's collective takes Dirty Loops' "Hit Me," already a notorious gauntlet of odd accents and harmonic curveballs, and blows it up into a full big-band-meets-strings-meets-choir spectacle. We're talking five saxes, four trumpets, three trombones, a full string section with violins, violas and cellos, an eight-voice backing choir, piano, keys, guitar, bass, percussion, and Karunakaran himself behind the kit anchoring the whole thing with Phoebe Stratton-Morris out front.

For drummers, the appeal is watching how Karunakaran holds that traffic together. The Dirty Loops original leans on Aron Mellergårdh's hyper-precise pocket and ghost-note vocabulary, and translating that to a room this large means every kick and snare placement has to cue dozens of musicians. It's a clinic in being the click for an entire orchestra.