Larnell Lewis' trio ending 🎹 · Aquarian vs Remo tom-head shootout · Dennis Chambers linear groove 🔥 · fix your weak hand

@LEO USINGER

Leo Usinger has a simple fix for a lopsided kit: flip the paradiddle to LRLLRLRR and let your weak hand carry the accents. It sounds like a small tweak, but reversing that sticking rewires how you lead phrases and exposes every crutch in your right hand. Worth saving for the next practice session.

@Sam MacKenzie - Session Drummer 🥁

Sam MacKenzie tips his hat to Dennis Chambers with an advanced linear groove that threads hands and feet into one unbroken stream. He breaks it down at a reel-friendly pace, keeping the phrasing musical rather than showing off pure chop count. Worth a slow-mo pass on the sticking if you're chasing that Chambers-flavored funk vocabulary.

Tying today's 'practice while you walk' thread to something you can actually park in a corner: Seteol's 12-inch double-sided pad kit bundles the essentials at a budget price. You get a rubber-faced pad with a wood core and cotton damping, an adjustable stand that works seated or standing, two pairs of sticks, a stick holder, and carry bags for the pad and stand.

It's not going to unseat an Evans RealFeel for feel, but as a grab-and-go rudiment station for hotel rooms, backstage warmups, or a kid's first setup, the all-in-one packaging is the pitch.

Aquarian Classic Clear versus Remo Ambassador Clear is one of those quiet decisions that shapes your whole tom sound, and Sean Daudelin puts them head to head across a full DW Collectors kit in Cherry Mahogany, 8/10/12/14/16 in fast depths. He runs both sets through slow hits, medium and fast attacks, grooves, and fills, listening for which head sits more openly on the shell and where the overtones bloom.

@Larnell Lewis Music

Larnell Lewis closing out "Got A Light" with the Jeremy Ledbetter Trio at Aeolian Hall in London, Ontario is the kind of trio interplay worth queuing up with headphones on. Piano, bass, and drums locked into a conversation where Lewis's touch on the K Cons and that prototype 22" with rivets does most of the storytelling, wringing dynamics out of a five-piece Yamaha Hybrid Maple kit without ever tipping into overplaying.

Steve Smith's practice pad routine is built on one idea: rudiments aren't finish lines, they're the connective tissue between phrases. In this short, Marty B. demos an exercise he picked up from Smith that trains you to glide between rudiments without the seams showing, so your control and flow read as musical rather than mechanical.

The angle is transitions. Instead of drilling a single rudiment at one tempo until it's clean, you stitch two or three together and treat the handoff as the actual reps. Pick a pair you already know, say singles into doubles, or paradiddles into six-stroke rolls, and loop them back to back on the pad. Start slow enough that the last stroke of one rudiment and the first stroke of the next feel identical in weight and spacing. Only then push the tempo. The common trap is speeding up the rudiment itself while the transition stays lumpy, which is exactly the mechanical feel Smith's exercise is designed to kill. Watch your accents too. If the natural accent pattern shifts when you cross over, slow back down until the dynamics stay level, or until you're choosing where the accent lands.

@Stephen Taylor

Stephen Taylor says your single stroke roll is failing for three specific reasons, and once you address them the roll basically fixes itself. If your singles feel uneven, hitchy, or gassed out by the second bar, this is the diagnostic pass to run before you touch the metronome again.

Taylor's clip is short, so treat it as a checklist rather than a full method. The usual suspects with singles are stroke height mismatch between the hands, a death grip that kills rebound, and pushing the tempo before the motion is clean. Try this today. Play sixteenth note singles at 80 BPM and film your hands from the front. Are both sticks rising to the same height? Are your fingers meeting the stick on the way back up, or are you muscling every stroke from the wrist? Is the weaker hand dragging just behind the beat? Isolate that hand alone for a minute, then bring the roll back together. Bump the tempo up only when the sound between the two hands is genuinely identical.

@Pavel Mamonau

Pavel Mamonau just launched an Odd Grouping Challenge series on Instagram, and episode one is a four-limb puzzle worth stealing for your practice pad. Walk away knowing how to layer a dotted-8th kick, a "1-2-3" hi-hat, and a 5/16 left-hand pattern into one groove that sounds asymmetric but never falls apart.

Here's the setup. Left foot plays a rest followed by two 8th notes, giving you that rolling "1-2-3, 1-2-3" feel underneath. Right foot plays dotted 8ths, so the kick keeps stretching past the barline and pulling the pulse forward. Right hand splits between ride and snare, holding time while also placing the backbeat. Left hand groups the 16ths in fives, accenting the 1st and 3rd of each group, moving between a tom and a clap stack. Do not try to feel all four parts at once. Start with just the feet: dotted 8ths on the kick against the paused hi-hat figure. Loop that until it locks. Add the right hand next, ride first, then insert the snare hits. Save the 5/16 left-hand layer for last, and count the fives out loud while you play. Metronome slow. Painfully slow. Somewhere around 50 to 60 bpm on the quarter note is not too conservative.