Nate Smith stretches out at KOKO 🎷 · Eloy Casagrande's bubinga at Studio 606 · Sabian's dry new Stratus 🌫️ · paradiddles as grooves

@Kembely Almeida

Kembely Almeida locks samba and funk into the same pocket on a Seu Jorge groove, threading partido alto swing through a backbeat that refuses to sit still. The hi-hat work alone is worth a rewind, with ghosted snare accents pushing the feel just ahead of the click. A short reel, but a clinic in how Brazilian feel and American funk share more DNA than most kits ever show.

@Sam MacKenzie - Session Drummer 🥁

Sam MacKenzie out of Wellington takes on David Garibaldi's "Soul Vaccination," and the ghost-note geometry holds up under the microscope of a phone camera. It's a clinic in linear funk: hi-hat barks, snare ghosts, and kick syncopations stitched so tight the groove feels woven rather than played. Yep, Garibaldi's vocabulary remains the gold standard.

Eloy Casagrande puts the new Limited Edition Starclassic Bubinga through its paces at Studio 606, performing Solstice, a Casagrande and Hanysz original built to showcase the kit's range. It's a smart pairing: bubinga's dense, focused low end and aggressive attack suit Casagrande's precision-heavy vocabulary, and the Studio 606 room gives the toms room to bloom without losing definition.

If you've been curious how this Starclassic configuration sounds in a modern metal-leaning context rather than the usual demo-room setting, this is a useful five minutes. Watch for how the kick and floor toms sit against the cymbals, and how cleanly the snare cuts through dense passages.

Sabian's new Stratus series steps into dry cymbal territory, and Casey Cooper puts the whole lineup under the mic in a quick walkthrough on Sweetwater Soundcheck. He runs through the specs before letting each model speak for itself in the sound samples, which is really where dry cymbals earn their keep.

If you've been chasing that papery, trashy, low-sustain character that fits modern indie, worship, and studio sessions, Stratus is worth a listen before you commit to another Paiste 2002 dark or Zildjian Kerope. Cooper's A/B format makes it easy to hear how the line hangs together as a matched setup.

Grab the full cymbal set here🤘🏼.

Nate Smith brought his KIT.live band to KOKO in London, and the full set is now up on his channel with James Francies on keys, Josh Johnson on saxophone, and Michael League holding down bass. It's the kind of room and lineup where Smith's pocket gets to stretch out, the ghost notes breathe, and the interplay with Francies and Johnson turns into long conversational passages rather than tidy heads and solos.

Worth sitting with the whole thing rather than scrubbing. Smith's phrasing across the kit, especially the way he leans into displaced backbeats and lets the snare buzz hang, reads differently when you hear it develop over a full set.

@Eddie Van Dongen | Creative Drum Coach

Eddie Van Dongen wants you to stop grinding rudiments on the pad and start turning them into grooves. The lesson he opens up: take the paradiddle and the para-paradiddle off the practice pad and use them as groove engines, one for triplet feels and one for straight sixteenths.

Play a para-paradiddle (RLRLRR LRLRLL) as a triplet groove: orchestrate the right hand on the hi-hat or ride, drop a few of the left-hand notes to the snare for backbeats, and let the doubles fall where they create movement. Then take the standard single paradiddle (RLRR LRLL) and lay it across sixteenth notes the same way, hi-hat on top, snare on 2 and 4, kick filling the gaps. Remember to start slow! The common trap is rushing the doubles and flamming the hand-to-hand transitions, so isolate those before you add the kick. Once it locks, move the right hand around the kit, ride bell, floor tom, half-open hat, and watch a rudiment become a groove vocabulary.

@Pavel Mamonau

Pavel Mamonau's Paradiddle Course hits Lesson 14, and this one takes a rudiment most drummers think they've mastered and turns it into a real coordination workout. The angle: weaving single bass drum notes through a 16th-note paradiddle sticking. You'll walk away with a clearer sense of how your feet and hands actually line up at speed, and a fresh way to make a familiar rudiment feel new on the kit.

You're playing the standard paradiddle as 16ths between your hands (RLRR LRLL), and dropping single kicks underneath at chosen subdivisions. The challenge is keeping every note even while the foot threads in and out of the sticking. Start painfully slow, somewhere around 60 to 70 bpm, and loop one bar until the spacing locks. Stay relaxed in the shoulders and grip. Watch for the two usual leaks: rushing the second R or L of the double, and letting the kick get louder than the hands when it lands with a tap rather than an accent. Isolate the feet first if it falls apart. Play just the bass pattern with a metronome, then add the hands back one limb at a time. Once it's clean on a pad, move it to the kit and orchestrate: hands split between snare and hi-hat, or move the doubles to a tom. Try it under a slow funk groove or a half-time shuffle to hear it musically.