Quincy Davis' left-hand workout 🎷 · steal a Steve Gadd lick · Meinl's Pure Alloy Custom shimmer ✨

@Matt McGuire

Matt McGuire rips through Maroon 5 in a quick Instagram reel, calling it one of his favorite tracks to jam regardless of what style you play. The Chainsmokers' touring drummer makes a convincing case that every kit player should run this groove at least once. A fun two-minute reminder that pop pocket can be just as satisfying to attack as anything heavier.

Miles McPherson takes an all Pure Alloy Custom rig through "Burrito Dreams," and the kit shows off everything the line is built for: smooth, warm tonality with soft attack, fast decay, and a bright shimmering sustain. Meinl positions Pure Alloy Custom as the middle ground between the darker, raw B20 Byzance voice and the ultra bright B12 Classics Custom. The 15" Extra Thin Hammered hats and 22" Medium Thin ride do most of the talking.

Check out the 16 inch crash on Amazon.

Evans EMAD2 in 22 inch is sitting at $69.99 on Amazon right now, down from $89.99, a 22% cut on one of the more widely imitated bass drum head designs out there. The two-ply build pairs a 7mil outer with a 10mil inner, and the externally mounted damping ring is the whole point: swap between the thin and thick foam to dial in attack and sustain without burying a pillow inside the shell.

It's the working drummer's safe bet for a reason. Punchy, tunable, studio ready, and equally at home on a vintage Pearl or a modern DW. If your kick has been flapping around sounding boxy, this is the cleanest path to a defined thump.

Drum Beats Online spends 13 minutes diagnosing a student named Joseph and walking through the exact fixes, which makes this one of those lessons that's more useful than a generic technique video. The breakdown moves through single strokes, rebound, drop catch, a flamming issue, single stroke rolls with accents, and a rebuilt six stroke roll, ending with a practice plan you can actually steal for your own woodshedding.

Watch it with sticks in hand. Even if your weak spots aren't Joseph's, the framework of isolating the mechanic, slowing it down, and layering accents back in is a template worth borrowing the next time something in your own playing feels stuck.

Ryan Fox's groove on Dexter and the Moonrocks' "Freakin' Out" lands with that sharp, echoing post-grunge crunch, and The Drum Vault breaks it down in 28 seconds. The recipe: double kick at the top of each bar, single kick to close, snare on 2 and 4, closed hats opening up, then a crash to cap it. A clean pocket worth stealing once your hat work is steady.

Stop guessing which rudiment to drill next. The Drummer's Rudiment Reference is a 4-page printable cheat sheet covering 30 essential rudiments with sticking patterns, BPM targets, and skill tags, built to pin above your kit. Grab it for $4.99 and turn your warmups into a real plan.

Steve Gadd's vocabulary gets dissected constantly, but Brett Clur's 24-second short zeroes in on one tidy lick worth stealing for your own playing. It's the kind of phrase that rewards slow practice before you try to drop it into a groove, so loop the clip, figure out the sticking, and work it up to tempo on a pad before taking it to the kit.

Short-form lessons like this are best treated as seeds, not finished ideas. Once the lick sits comfortably under your hands, try shifting it around the toms, voicing it between snare and hats, or using it as a setup into a backbeat. That's how a Gadd-flavored idea becomes something that actually sounds like you.

@Quincy Davis

Quincy Davis breaks down a serious left hand workout pulled from the alternate take of "It's Only a Paper Moon," and it's the kind of Art Blakey adjacent vocabulary that exposes any weakness in your weaker hand. The phrasing leans on independent comping figures that keep the snare busy while the ride stays locked, so the left hand has to articulate, accent, and ghost without dragging the time.

Try looping a four bar section at a slow tempo with a metronome on 2 and 4, then push it up only when the dynamics stay clean. The goal isn't speed, it's getting the left hand to phrase like a horn line underneath your ride pattern.