💥 the D beat dissected · Anika Nilles joins Rush 🎸 · 🌀 inverted doubles unlock new fills

Khruangbin's hypnotic pocket gets the Drum Dog treatment in a tight 52-second short, all loose-limbed ghost notes and that signature laid-back swing behind the beat. It's a quick study in restraint, the kind of feel that's deceptively hard to lock in without overplaying. Worth a rewind to catch how the hi-hat work breathes underneath the groove.

Drum Dog is offering a free UK Drum Show ticket as the headline perk in a 23-second pitch for its drummer membership, which also bundles gear discounts, flash offers, artist sessions, and a full lesson library. There's a 30-day money-back trial if you want to try it before committing.

Spike T. Smith breaks the D beat down to its bones for Drum Dog, and the lesson works because he refuses to skip the boring part. It's a one-bar, two-limb pattern: bass drum on the one and the two-and and three-and, snare on two and four, and that's basically the whole engine of punk and hardcore drumming.

He counts it in eighth notes on sticks, then quietly on the kit so you can still hear the count, then shifts to a quarter-note pulse once the tempo outruns his mouth. From there it's the purist cowbell version following the kick, then Discharge-speed with the crash as the weapon, then opening the right hand across hats, ride and floor tom.

Anika Nilles stepping into Rush is the headline, and Drum Dog's Back Beat #3 sits with that moment before fanning out to a Djo record, UK brand Ramrods' percussion rods, and the eternal feel question: does the click kill it? A tight weekly digest that rewards a proper listen rather than a scroll.

Rick Jupp passing on a piece of Mike Portnoy wisdom is the kind of short clip worth pausing for, because the lesson behind it outlives its 58 seconds: the habits Portnoy brings to the kit are the ones working drummers tend to share.

Without putting words in Jupp's mouth, the angle this opens up is one any drummer can act on today. Pick one Portnoy quality you admire, whether it's his command of odd time, his independence across a sprawling kit, or the discipline that lets him deliver long-form prog night after night, and isolate one small piece of it in your next practice session. If it's odd time, loop a single bar of 7/8 at a slow tempo and don't move on until it feels like 4/4. If it's independence, park your hands on a steady ride pattern and let your feet have the conversation underneath. If it's stamina, set a timer and play one groove without stopping for the length of an actual song. The common mistake is trying to absorb a hero wholesale. Steal one habit, not the whole catalogue.

Watch the clip, sit with whatever Jupp highlights, and bring one Portnoy-shaped idea to the kit this week.

Rick Jupp drops by Drum Dog to make the case for a rudiment most players skip past on the way to singles and doubles: the inverted double. In 51 seconds he points at why this sticking deserves serious shed time, and the lesson is worth taking on board if your fills always seem to flow in the same direction around the kit.

The inverted double flips the usual RRLL into RLLR (or LRRL), so the doubles land on the offbeats instead of the downbeats. That small reordering changes everything about how the pattern moves: the accents shift, the hand that leads into the next bar swaps, and suddenly you can navigate the toms in shapes that straight doubles and paradiddles won't give you. Start at a tempo where you can keep the doubles even and unaccented, and only push faster once both hands sound identical. The common trap is letting the second note of each double get quiet and lazy, which is fine in isolation but collapses the moment you orchestrate it around the kit. Once the sticking feels locked, move it: RLLR with the R on the snare and the LL on a tom, or split the doubles across two toms for a cascading fill. Try it under a half-time groove on something like Porcupine Tree's Blackest Eyes for an obvious application.

Rick Jupp, the Elbow drummer and UK Drum Show fixture, drops a quick independence drill that's worth pinning to your practice pad.

The clip points at a familiar but underused approach. Lock one limb into a repeating ostinato (think hi-hat quarters or a steady left foot on the pedal) and then layer increasingly awkward patterns over it with the other limbs. The goal isn't speed. It's the moment your brain stops calculating the second pattern and lets the ostinato run on autopilot. Start dead slow. Isolate the foot first, get it metronomic and boring, then add a snare pattern that deliberately doesn't line up, like dotted eighths or a three-against-four feel. The common mistake is rushing past the slow tempo because it feels easy. It isn't easy yet, you're just hiding the unevenness. Record a minute of it and you'll hear the truth.

Apply it to something musical today: try it under the verse groove of Elbow's Grounds for Divorce, or any tune with a hypnotic, repeating pulse. If you can hold a conversation while the ostinato keeps ticking, you've got it.