Try this Polymeter exercise 🌀 Vinnie's 5-flam practice 🔥 Portnoy hears Bonham cold 📻

@Patric McGroarty

Larnell Lewis and Rich Brown lock into a duet on Lewis's composition "In The Moment," captured at Jukasa Media Group and mixed by Patric McGroarty. It's a clinic in listening: bass and drums trading micro-decisions in real time, with McGroarty's mix doing the smart thing and getting out of the way. Watch for the conversational interplay between two players operating at an absurd level.

@Vic Firth

Kaii Craig runs a tight wrist workout on Vic Firth's feed, moving double strokes in triplets across a grid to isolate accents and taps. It's the kind of clip you can loop before a gig and feel your hands wake up. Short, surgical, and built for the practice pad.

Zildjian breaks down three ways to stack cymbals in a 34-second short, the kind of quick primer that turns a vague "I should try a stack" into an actual weekend experiment. The clip walks through the basic configurations, bell-up, bell-down, and the over-under sandwich, each producing a different bite and decay depending on which edges are kissing.

Stacks remain one of the cheapest ways to expand your vocabulary without buying new cymbals. Pull a cracked crash, a thin splash, or that B8 ride you stopped using, and start pairing. The Zildjian video is worth a watch if only as a reminder that the trashiest sound in your kit is probably hiding in the cymbals you already own.

Apartment dwellers and late-night practicers, the Mosico Golden Low Volume Cymbal Pack is currently on sale on Amazon, bundling 14" hi-hats, 16" and 18" crashes, and a 20" ride into one stainless-steel kit. Mosico claims a 60 to 70 percent volume reduction versus standard bronze, and reviewers with decades behind the kit single out the crashes' bright decay and the hats' usable chick. A practical option when the neighbors are the real bandmate to consider. Check out how they sound here.

Max Portnoy, the Tallah drummer raised in a prog household, sits down to hear Led Zeppelin's "In My Time Of Dying" cold and build a part on the fly. The fun of Drumeo's first-listen format is watching the decision tree out loud: what he locks onto in Bonham's phrasing, where he chooses to ride the shuffle versus open it up, and how a metal player negotiates a slide-driven blues epic he's never touched.

At nearly 19 minutes, it's a worthwhile sit because the learning happens in real time, not in hindsight. Stick around for the reveal at 16:22, when Max finally hears the original and compares his instincts to what Bonham actually played.

Gregg Bissonette unspools a 13-minute solo pulled from "Musical Drumming in Different Styles," his Hudson Music instructional, and it is a masterclass in how a session vet thinks at the kit. Bissonette never treats a solo as a sprint. He moves through feels, dynamics, and orchestration like he is composing on the fly, threading jazz vocabulary, big-band hits, and rock muscle into something that actually breathes.

This is the kind of clip worth watching with a cup of coffee and no second tab open. Pay attention to how he sets up phrases on the hi-hat before resolving them around the toms, and how often he leaves space. From the archives, but the lessons inside have not aged a day.

@Sam MacKenzie

Sam MacKenzie's latest clip is a clean entry point to polymeter: 7/8 in the right hand riding over 4/4 in the rest of the kit, all locked to one pulse. If you've been curious about odd-time feels but get tangled trying to count two meters at once, this is the angle that finally makes it click.

Polymeter isn't polyrhythm. Same tempo, same eighth-note grid, just different bar lengths stacked on top of each other. Your right hand cycles every seven eighths while your kick, snare, and left foot keep a normal four-on-the-floor backbeat structure. Because the cycles are different lengths, the hand pattern lines up with beat 1 of the 4/4 only every seven bars of four, which is what gives it that shifting, almost glitching quality. To work it up, loop a 4/4 backbeat first, slow, somewhere around 70 bpm. Lock that without thinking. Then add the right hand counting "1 2 3 4 5 6 7" out loud while the feet and snare ignore you completely. The common trap is letting the right hand drag the backbeat with it when the accents cross; if the snare starts wandering off beats 2 and 4, stop and reset. Record yourself, even on a phone, so you can hear whether the 4/4 is actually staying put.

Once it feels stable, take it to a tune. Anything with a steady four works, but Meshuggah-adjacent grooves or even a Tool track will show you what the technique is built for.

JP Bouvet is back with Practice Idea #27, and this one zeroes in on something most drummers skip entirely: slow jazz comping. Pair it with RhythmBot (his iOS/Android click app) and you've got a quiet, deeply musical practice session that builds your independence, your time at uncomfortable tempos, and your ear for space.

The premise is simple. Pull the tempo way down, somewhere ballad territory, and let a sparse click or pattern from RhythmBot hold the form while you ride and comp underneath. The ride pattern stays the constant. Underneath, your left hand and bass drum trade quiet conversational figures against the cymbal. Try this today: set a slow tempo, lock the ride into a steady spang-a-lang, and improvise comping figures with just the snare for a full chorus. Then add the bass drum. Then trade phrases between them. The common mistake is rushing to sound busy. Resist it. Slow tempos expose every flam, every uneven triplet, every place your ride sags when the left hand enters. That exposure is the whole point. If you want a tune to apply it to, put on something like "Blue in Green" or any slow standard and comp through the form without soloing.

The takeaway: slow jazz is the magnifying glass that fixes your fast jazz.

@Pavel Mamonau

Vinnie Colaiuta's vocabulary is a rabbit hole most drummers never climb out of, and Pavel Mamonau just dropped a tidy entry point: a five-flam phrase built on the sticking F_RRLLRRKK. Spend a session with this one and you walk away with a feel for how Vinnie threads flams, doubles, and kick voicings into a single breathing line instead of a stiff exercise.

Read the sticking slowly. The opening flam sets the accent, then you ride right-right, left-left, right-right into two kicks, looping back to the flam. That's the architecture. The musical work is hiding inside it: the flam has to speak cleanly without choking the doubles that follow, and the kick pair needs to sit in the same grid as your hands, not lag behind them. Start painfully slow, somewhere you can hear the grace note clearly, and only nudge the tempo when the flam, the doubles, and the feet all sound like one phrase. Common traps to avoid: rushing the doubles so the second stroke disappears, and letting the flam get louder than the accents around it. Once it locks, move the right hand to a tom, push the lefts to the snare, or send one of the right pairs to the floor tom. That's where it stops being a rudiment and starts sounding like fills.

Five flams, one phrase, infinite orchestrations. Get the flow first, then make it musical.