Try this practice warmup ⏱️ how to hide a paradiddle in the pocket 🎯

Brooks Wackerman pulls apart "The Stage" on his Avenged Sevenfold kit, and in under a minute you get a window into why the 2016 title track is such a beast to learn. He zeros in on the shifting time feels and the double bass coordination hiding underneath the groove. Worth the scroll if you've ever tried to play it.

Gavin Harrison drops into Vic Firth's Vic Licks series to break down one of his own fills in about 23 seconds. The Porcupine Tree drummer's economy of motion is the whole lesson: dense, lopsided phrasing dissected slowly enough that you can actually steal it. Worth a few rewatches before you take it to the kit.

ProMark's Rebound 5A puts the mass toward the butt end, promising a livelier bounce off the head, and Drum Drum Drum runs six pairs through the wringer to see if the rear-weighted pitch holds up. The 14-minute review pits them head to head against ProMark Classics, Vic Firth 5A, and Vater, with roll tests for straightness, weight matching across pairs, a chip and damage check, and pitch-matched sound samples so you can actually hear the difference.

If you've been eyeing the Rebound line but can't tell whether the redesigned taper is a real feel upgrade or just marketing on the wrapper, the price comparison and side-by-side stick specs around the three-minute mark are the part worth queuing up first.

Pick up a four-pack here.

Gideon Waxman puts all eight current Evans EMAD bass drum heads head-to-head on a Yamaha Absolute Hybrid Maple 22x18, swapping between the UV Coated, UV2, Clear, EMAD2, Heavyweight, Coated, Onyx, and Calftone to hear how each one actually sits in a mix. He runs isolated kick hits and full grooves both with and without internal dampening, keeping EQ and compression minimal so the tonal fingerprints of each head come through cleanly.

If you've ever stared at the EMAD lineup wondering whether to jump from a standard Clear to the Heavyweight, or what the Onyx really buys you, this is the kind of carefully level-matched shootout worth queueing up on monitors before your next head order.

Rush returned to the road without Neil Peart, and Modern Drummer was there to wrestle with what that actually feels like. Anika Nilles took the chair for the tour's opening night, and the review leans on a Geddy Lee comment from his recent Rick Beato sit-down about Anika understanding and appreciating Peart's greatness without diminishing it.

It's a long read worth sitting with because it's less a setlist recap than a meditation on stewardship. How do you honor Peart's catalog without impersonating him, and what does Nilles bring of her own to parts fans have memorized note for note?

"You can practise on your own for ten years and just get really good at doing it wrong." That line anchors this week's Back Beat from Drum Dog, where Dan asks whether self-teaching quietly caps your ceiling. It's a fair question to sit with for ten minutes, especially if you've never had a teacher catch a bad habit before it ossified.

Before he gets there, he runs through a Bad Bunny record (Debí Tirar Más Fotos) that genuinely surprised him, a Keith Carlock spotlight pulled from the Wayne Krantz trio's "Why" solo around the 1:13:00 mark, and Pollner's stave drums carved from a single log with no cuts. Four small rabbit holes, one bigger question.

@DrumsByDavid | Drummer + Educator

DrumsByDavid has a quick reframe worth stealing: the single paradiddle is not just a pad rudiment, it's a groove engine. Watch his Instagram clip and you walk away with a way to hide RLRR LRLL inside a backbeat so the rudiment disappears into the feel instead of announcing itself.

The move is orchestration. Take the standard single paradiddle sticking and start splitting it across the kit: lead hand on hat or ride, accents migrating to snare on the 2 and the 4, the doubles filling in as ghost notes or moving to a tom. The magic is in where the accents land. When the first note of each grouping hits the snare on beat 2, you suddenly have a groove instead of an exercise. Try it today. Loop the sticking on a pad first at around 80 to 90 bpm so the hands are even, then move the lead hand to the hat and put the accent on the snare. Keep the unaccented notes quiet, this is the most common mistake, drummers play every note at the same volume and the groove turns to mush. Add a kick on 1 and the "and" of 2 and you have a usable pocket. Once it locks, experiment with moving one of the doubles to a tom for a linear flavor.

Takeaway: rudiments earn their keep when the accents become the song.

Need more rudiment help? Check our our very own printable rudiment cheat sheet!.

Mike Johnston's latest 10-minute warm-up flips the usual script: instead of burning your hands out on mindless singles and doubles, he uses the clock to wake up your creative brain too. The takeaway is simple but worth internalizing: if your warm-up only trains speed, don't be surprised when your fills come out fast but not musical.

The routine moves through five short exercises before landing on a trading-fills section, where you improvise against the click in call-and-response phrases. That last part is where it earns its keep. Most of us treat warm-ups as a physical checklist, then sit down to play and wonder why nothing interesting comes out. Trading fills with yourself forces pattern recognition and real-time decisions while your hands are already loose. Try this today: pick a comfortable tempo, run through your usual singles, doubles, and paradiddles for five minutes, then spend the next five trading two-bar phrases, one bar of time and one bar of fill, without stopping. The rule is no repeating a fill twice in a row. You'll run out of ideas fast. That's the point.

Treat the burn-out moment as the start of the creative work, not the end of the warm-up. Speed gets your hands ready; improvisation gets your brain ready. Do both, every day, before you sit down at a gig.

Alex at Drum Hub takes aim at the gap every practicer knows too well: the rudiment that sounds clean on the pad but lifeless behind the kit. His angle in this 6 minute lesson is that the fix isn't another orbit around the toms. It's treating the rudiment as vocabulary, a phrase you can drop into fills, grooves, and improvisation the same way a soloist quotes a lick.

The example he builds the lesson around is the six stroke roll, and the reframing is the takeaway you can use today. Stop running the sticking as a loop. Pull a fragment out of it, two or three notes, and treat that fragment as the idea. Move accents, leave space, let the rudiment breathe inside a bar of time instead of filling every sixteenth. A practical first pass: play a bar of groove, drop a single six stroke fragment into beat four, then return to time. Resist the urge to chain three in a row, that's the move that pushes it back toward exercise territory. Notation is on the Drum Hub blog if you want his exact phrasing, and there's a seven day challenge built around this same rudiment if it clicks.

The takeaway: rudiments become musical the moment you stop playing them as rudiments and start using pieces of them as phrases.