Subscribers

Here is our first EOTM by David Friedman. I'm hoping David will become our EOTM man. He has all these creative ways of playing scales and doing exercises. So let's see if we can get him to be our EOTM CEO.

Here's the first one. This is a great idea actually. If you practice one of these exercises each month and just for the month I would argue that technically it will alter your playing for the better. I'm going to do it also!

Check out the pdf below.

The theme of this lesson is to find something that YOU like when you play. Forget about judgement, and just listen. Find patterns that sound good, pick out melodies that sound familiar or make up new ones, experiment with different ways of striking the instrument. Try anything. Record and/or remember the things that you really like, and then later you can learn WHAT it is you played so that you can do it again, or be free to change it however you want.

Here is a lesson on building a voicing vocabulary. This is a exercise with offers a method for familiarizing yourself with every possible inversion and alteration of any given chord with a 4 note voicing. This first lesson just deals with close position voicings. I plan to expand to include drop 2 and other more spread out voicing in the next lesson. As always, I'd love to hear your feedback and welcome any questions or comments on the material.
-Tyler

Hi everyone,

This etude is similar to the last one; another mallet independence etude, but with a few different things. Pdf is attached. Enjoy!

Behn

This is a very interesting and demanding interlude,written by the great composer/arranger Frank Zappa.It is a incredible exercise on playing a single line melody,using uncommon intervals.
This version appeared on the "Apostrophe"album,as part of a tune called "st Alfonzo's pancake breakfast".It begins approximately at 1:09 and it was performed by the great Ruth Underwood.

It is a standard piece in the Zappa repertoire,and it was played by all the percussionists that played in the Zappa band.