For my first several years of learning to play drums, like many young musicians, I immersed myself in technical studies, practicing four to ten hours a day. As I became familiar with all the classic drum books, I noticed a baffling failure on the part of the authors to grasp what seemed to me to be obvious logical relationships between and among the technical and rhythmic patterns they presented. It was an accepted approach to learning drums that was equivalent to learning piano with no knowledge of scales, chords, or arpeggios. It became clear to me that there was a grammar of drumming and rhythm that remained to be discovered and explored, so for the next few years I set out to do it myself. The result was my book, Drumming Patterns, self-published in 1988.
While Drumming Patterns was quite well-reviewed by the top drum and music magazines of the time, and endorsed by several celebrities in the drumming world, because it was self-published and without a distributor in the days before the Internet, and because I moved to New York City within a few months after its publication, became consumed with survival, and lacked the time and means to further promote it properly, it has largely remained undiscovered in the intervening years. It is only now that I have determined to present it properly on the web, where I expect that it will finally gain the audience that it deserves. To learn more about my book and the concept underlying it, visit my new site, DrummingPatterns.com.