E-BOOK
LEVEL: ALL
$10.99

This unique multi-media e-book isn’t designed to be a complete, all-encompassing drumming method. Rather, it’s conceived as a collection of short exercises, practice tips, and play-alongs that are meant to inspire you to explore new ideas each day. The book is organized as a four-week course, with each day of the week being dedicated to one specific area of drumming. Sundays, Wednesdays, and Fridays focus on coordination exercises and full-kit ideas, Mondays and Thursday emphasize hand technique, Tuesdays are for bass/drums play-alongs in different styles, and Saturdays are brush workouts.

Each daily routine includes transcriptions or notation, audio/video demonstrations, and additional practice tips. Gould also throws in relevant historical nuggets and links to online content designed to help expand your overall drumming knowledge. Because it’s an e-book, you can also highlight sections that you want to return to, add digital bookmarks, and type in notes about practice reminders, such as tempos, examples that need more work, and original ideas you come up with based on the included lessons.

As a tool to help get the creative juices flowing, Drum Diaries, Volume One is great. Some of the drumset coordination and sticking ideas and the snare drum exercises are especially fruitful. I do wish Gould had included drum-less play-along tracks to accompany the Tuesday bass/drum groove studies. Hopefully future volumes will have those added. (Gould Music) Advertisement

Michael Dawson