Background: Designing Exercises

I left us last time with a question:

At some point, the interesting question stops being “What makes a great exercise?” and becomes “What skills allow us to design one on our own?”

Great exercises are designed in the practice room by identifying problems, inventing solutions to those problems, getting feedback on whether those solutions worked, and practicing successful ideas until they are ingrained in our brains.

In my opinion, diagnosing problems in our playing and inventing potential solutions to them are the most difficult to learn, as they require “studio talk” with a master teacher, abundant experience, repetition in similar learning environments, and endless tinkering with one’s own musicianship. More on that later.

From Technique to Expertise

If our skills improve over time, then so do the exercises they produce. Here’s another question:

What happens to these mysterious, essential exercises as we improve over months, years, and decades of practice?

Some exercises are promoted to “habits” or “rituals”: they become part of our identity as they help us hone and refine our craft. Others are replaced by other exercises as we develop and molt.

To me, what’s more interesting than thinking about the thousands of studies I’ve tried over the years is pondering why we change our practice.

In many professions, expert practitioners start with their teacher’s exercises. They work! I have SO many of my teachers’ photocopied exercises, and they are essential to my musical personality.

But, as someone who’s watched enough sports documentaries and episodes of Chef’s Table, there’s a time at which training diverges from skill, where we move beyond the set of exercises, practices, and habits that supported the development of our craft, and step into our own expertise and specialty. We molt, leveraging our classical French culinary training to do something more individually meaningful. We step away from the music we learned from our teachers, develop our own repertoire, and build the skills necessary to support that unique performance practice. We move from technique to craft, from skill to expertise.

How to Molt

One of the most valuable musical skills on that journey from skill to expertise is the ability to improve on our own, which often requires significant investment after fundamental study is complete. Exercise design, therefore, becomes one of the fundamental creative acts of learning, allowing us to continue developing long after we’ve mastered the basics. And a critical key to designing solutions is understanding the problem.

Next time, we’ll tackle an obvious follow-up question: how do we diagnose problems, when figuring out what is wrong can feel like finding a single plant in an alpine meadow?

Epilogue: There’s a book for that!

My book Unsnared Drum Lab doesn’t cover diagnosis, other than to say that performers should get good at it. In fact, my book makes only passing mention of some essential elements of musical learning, such as noticing and attacking plateaus in playing, organizing practice and learning, musical analysis, and any work outside the practice room. And, while the book is applicable to any instrument, the only exercises in the text are for the snare drum. In fact, the glaring omission of these sectors of musical development prompted me to develop a course on how to apply the concepts from the book to these “terra incognita” of musical development. A very fun course, by the way!

But… it does spend a lot of time on how performers can assess challenges quickly, learn to invent material to help them achieve their musical goals, leading to faster, more targeted learning, better performance under pressure, and more fun! And it does pepper the reader with exhortations to be creative, compares pataflaflas to 19th-Century British poetry, invites readers to ignore my exercises, replace them with their own, and apply those concepts to whatever instrument they’re playing.

It’s available on my website now, as well as Steve Weiss Music.

How would you practice if you wanted to spend the least amount of time in the practice room and get the most done?

As a university professor, I spend a lot of time berating my students for not practicing enough, but that’s only part of the story. In reality, I should berate them for not practicing more effectively…or…not berate them at all…?

Learning to learn is the single most essential outcome of studying music at a university. As such, developing effective, flexible, and individualistic practice habits is the quintessential task of the student musician, the most essential ingredient in the pivot from talent to skill that demarcates the professional from the amateur.

I was not an effective practicer while in school, prone to binges on single techniques, long forays into a single action, and hopeless attempts to memorize music too quickly.

In an effort not to have my students repeat my mistakes, clarify my thoughts on practicing, and give my students a framework for effectively individualizing complex musical tasks, I made a flowchart documenting what my research led me to conclude are the most important touchpoints in each practice session.

This chart lays out the phases of a practice session, and hews to best practices from cognitive neurology (interleaved practice, cognitive interference, deliberate practice, etc). I believe every practice session should include most of, if not all of these categories of activities, for maximal, long-term benefit.

More importantly, it answers the question:

How would you practice if you wanted to spend the least amount of time in the practice room and get the most done?

Pre-Practice: Analysis/score study/framing

• Get to know the music you’ll be learning, contextualizing it historically and stylistically while analyzing and characterizing significant moments in the music. You want to be sure that I’m practicing with a musical goal in mind rather than wandering note by note through a score.

• Then, prepare everything you need so your time practicing is 100% focused on practice. Score printing, part preparation, page turn planning, binder making, etc.

Getting Going: warm up, scales, technical development

Like standing in an immersive James Turrell work, our minds and hands need a little bit of time to acclimate to practicing. My goal is to refine my percussive technique, but also to open my ears and keep critical thinking.

• Warm your muscles by playing conscientiously and curiously, analyzing technical issues by tinkering, hypothesizing about their origin and experimenting to see what changes make the most impactful sonic results.

• Create and play exercises that address these issues. I like to, like Law and Order, rip them from the ‘headlines’ of my repertoire.

• Don’t skip this section! Warming up is as much a mental as a physical ritual, and helps get your mind ready to focus.

• Finally, do SOMETHING to measure and record your progress. This could be a practice journal. It could be marking something in the music. It could be your memory (not recommended). Keeping track of milestones and benchmarks and challenges gives you valuable information you can incorporate into your next session, so you don’t have to start from square one each time.

Need some warm-up ideas?

Note Learning/Ingestion

I say ingestion here because it’s more specific than learning. Anyone can learn something, but it takes effort to digest information, keep it inside of oneself ready to use at a moment’s notice.

• Because of your analysis and study (you have been analyzing the music you’re learning, right?), you already have a strong idea of what you expect the piece to sound like. You have a hypothesis about what you want to do interpretively in the music before you learn the notes. This hypothesis or musical thesis will change, of course. But learning and interpreting notes is much easier when the notes are part of sentences and paragraphs and chapters rather than random dots.

• As you play a section of the piece, use this sense of what the music “should” be like to pinpoint issues or mistakes—sounds or gestures that deviate from your conception.

• Address the problem with an issue-specific tool.

• What fills up your toolbox of practice methods? Ideas from creative practice sessions, sounds from mentors or idols, memories from coaching or lessons, inspiration from other artistic disciplines, ideas from scientific research into learning methods, and analogies. In short, everything creative or curious that we do.

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Don’t confuse this way of practicing with always shooting for the same musical goals. Practicing this way does get you closer to your desired interpretation very quickly. But, paradoxically, asking specific questions of the music at hand and toying around with techniques and musical ideas broadens expands your conception of what a desired interpretation could be. So be specific from step one.

I wrote about some of my favorite practice tools here

Refining

• The same, but with both longer spans of music and a more refined or detailed sense of what to address.

• Record yourself and get feedback from peers to make sure your senses are calibrated to your sound.

Refreshing/Longer Runs/Incubation

• This period occupies the LONGEST part of our practice time. Start piecing together the music, section by section, paragraph by paragraph.

• You will make different, surprising, and delightful new mistakes, so continue the processes from before. Let the music age like a Brunello wine (although maybe not for as long).

Reflection

Learning = Experience + Reflection. So………… reflect! What worked, what didn’t? Be creative and resilient.

Need some help reflecting?

Learn with Mike

Reflection: Technique of Master Learners

(I wrote a TL/DR version of this post on my other newsletter, On Learning Percussion. If you have time, I’d love for you to check it out…

Read more

2 years ago · Michael Compitello

Timing

• Except for the incubation, which could take years, this routine takes an hour or less—one Law and Order episode.

• In each section of the practice session, we’re harnessing Deliberate Practice and Design Thinking. Ideation, prototyping, failing fast, and iterating new solutions are key steps in musical improvement.

Happy practicing!

What Makes a Great Exercise?

Like most of you, I’ve invested a lot of time investigating which exercises to do and checking on whether the exercises I’ve chosen work. In fact, I concluded that exercises are so important that I wrote a whole book on how to find, develop, and design them!

But have you ever wondered, “What makes a great exercise? Am I using the exercises I’m using because I’m lazy, or because they work? And how do I even tell if they’re working?”

I have. After years of perusing method books and experimenting on myself and my students, I’ve identified some qualities of good/great exercises.

Short and Simple

Great exercises are easy to learn, easy to remember, and difficult to master.

Specific

Good exercises are focused enough to address a specific need.

Flexible

The best exercises grow with you, and are capable of being scaled to be more or less challenging, whether through speed, transposition, rhythm, or any other musical parameter.

Effective

Duh! Exercises should build mental models and address weaknesses, not simply accumulate repetitions. If the exercise helps you hear, feel, predict, and recognize a musical idea more clearly, it is probably doing useful work.

Relevant and Timely

Great exercises are directly related to your musical goals and delivered at the exact right time. The perfect exercise six months from now may be far less valuable than a good exercise that addresses tomorrow’s rehearsal.

Interesting

Attention is a finite resource. Interesting exercises encourage experimentation and invite curiosity-driven variation and invention.

Yours

Creating your own exercises inspires deeper and more consistent work, much like growing your own food can inspire thoughtful, seasonal cooking. When something is “yours,” you care more, pay more attention, and think more proactively about improving it.

The first six qualities describe a good exercise.

The seventh describes a good learner.

Growing your own vegetables changes the way you cook. You become more aware of seasons, ingredients, constraints, and possibilities. Designing your own exercises creates a similar shift. Instead of asking, “What should I practice?” you begin asking, “What problem am I trying to solve?” Creating your own exercises forces you to diagnose problems—another super-important practice skill—identify constraints, and design solutions. In doing so, you begin learning not only the skill itself, but how you learn to do anything.

Exercise Design

At some point, the interesting question stops being “What makes a great exercise?” and becomes “What skills allow us to design one?”

Here are two: diagnosing problems in our playing and inventing potential solutions to them. They are linked by the dynamic processes of Design Thinking and Deliberate Practice.

Useful exercises exist in dialogue with both these skills, helping us figure out what’s not working and helping fix those issues. Great exercises help you take mysterious problems and turn them into what I, in a previous post, called “Infomercial Problems”: an obvious problem with an obvious solution, and sometimes even a narrator to tell you what you’re doing wrong.

In reality, most musical problems are not simple to diagnose or quickly solved. Thus, problem-finding is just as important, if not more so, than problem-solving. That’s an issue we’ll tackle next time…

Exercises

Speaking of exercises, I just wrote an entire book, full of exercises and instructions/exhortations/encouragement to create your own. And while Unsnared Drum Lab is technically about the snare drum, the concepts transfer to every percussion instrument. Actually, to every instrument! It’s available at my website here, and shortly thereafter at Steve Weiss Music.

I grew up with those infomercials where someone would really be struggling.

While unintentionally whimsical—wouldn’t it be awesome to be an actor in one?—These commercials are not so realistic for musicians. We tend not to have narrators telling us exactly what the issue is (outside of lessons), but even when we do know what turpitude our playing has brought upon us, salvation does not come from a simple solution like buying a chamois cloth or a Tupperware lid holder.

Musical problems tend to be more insidious and unknown, as David Epstein calls them in Range, “wicked” learning environments.

I’ve felt, and seen my students feel, these pains. Maybe you have too?

• You seem to revert to devolve every new day of practice, despite frequent effort

• You try detailed practice plans, but they don’t work.

• You invest in science-backed practice methods, but you don’t learn notes quickly enough

• You try to be creative in the practice room and improvise with material, but you don’t learn enough music in time.

• You try to build accuracy and precision, but you get super nervous on stage

It feels BAD to think you’re trying too hard and nothing is working! Maybe even worse than those Infomercial situations.

Unknown Unknowns

Recently, while working with musicians at Unsnared Studio, a little summer session organized around my book Unsnared Drum Lab, we focused on precisely these “unknown unknowns of our musical development. Not ‘why do I suck?,’ but ‘what is getting in the way?” Here’s what we discovered.

When we hit a plateau, our first instinct is usually to work harder, for longer. But on what? This mindset is reinforced by many music teachers (myself included). “Music learning takes a long time to incubate” is a doxology in classical music pedagogy. That’s true!

But, incubation only works if you know you’re sitting on a chicken egg, and not a Cadbury egg. Sometimes, the problem is that we’re not diagnosing the right issue: the cure is not linked to the right disease.

So, deciding what to work on in the practice room is as important as how to work on it.

The Thing Behind the Thing

Unsnared Drum Lab is all about inventing dynamic exercises to help you overcome your musical hurdles. But, how can you invent a solution if you don’t know the problem?

I was very fortunate to interact with brilliant musical entrepreneur and coach Jennifer Rosenfeld a few years ago. In one of her sessions, she described “The Thing Behind the Thing” as a way of articulating emotional blockages in our creative work. Often, these blockages seemed to have little to do with the stated problem. Often, a Thing Behind the Thing was an assumption, and challenging these assumptions might unleash a torrent of professional and creative activity.

Jennifer’s Thing Behind the Thing exercise tended to focus on larger challenges of professional identity or a creative path. But, for performing musicians, there is a particular kind of professional dehabilitation that comes from stagnation in the practice room.

Learning Percussion is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

Taxonomy of Plateaus

One reason experienced teachers can diagnose problems quickly is that they’ve seen many versions of the same problem before. Over time, you build a mental catalog of recurring obstacles. If you don’t know what is going wrong, here are some ideas, organized by the following topos: technique, learning music, remembering music, playing on stage, and time management. Maybe some of them resonate.

• Eating too big a sandwich.

  • Practice intake is too big for our recall

  • Too many desirable difficulties and too much contextual interference in the practice room

• Not Practicing for the Stage

  • Don’t have a clear mental image of the performance situation

  • Don’t know what you sound like on stage, while nervous

• Practice may not be sufficiently improvisational (in the moment) OR planned (over time)

  • One limits the durability of learning, the other limits the amount of learning.

• You don’t know how long things will take to complete

• Technique Mismatch: Your technique doesn’t match your needs

  • Your technique doesn’t let you communicate what you want to under pressure.

How Do We Find The Thing Behind The Thing?

How do you find these things behind things, especially when you don’t know what the blockage point is?

Learning Communities

Where our heads are matters as much as what’s in them. Communities of shared practice offer terrific opportunities to compare notes, diagnose issues, and reflect. It’s why I wanted to host a live program around Unsnared Drum Lab: dynamic conversations with peers often lead to individual epiphanies. Other musicians often see the problem we are too close to notice.

Experiment on Yourself with Design Thinking

• Another way to uncover hidden problems is to treat practice like a series of experiments. I wrote here about using recordings in the practice room to make hypotheses about potential issues and take quick action to determine whether you’re right (and fix the problem).

• In Unsnared Drum Lab, I discuss how improvisation can help assess a musical problem and determine whether a devised solution might be working. I shared one such session in a previous post here.

• You might use your performances as data, comparing concert recordings to your own memory of the performance to calibrate what isn't working according to plan and help assess what you might focus on in your next practice sessions. Here are some ideas.

Try it:

In our session, we broke out to chat about our own experiences with these seemingly unknowable barriers. Here are some of the metacognitive queries we coagulated around.

1. What are the plateaus you are facing? How long have they been there?

2. What kind of feedback would help you tell if what you’re doing is working?

3. What kind of musician am I trying to become? What technique would that musician need?

Reflection

In our next Unsnared Studio session, we’ll dig into improvising, composing, and designing techniques through targeted musical invention. But to do so without knowing the true goal of one’s playing—what kind of musician am I trying to become and what technique supports that goal—would be malpractice.

It has been such a joy to develop precisely the kind of class I would have loved to be a part of as a young student, and that jives with everything I know about learning.

Schedule

I designed Unsnared Drum Lab (the book) to help percussionists develop their own snare drum technique, become familiar with the canonical repertoire, and invent their own material, enabling maximal flexibility. I wanted to celebrate the book by going further, and in the sessions, I’m excited to expand these ideas to support all kinds of percussion learning situations.

In each session, I’ll present on a topic around our creative practice. Then, we’ll open things up for people in the group to share their own issues, problems, or struggles, as well as reflections on the time between each session.

June 3, 11 am EST: The Plateaus You Can’t Explain

• Why and how we stall

• What skills should a musician have?

• Design Thinking and Deliberate Practice

• What’s in a performance: The Ant vs. The Taxi Driver

• Studio class: live diagnosis

June 17, 11 am EST: Designing Technique That Works (for you…)

• Building a custom-fitting, flexible, reliable, efficient, expressive musical technique

• The Stone Tablet vs. The Post-It: improvisatory exercise design

• Car-Talk for Drummers: Diagnostics and mental models

• Studio class: live diagnosis

July 1, 11 am EST: From Practice to Performance

• How invention and play support peak performance under pressure

• Building communicative, flexible interpretations in the practice room

• Metacognition and planning creative work

• Studio class: live diagnosis

Studio Class

Highlighting the importance of learning communities, in each session, we’ll open things up for people in the group to share their own issues, problems, or struggles, as well as form affinity groups and become accountability buddies.

I’m asking participants to come with musical challenges they’re trying to solve, for any percussion instrument.

This might include:

• a challenging passage, etude, or piece of repertoire

• a broader technical issue

• time management: planning your practice and musical learning, setting musical goals, etc.

• During the studio class sessions, we’ll use that material to:

• identify what’s breaking down

• design creative and flexible exercises to address those issues

• test how those solutions hold up in different conditions

• plan musical development over a number of practice sessions.

Whether people are actively applying these ideas or squirreling them away for later, I’m really hoping we form a little community that continues to share ideas and learn from one another.

The Book

Session participants will get a pre-order of my book, so look out for that

There’s still a liiiiitle bit of space left in our little cohort. You can join here:

Register Here

Or, reply to this email with any questions you have.

Happy practicing!

PS: A text-heavy page…

A stone tablet is permanent (mostly), and requires careful, meticulous design and craftsmanship. They commemorate, mark, and memorialize.

A Post-It is designed to be temporary. It’s sticky, but not forever. Its fluorescent coating screams “look at me,” but its small size and bountiful numbers say “I’m not important for long.”

• Daily to-do list? Post-It.

• Gravestone? Stone Tablet

• Optometrist’s phone number? Post-It.

• Roman calendar? Many stone tablets!

How do we improve the most effectively?

How do performing musicians most effectively increase our musical capacity, learn more quickly, and play with accuracy and precision? Asking for a friend.

With technical studies carved into marble in Trajan typeface, ready to be examined without change for millennia, or on whatever kind of paper Post-Its are made of, fickle, vulnerable to gusts of wind, and easily toss-able?

Thanks for reading Learning Percussion! This post is public, so feel free to share it.

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When practicing, I often create improvisational fragments to help me learn notes, recall music, or challenge my technique.

I used to think of these fragments like shards of Ancient Greek pottery, valuable missives from the great beyond, worthy of storage in a great museum.

But actually, they’re much more like Post-Its.

As my practice has shifted away from rote repetition towards improvisation and variation, I am finding that I need more timely, targeted material.

Much of my practice centers on petite musical nuggets invented on the spur of the moment to address an acute need and serve as a temporary solution. They are prototypes, living between “identify problem” and “get feedback” in the Design Thinking process.

What to do with these Post-Its?

1. I fully expect to crumple some up at the end of a session.

2. Sometimes, a collection of Post-Its can be upgraded to a Most-Wanted List, a collected worksheet of exercises clustered around a set of musical or technical problems that can then be incubated over days and weeks of practice. Here’s mine for the first measure of Joe Tompkins’ Nine French American Rudimental Solos, a tricky three quarter notes! I settled on these exercises after improvising with the material for a few minutes.

3. Still others will live in perpetuity, attached to the edge of my computer monitor, promoted to a Google Doc or a Notion page; they become part of my regular practice.

On a scale of “Post-It” to “Roman Marble Tablet,” how permanent should musical exercises be?

I lean towards Post-It, because I know that my needs and desires will change as my technique evolves. In fact, all technical studies lose utility over time. As we improve, we become immune to their challenges, and we should repeat the process of reevaluating and recomposing our exercises.

While one-size-fits-all broadsides (such as the first page of George Stone’s Stick Control) can do a great job of transforming technique from 0%-60%, the journey from 60-80% or 60-90% can only be undertaken with Deliberate Practice and Design Thinking, which require strong diagnostic ability, frequent feedback, and constant revision.

In my own practice, this improvisation-feedback loop happens daily. I find that I do not need to play specific exercises each time I practice. Working on similar types of exercises (and, by extension, musical techniques) helps me address challenges consistently, imaginatively, and, in the words of my teacher Robert van Sice, “soundfully.”

A huge amount of my new book, Unsnared Drum Lab, grew out of this idea: inventive, diagnostic, flexible practice. Despite having been working on the musical type setting for a number of months, I consider almost all the exercises in the book to be temporary stand-ins for something better that might come from the reader. Although I invite the reader to try my examples, I hope one engaging with the text will invent their own, more effective, more interesting musical missives throughout.

Just something to chew on!

Learning Percussion is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

“It is not enough to know the principles; one needs to know how to manipulate.”

Dictionnaire de Trévoux

Recently, I wrote an article for Percussive Notes about professional development, in which I argue that a key (and underrated) professional development for performing musicians is to become a more effective musical learner. Not just a harder worker. A better learner.

What’s one great way to get better quickly? Being really good at diagnosing issues, especially without a teacher around. What’s the best way to get better at self-diagnosis? Tinkering in the practice room. And listening to Car Talk.

Critical Virtuosity

I grew up listening to Car Talk, the NPR radio show where Tom and Ray Magliozzi diagnosed mysterious automotive catastrophes over the phone while inserting their own particular brand of effusive chaos into the proceedings.

In recent years, I’ve become enamored by Chef Wang and his rapid-fire mastery of Sichuan cooking

and gardener Monty Don’s ability to know just when to prune a rose:

What’s remarkable about their diagnostic ability is how FAST it is, a result of years of accumulated observation and experimentation.

Musicians do this as well. Identifying and isolating problems in our playing quickly helps us address mistakes, repertoire weaknesses, and other challenges.

How do we diagnose problems with our playing? First, we need to know what is right, and for that, we need a mental representation.

TINKERING

How do we develop this diagnostic ability? Fix a lot of cars, listen to a lot of Car Talk episodes, observe a lot of performances, or (easier) tinker in the practice room, inserting playful, constant variation.

Tinkering facilitates mastery of concepts, not just mastery of content

For example, one of my favorite ways to practice a very simple stroke exercise is to constantly vary the physical approach while maintaining the same rhythmic surface:

I love doing this because it heightens my sensitivity to the sonic effects of physical changes in my technique.

You might notice that while lifting the stick, the left hand becomes brighter than the right, or that with a fulcrum in the back of the hand, you can play with a rounder sound with less finger involvement. Easy example = easier to notice the changes. With time, you begin noticing subtler differences in sound, effort, timing, resonance, tension, and phrase shape.

I might throw in some accents to see how they impact my sound:

Or juxtapose with different sticking patterns…

Playfulness matters here because a few minutes of focused experimentation can teach more than hours of unconscious repetition.

Constrained invention and playful variation help performers develop richer internal models by expanding the range of possibilities for each technique. That tracks with the science, which consistently shows that skill mastery and peak performance come from focused attention, rapid feedback, variation, and frequent adjustment.

Tom and Ray got good at diagnosing cars because they spent decades tinkering with cars. Chef Wang got good at cooking because he spent decades tinkering with cooking. Monty Don got good at gardening because he spent decades tinkering with gardens. And musicians become better diagnosticians by tinkering with sound, movement, phrase, rhythm, memory, and touch.

What’s “Right”

Frequent readers will know that if I were to have a tattoo, it would say

The development of deep and rich mental representations is the key to both elite musical learning and transformative performance on stage.

Or maybe “I heart popcorn” instead. I’m workshopping it.

So the development of rich mental representations — a strong internal sense of what music should sound, feel, and look like — should be a central feature of our craft.

A performer with only one rigid sense of how a piece should go is easily rattled, like a driver who has only driven on a road in perfect weather. A performer with a broad, flexible internal model has somewhere to go when things inevitably change: a different stage, a different marimba, different shoes, your duo partner jumps an eighth note…

Because performance is unstable, technique cannot simply be the memorization of one “correct” physical solution.

So:

Studio Talk: This Summer!

A huge amount of Unsnared Drum Lab grew out of this realization. The book encourages performers to invent exercises, vary existing material, improvise solutions, and build more flexible and individualized techniques through playful experimentation in the practice room.

Yes, you can develop diagnostic ability on your own, but it’s easier with others through “studio talk”: experimentation, feedback, collaborative diagnosis, trying things in real time, and refining ideas together.

That’s a large part of what we’ll explore together in Unsnared Studio this summer: how inventive practice can help us break through technical plateaus, learn music more effectively, perform more reliably under pressure, and become better diagnosticians of our own playing.

Info is here:

Hope you can join us!

Here’s why:

For years, I struggled with how long it took me to learn music and with the gap between what I could do in the practice room and what actually showed up in performance. That chasm led me to study how musicians (and experts in other fields) build skills, and why certain forms of practice led to deep, flexible musicianship while others produced tension, inconsistency, and burnout.

I started obsessively refining a set of techniques that fundamentally changed the way I practice, teach, and perform: forcing improvisation and creativity into my practice, withholding repetition, scouring the literature on motor learning and deliberate practice, and studying the habits of master musicians across many genres.

These ideas are now distilled into my forthcoming book Unsnared Drum Lab: a collection of exercises, experiments, practice strategies, and creative frameworks centered on the snare drum and informed by research into learning, performance psychology, and skill acquisition.

Its central thesis:

And by technique, I mean any musical skill or craft. The result is more like a laboratory for creative practice than a traditional method book. I can’t wait to share this book with you this summer.

Unsnared Studio: This June

So why am I telling you this?

The book has a fatal flaw (it’s not typography!). These kinds of creative practices are best experienced in real time, through the kind of “studio talk” that sits at the center of elite artistic learning: experimentation, observation, feedback, adjustment, and the sharing of ideas among curious musicians.

So this June, I’m opening Unsnared Studio: a small online cohort designed for percussionists and educators who want to take a more active role in shaping how musicianship is built and perform better under pressure.

We’ll explore technical development through creativity in the practice room and all its impacts on your musical learning and performance practice.

You might find it valuable if you are working on challenging repertoire, feeling stuck despite consistent practice, looking for more control in performance situations, and interested in building a more flexible, creative, and self-directed technique for yourself and/or your students.

Wait

While my book is about the snare drum, the underlying principles of Unsnared Studio apply to percussion playing in general, and I encourage you to bring repertoire and musical challenges for all percussion instruments.

Details

The cohort is organized around how musicians actually learn: in spurts and stints, with experimentation, frequent feedback, and constant adjustment.

Each session combines my presentations with live diagnostic work on real playing. We’ll take apart excerpts from your repertoire, identify why they aren’t working, build custom exercises to address those issues, adapt those exercises as your needs change, and test those changes in conditions that more closely resemble performance.

This kind of program might not be for everyone.

But if my own story resonates with you, and this sounds like the kind of work you’ve been looking for, I hope you’ll join us.

A few practical details:

• Small online technique-building cohort for percussionists

• 3 online meetings across 5 weeks (June)

• Weekly guided practice prompts, discussions, and feedback

• Includes an advance copy of Unsnared Drum Lab

• Focus on creative practice, technical flexibility, improvisation, and musical fluency

• The cohort is designed for work in progress: no need to refine material before taking part

You can learn more about the cohort, schedule, and enrollment options here:

I hope you can join us, and be in touch with questions!

More Info

-Mike

BTW, Learning Percussion is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber.

A few weeks ago, we recorded a MikeDrop episode on the metronome. After apparently forgetting that I had written >0 words on metronome usage a few years ago, I decided to update my metronome hot takes.

Listen to our podcast here:

And explore my more fanciful inventions below, unencumbered by the rationality of Mike T, including a NEW section on the history of the metronome…

Happy practicing!

⬇️

I walk by the practice rooms on campus, attracted by the dulcet tones of slow, deliberate practice like a hipster to a scone-filled third-wave coffee house. As I near, irritancy strikes: like a hive of buzzing bees, the relentless “doik dink dink dink” of a metronome, articulating the 16th notes in music that moves in half notes.

Aside from being a tremendous drain on cell phone batteries, I see this practice as a tremendous waste of time for most percussionists in most situations. My colleague/frenemy Mike Truesdell calls it “the rhythmic ventilator.” Here’s what’s wrong with emojis for my Gen Z readers.

🔎 First, this modality demonstrates a lack of trust in one’s abilities. Percussionists spend their entire careers developing a nuanced (some might say obsessive) sense of rhythmic placement and timing. Use it or lose it!

😰 At the same time, this type of metronome usage makes the user extremely susceptible to stage fright by introducing a chamber partner who won’t be there in the concert. Most performance anxiety is either caused or enhanced by differences between performance environments and practice environments. Practicing with a sound that won’t be present at the concert or rehearsal is a pretty major difference. Bigger than the Sixth Sense.

🙉 More importantly, all-in metronome use has a tendency to close one’s ears, numbing the diagnostic listening capacity so crucial to chamber music-making. A quartet playing with a metronome is more likely to listen to the metronome than to one another, deflecting the kind of crucial listening needed for ensemble unity.

😬 If that isn’t bad enough, rhythmic ventilation fosters a dependency on the metronome, which is at the very least deleterious. If you can’t make it through a piece without a metronome, you might be addicted to Dr. Beat.

Evenness is a Tool

My biggest issue with constant, thoughtless metronome use is that it trains us to do the wrong thing. Even if putting a metronome on every subdivision helped develop a steady pulse and even rhythmic subdivision—it doesn’t—evenness is just a tool, not an endgame.

Most of my favorite music is not quantized: beats might be steady, but subdivisions are movable in order to inflect rhythms. Even the music of subdivision legend Steve Reich requires nuanced inflection: too even and the interlocking parts don’t mesh, and too inflected, and it sounds swingy.

And god forbid one stretches the timing at an important moment! I even wrote a newsletter about the importance of tempo flexibility in the music of Brahms et al:

Learn with Mike

Coincidences, Coincidences

I have an obsessive personality. It’s not great for watching Battlestar Galactica, but is a net positive. But, when I become fixated on something, it’s helpful to ask why my brain might be pointing me towards something. This week, a few obsessions became unwittingly intertwined. The locus: a hairpin…

Read more

4 years ago · 2 likes · Michael Compitello

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Rhythmic placement is essential to expressivity and, thus, should be essential to our practice routines.

Practicing with the metronome all the time can diminish inflection, flexibility, and rhythmic nuance.

🤨 Sidequest: The History of the Metronome

It’s fascinating that the metronome developed at a particularly un-metronomic time in music history.

In the early 19th century, if you wanted to hear a new piece of music, you would have to hear the composer play it. But, with the development of more commercialized music publishing, a piece might be performed and learned without the creator present (gasp!). So a composer would need to give some indication of how to play their music, but not so much that it would stifle what I think composers in the 19th century thought was a really essential element of the music: flexibility of time. There are so many things in the music that we, that I think performers in the 19th century, and even more so in the 18th century, just did based on the content of the music. A composer (or publisher) might say, “These character markings—Allegro, Adagio—are accurate enough when I’m not here to play the piece. I need a way to articulate how fast to start the piece.” Enter the metronome:

But at the same time, the broad performance practice was never to be metronomic. In fact, in the 19th and 18th centuries if was more notable when someone played completely in time. This obsession with evenness is really a 20th-century phenomenon, broadly corresponding with the development of recording, increasing industrialization of production, the jet age, and the transition from gut to metal strings, etc. For more on this, I recommend Mark Katz’s Capturing Sound.

So, why was the metronome invented if 19th-century performance practice did not prioritize even rhythmic timing? My take: the metronome was designed to help people identify a starting tempo, not a through-going tempo.

And it’s also a historical irony that the original metronomes weren’t very accurate!

Back to the productive information…

What, if anything, is the utility of our good Dr. Beat?

1. Checking or determining the speed of the piece or section.

   1. How fast is 66? Dr. Beat knows!

2. Diagnose/confirm timing issues

   • Compare your pulse to the metronome’s steady pulse. Note divergences, and practice accordingly. This can be particularly helpful if one is susceptible to rushing or dragging, the evil cousins of compression and expansion. Mike Truesdell extolled the virtues of

3. Develop timing and pulse control

   Wait, what!?

Top tips for music-positive metronome usage

The metronome doesn’t, in and of itself, train one’s sense of timing, pulse control, or rhythmic expressivity.

Those skills are best done with concerted rhythmic training, which doesn’t require a metronome. The development of pulse steadiness is accomplished through a pincer movement of rhythmic training: active subdivision to develop the capacity for accurate division of pulses into rhythms, and management of larger spans of time to develop pulse control and steadiness. Both goals are best undertaken by engaging the entire body (there’s a reason drumset players tend to have good time…), but both are metronome-positive. The development of rhythmic expressivity is undertaken through experimentation, modeling, and joyful invention.

Here are some ways I use the metronome to develop rhythmic stability, pulse control, and expressivity.

Off-beats

Play with the metronome on the off-beat (the “ands” of each beat, or beats 2 and 4 of a 4/4 music). This forces the performer to be responsible for generating pulse and shifts the metronome to an observational capacity.

Fewer clicks

Put more space between metronome clicks. Metronome at 120? Try 60. Better yet, put it at 30. This practice forces you to generate more pulse, allowing the metronome to check your timing, rather than holding you dependent on the device.

This practice really comes into the forefront in Baroque repertoire, where bar-to-bar rhythmic stability is high, but beat-to-beat inflection can vary significantly.

Example:

Subdivisions

Within a given pulse, move between subdivisions (3s, 4s, 5s, etc), which develops pulse control.

Better yet, use polyrhythms (here 4:5) to help anchor yourself to a pulse:

Polyrhythms

One effective way of learning more complex polyrhythms (think 5:6 or 8:7) is to play along with them, which, with time, will add some muscle memory to your rhythmic execution. In the pre-app era, I programmed a DAW or notional software, but these days I use the app Tempo Advance.

Money-Maker

Stylistically appropriate rhythmic placement is essential to the professional careers of percussionists, so its development should be emphasized.

Taking time to isolate the development of rhythmic accuracy from the learning of repertoire aligns with best practices from the scientific literature on skill building and cognitive neurology. It also creates more space in the practice room for rhythmic inflection and nuance, the REAL MVPs of phrasing.

Happy Practicing!

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After writing a short article for Percussive Notes on long-term collaboration, making some videos about a specific collaborative project, and presenting on it a number of times in recent months, I can’t believe I have more to say about this!

While I do like the meandering process of working on a piece over a number of months/years/decades, I do have specific goals for the repertoire I commission for percussion. Actually, they are goals for the repertoire I play in general, and if one listens closely to the greatest works for our instrument in recent years, they seem—in my opinion—to have these features.

Short Video:

Full Video is here:

I. Expressive

First, I believe that awesome works for percussion can be expressive, where the performer's interpretive intent can and should be part of the work’s performance practice, and that a human performer is more beneficial than a synthesizer.

II. Idiomatic

At the same time, music I love is taking into account the unique sonic, performative, and theatrical properties of the instrument while demonstrating hitherto unseen possibilities—in other words, the work could only be written for percussion. Here, idiomatic doesn’t necessarily mean “easy to play.”

III. Subversive

Finally, I hope the works I commission have the capacity to be subversive, to undercut our expectations for an instrument while positing new ideas about what that instrument, performer, or ensemble can do.

Happy Practicing!

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More Resources

Learning Guides

I shared these ideas in my Unsnared Drum Performer’s Guide, in which I walk performers through how one might approach learning and performing the works on this album. For each work, I ask “what makes a great interpretation of this piece,” and then offer specific tips for learning and performing each work (and any work, to be honest). I tried to avoid saying “play these pieces as I do,” and instead pointed the interpreter towards salient musical details, issues of style, and technical ideas that might facilitate flexible interpretations.

I hope these videos are valuable to anyone approaching these pieces. Actually, I hope they are valuable to anyone learning any kind of music!

More Benefits of Long-Term Collaboration

In a Percussive Notes article I wrote a few years ago, I explored some other benefits of long-term collaboration, including:

• Entanglement in the creative process helps performers learn music more quickly and effectively. The ideation, experimentation, and workshopping characteristic of long-term collaboration ensures that by the time a new work is completed, the performer has played most, if not all, of the material, music tailor-made for the performer’s musical voice and aesthetic values.

• The experimentation and workshopping process provides performers with profound insights into how a composer works, their intuition, and their style: key elements in interpreting music. Experience with a composer’s process is a vital source of information about what parameters in their music are most important, and thus what constitutes an arresting, dramatic, or honest interpretation.

• A performer who has worked with a composer on a new work can be a resource for future performers. They might articulate ideas about the composer’s style, frame the type of interpretation the composer preferred, and provide insider information on preferred instrumentation, implements, setups, and other logistical concerns.

Without intervention, the second note of our rebounded strokes tends to be too close in rhythm to the first and too soft, resulting in uneven double strokes. Strengthening this second note, therefore, is of fundamental importance to a percussionist interested in smooth, even rebounds. In Accents and Rebounds, George Stone waxes poetic on the possibilities of rebound control:

…if with either sticks or ball we could make rebounds (one or more) as strong in power as the initial impact, the sticks would rebound to perfection, the ball would bounce forever, and we would have discovered the secret of perpetual motion.1

For those of us interested only in smooth rolls and not infinite kinetic energy, inverted doubles are extremely useful. To help ameliorate the weakness of the second (and third, fourth, or fifth) rebound of a stroke, we artificially exaggerate our finger motion. These newly empowered fingers stabilize the arm and wrist-powered rebound strokes, helping the rebounds become more even without tension. We’ll explore another way of using our fingers—extending the length of rebound strokes—later.

Inverted doubles remind me of those BASF commercials from the 1990s: they don’t make the strokes, they make them better:

TL;DR: A Video Example

Full points for showing one’s work, so here goes:

Invention

How best to design an exercise around inverted doubles?

1. Put the 2nd note of a double stroke on the beat to aid inflection.

2. Do something to create space in the hand so that your fingers can snap extra hard on the 2nd note. I drop my wrist below the surface of the drum, opening the hand while keeping my fingers around the stick

3. Make as much difference as possible between the accented and unaccented notes. We would (almost) never play this way in real life, but it helps isolate and strengthen our muscles.

4. Start with one hand at a time, later using the other hand to fill in the space.

My first draft. In this exercise, I use scansion (the notation used in poetry to denote accented and unaccented syllables) to indicate stressed and unstressed notes.

After a few minutes of isolating the inverted stroke, try it with both hands, using tighter rhythms to test if the stroke is durable at faster tempi. Really snap these out using your fingers!

Testing

Check the exercise’s effectiveness by increasing the speed, turning the 16th notes into tuplets of increasing density, and keeping the metronome at the same setting.

🕯️Remember, this is all just a derivation of the first exercise. Your variations and inventions can and should differ.

Make it Harder

Next, a version of the “make it harder” practice I’ve discussed in previous newsletters. Here, three strokes in a row are more difficult than the original exercise, and the triplets also require faster finger motion. The first measure is a “check” pattern to ensure you are still keeping a relaxed hold on the sticks. Try this, and you’ll see the utility for Tompkins’ Nine French-American Rudimental Solos.

Made it this far? You might like words written by a human, and/or appreciate the visual aids. You should probably subscribe, or at the very least send a note to say “hi!”

Put it Back

After 5-10 minutes of work on inverts, “put it back.” Check your progress on regular doubles: are they smoother and more even?

Final Exam: Make it Even Harder

Great chefs season their food as they cook. Great musicians test their phrasing as they practice to ensure they can execute on stage.

Practicing both the finger motion necessary for inverted doubles directly adjacent to its technical antonym—a wrist-activated throwing motion—helps ensure both mental models are distinct and rich.

All the exercises as a suite…

Happy practicing!

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I’m back from Delaware and Maryland after a stupendous weekend at the University of Delaware Interactive Percussion Seminar.

I loved learning from the clinicians and students and encountering the most organized percussion shelves ever

It was a particular pleasure to visit Steve Weiss Music to check out some Pearl snare drums with Gene Koshinski.

The Marimba

My class at Delaware was called Supercharging Your Marimba Technique, and beyond the inflated title, I tried to share some tips and tricks to play four-mallet marimba with more flexibility, grace, and power. In particular, I wanted to share some top tips for Stevens’ grip, which is known to be quite challenging.

And, the class had to be interactive.

So, we spent time doing Studio Talk, where volunteers played micro-excerpts of their repertoire, and we worked as a group to diagnose musical issues, which led to diagnosing sonic issues, which led to diagnosing technical issues. Rather than fall victim to the tragedy of the commons, we used what learning scientist Keith Sawyer calls “studio talk,” the performative, real-time narration teachers use while critiquing student work. Music teachers know this intimately, as we use studio talk to narrate what we’re hearing, model thinking processes, and keep feedback fluid, exploratory, and possibility-rich.

Below are my notes from the session. But, keep in mind that any technical exploration must include:

• Frequent feedback, from yourself, your peers, or a teacher

• Personal exploration of the topics at play

  Click Here to download my clinic handout

I’ll tee it off with a video about changing intervals:

Happy practicing!

Learning Percussion is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. It really helps!!

Interesting Questions™

What is technique or craft? Why is it important? How does one acquire it?

Our musical craft is a set of techniques that enable us to express ourselves authentically on our instruments. Our craft connects our ears, hands, and heart, and subsumes a disciplinary set of learning and performing skills. These techniques include, among others:

• Flexibility

• Observation

• Synthesis

• Creation

• Peak performance

• Accuracy

• Precision

So, technique is not just about your hands or chops.

Our technique is built on mental representations, so developing deep, rich mental representations is key to both elite musical learning and transformative performance on stage.

💪 How do you develop technique?

By improving the quality and quantity of mental representations. This can be done alone, or with a teacher

Alone, technique is best developed by tinkering, learning to understand how your muscles work, and connecting physical movement to sonic result. Tinkering can be improved with Design Thinking and Deliberate Practice, which offer instant feedback and the invitation to make quick, constant adjustments. Technique can also be developed through invention and with creativity in the practice room. Finally, technique is best addressed over the medium and long term, so a plan is essential. Interested musicians might try my Technical Development Plan, which uses a series of metacognitive questions to develop a personalized learning plan over time.

We also develop our musical technique through observation (exposure) and modeling. This can be done with a private teacher, or by attending concerts, listening to recordings, etc. Modeling is essential to musical growth, especially for younger musicians.

Teachers also share their knowledge through what author Keith Sawyer calls Studio Talk, in which a teacher dissects what they see/hear/experience in a work of art or a student performance in front of other students. This process (similar to the Grand Rounds doctors use to train) helps less experienced musicians learn what the master sees and hears. The result is to help develop and hone diagnostic tools, and by extension, share ideas about sound, technique, and music-making.

Skill mastery and peak performance come from focused effort on understanding how something works, instant feedback, and frequent adjustment, not rote repetition.

Common 4 mallet Issues: Is this you?

These issues tend to result from imbalances, tension, and muscular deployment. They are symptoms of larger issues with Stevens grip:

• Sound quality with 4 mallets is significantly worse than with 2

• Significant finger tension in thumb and first finger

• Pain around carpal tunnel

• Significant red spots in center of hand

• Mallets slipping in hand

• Stiffness in neck and back

🚀Top Tips: Stevens Grip for Fun and Profit

These tips help loosen tension in the first finger and thumb and facilitate the use of the wrists and arms, allowing for maximal flexibility, timbral variety, and power.

Invest in Interval changes

The inner mallet is moved by:

• Gravity. When a note is struck, the kinetic energy propelling the mallets into the air will lessen the force of gravity, allowing the mallet to be more easily moved

• Middle Finger. The middle finger pulls and pushes the inner mallet from place to place

• Elbow. Large muscle movements help move the center of an interval to a new location, moving the interval to a new position

Master balance

To grip the mallets with minimal tension, they must be balanced in the hand.

1. The elbow should bisect the interval. An imaginary line from the inner elbow should bisect the interval, allowing the arm and wrist to support the mallets.

2. The inner mallet moves within the hand to allow mallets to be held without finger tension instead of using the thumb and first finger to open the interval.

3. The middle finger curls and uncurls around the inner mallet to facilitate this positioning

Play like you play other instruments

Loosening the finger grip allows for performance involving the wrist and arms. This facilitates grouping notes and inflection and greater transferability across different instruments.

Allow mallets to move

The inner mallet moves in the hand during strokes and when changing intervals. Just like with the snare drum, the fulcrum stays attached to the stick/mallet while the stick/mallet moves in the hand. After a stroke on the marimba, the inner mallet pops off the palm and is repositioned as necessary.

Marimba Mental Models

Muscles

These muscles are active when playing the marimba:

Legs

• Get body into correct position

Torso/Core

• Strength and stability; the source of strokes

Arm

• Weight, power, mass.

• Transports wrist to the appropriate position

• Helps support wrist and finger

Wrist

• Primary agent of stroke

Finger

• Stabilize mallets

• Interval changes

📐 Interval Types

I break my marimba intervals into three categories: small, medium, and large.

For each interval, pay attention to:

1. Angle of exit of mallet

2. Position of inside mallet within hand

3. Position of middle finger within hand (goes from curled to uncurled): measured by amount of inner mallet held by inside mallet

Small intervals

1. Inner mallet exits hand at 12 o’clock (in line with thumb)

2. Inside Mallet sticks under fleshy part of hand

3. Middle finger on mallet, not under

   • Mallet should be able to hang in this position. If not, hand is turned too far

Medium intervals

1. Inner mallet exits hand at 10-11 o’clock

2. No stigmata: inner mallet moves in center of hand, and is not pressed into palm

3. Inner mallet showing ~ 1cm past middle finger

Large intervals

1. Inner mallet leaves hand at 9-10 o’clock

2. Middle finger is at its most uncurled

3. Inner mallet is under middle finger

Here’s what’s been keeping me busy the past few weeks, as well as a NEW festival that might be worth checking out ⬇️

A Festival!?

I’ve written before about the power of summer festivals for musical and professional development. Hyper-focused repertoire development, dense feedback, strong networking with self-selected peer and mentor groups, pressurized rehearsal and performance schedules: all point towards meaningful musical experiences with a cohort that will probably become long-term collaborators.

I’m excited to share that I’ll be on faculty at the inaugural Vic Firth Summer Institute. During a week at the University of Maine and the Vic Firth factory (May 31-June 6), we’ll combine percussion performance and pedagogy with an introduction to the business practices of the music industry: look out for daily masterclasses, performance opportunities, clinics, and other learning opportunities with the Vic Firth Team.

I’m honored to be included, and looking forward to learning from amazing faculty members Bonnie Whiting , Clara Warnaar, Brian Stockard and Keith Aleo on this. Hope you can join us!

More Info!

Recent Busyness

Unsnared Drum Lab

I wrote a book! Unsnared Drum Lab: Designing Your Own Snare Drum Technique explores how to leverage creativity in the practice room to develop instrumental facility on the snare drum, perform without stage fright, and learn music more effectively. The book offers techniques and encouragement to make your own custom-fitting technique-building exercises to address the challenges of your repertoire and your musical development, synthesizing my own material with what I’ve learned from literature in cognitive neurology, motor learning, the learning sciences, peak performance, and the practices of musical experts and notable polyglots.

I am deep in the weeds on musical engraving and layout (and FONTS), and look forward to sharing it with you in the coming months. (Actually, if you’re an avid reader, you might have noticed that I have been sharing some of these exercises and ideas with you already…)

Recent font exploration:

MikeDrop

The MikeDrop podcast is still going strong, and we look forward to bringing you more regular episodes in 2026, alongside a diverse array of “shorts” and other musical explorations.

If you’re new to the pod, there’s no better way to jump in than our “2025 year in review” episode…

Or Mike T’s magnum opus, our favorite musical beginnings:

Ok, back to my font hidey-hole, doing my Mike Things…

Maybe it’s just me, but sometimes when confronted with the mysteries of rudiments (what are they made of, how best to improve their execution), I become as philosophical as 19th-century British poet John Keats when confronted with a Grecian Urn adorned with idyllic scenes:

Text within this block will maintain its original spacing when published

I’ll spare you the analysis, but after extensive rumination, Keats throws us a curveball and concludes that:

Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.

Unfortunately, I don’t have the luxury of a British Romantic: I want to maximize my practice time, and prove to you, the reader, that grace note rudiments are often not really about the grace notes.

But have you ever stopped to ask, “What is the pataflafla?” And why is it important?

After a recent bout of drumming from M. Lefevre’s Le Tambour I was drawn to investigate the utility and provenance of this mysterious rudiment:

1. And if they are called pataflaflas, not flapataflas, why don’t we write them like this?

2. And just what are pataflaflas supposed to train?

Pataflaflas are like the young kids and the cereal Applejacks in their 1990s commercials: we don’t know why we like them, we just do!

They seem to go well with certain other rhythms, like carbonara and artichokes, or arugula and lemon:

In fact, Lefevre’s pataflafla exercises include more of the above rhythms than actual pataflaflas!

What is this quintessence of dust? Is a pataflafla by any other name just as sweet?!?

Like the mill, paradiddle, and flam tap, the pataflafla is nutrient-rich, and working on it in a creative manner has transferable benefits to a number of sectors of your musicianship. Let’s explore this return on investment, isolating each of its component elements, creating exercises to develop each of these elements, and then returning to the original inspiration for this exercise. Is beauty truth, and truth beauty? We shall see!

Technically, pataflaflas contain two antipodal elements:

• Double strokes created by throwing the stick

• Triple strokes executed by “picking up the stick.”

Isolating each of these elements will allow us to maximize the utility of the pataflafla.

What about flams? Pataflaflas contain flams, but those flams are just rebound strokes or triple strokes compressed into grace note form.

Some exercises exploring each of these techniques. In the spirit of Keats’ mysterious amphora, I’ve left out my customary description of each exercise. Can you articulate what each is intended to train?

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Doubles:

1.

2.

3.

Triples:

Exercises and Études:

Now we make up some exercises

1.

2.

A longer étude:

Voilà! Perfect Pataflaflas without hours of flam practice.

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Maybe you can relate:

I was looking forward to decompressing at the end of the semester by reflecting, exploring ideas of creativity in the practice room, my use of AI, creating learning communities on campus, de-centering myself in mentorship, what we did at ASU this semester, etc. But the desire to learn (reflecting, summarizing, analyzing, synthesizing) has given way to a new kind of stress: REFLECTION STRESS. I’m more stressed out thinking about these activities than I was doing them!

Anyways…

The MikeDrop Store is Open!

Mike T and I have spent a few months organizing and notating our arrangements of not-so-recent music by Scarlatti, Rameau, Couperin, and Morley.

They are now available on our little online store:

I love these morsels, arranged for various combinations of vibraphone, marimba, and xylophone. The pieces are so interpretable, eminently playable, and FUN. We are so excited to share our recordings of these works with you, so watch out for that in 2026!

Given my obsession with fonts and Mike T’s obsession with playing from paper scores, you know that some serious care has been put into these adaptations. We hope you try them out!

You can hear more about the process here:

Look to this site for more publications in the coming year, including Mike T’s own transformations and my pedagogically-minded inventions.

Stocking Stuffers

Mike T. and I did a podcast episode about our favorite stocking stuffers for the percussionists in your life. While I assume your loved one’s stockings will be stuffed with MikeDrop scores and chocolate, here are some other music-minded gift ideas for your loved ones.

Mike C’s list

• Silent click mouse, for stealth-clicking during Zoom meetings. I recommend the Logitech M650L

• Jet Pens Gift Certificate. Japanese pen/pencil/paraphernalia website with the best selection and well-curated guides.

  • I recommend

  • Stabilo 88 pens, a graph-paper Rhodia pad, pencils with .9 lead, and perhaps this eraser sampler.

• Musician’s earplugs. I use Westone earplugs, ordered through an Audiologist. The number one thing one could do to protect their hearing over a career of music-making.

• Small books. Three suggestions from me:

  • The Architecture of Happiness, by Alain de Botton: A delightful book about our relationship with buildings.

  • Practicing Music by Design, by Christopher Berg. A wonderful exploration of best practices for musical practice

  • Transit Maps of the World, by Mark Ovenden. It’s not stocking-sized, but this exploration of public transit schema from around the world will keep you up all night while waiting for Santa

• Kitchen equipment: There’s a joy in cooking, and cooking with great tools is especially nice. Smaller favorites of mine.

  • Grandma Witner’s Old-Fashioned Peanut Butter Mixer makes short work of natural nut and seed butters. Like any responsible mallet company, they make a number of models. The 3” is my go-to.

  • Microplane Grater. While technically their “zester” model, this grater is my top choice for cheeses, fruit rinds, and anything else that needs an extra-fine rasp. Plus, it helps the stocking maintain structural integrity!

  • Precut parchment paper. Eliminating one profound frustration of holiday baking is worth its weight in GOLD!

  • Paring knife. Although not typically associated with stockings, knives make great gifts. This one hits the price/utility sweet spot.

• Rehearsal Snacks. Sharing music with friends should be supported by good snacks.

  • TJ 72 dark chocolate. Best price to taste ratio (according to me), and 70-73% is the best range for dark chocolate. Hyper cheap at Trader Joe’s stores.

  • Trader Joe’s Almonds, Cashews and Chocolate’s Trek Mix. Mike T brought bags of this mix to Cyprus, and I was HOOKED. IN fact, all the TJs trail mixes offer good value and taste.

  • Christopher Elbow Chocolates. For elite chamber music partners. Kansas City people know Elbow’s profoundly artistic chocolates. I used to love stopping by the store for a cup of drinking chocolate and his beautiful array of truffles and bon-bons. Luckily for the world, he ships!

  

Mike T’s list

• Theragun Mini: for muscle relaxation before rehearsals, performances, and recordings.

• Subscription to something you care about. Nothing like learning something new while supporting something you love! Examples include: a substack you read, Nkoda, congamasterclass.com or sambamasterclass.com

  Note, maybe you could subscribe to this Substack…

• Arduino unit, to support and encourage tinkering!

• A 442 Tuning Fork. Although not far from an A440 fork, A=442 shows you mean business, and that you care about accuracy and precision

• Practice Space Candle. Ignite focus by igniting FIRE and SCENT!

Mike T’s honorable mentions include:

• No Nuts Cymbal Sleeves: no felts needed and they stick to the stand

• Getting your marimba bars tuned: useful, but difficult to fit in a stocking

• Vic Firth Stick Tips, for practice anywhere (note, Mike C uses the American Classic “Chop-Out” sticks)

• Thin Handkerchiefs for snare drum mutes: no more wallets!

If you’re looking for more suggestions, I have enough gift recommendations to knock a Magi off of a camel. Let me know, and I’ll stuff your inbox with cheerful suggestions for maps, writing implements, and other trinkets and diadems…

Happy Practicing!

Mike

Recently, MikeDrop sat down with Ian Sullivan, timpanist of the New York City Ballet, for a wide-ranging discussi—- ok, ok, the conversation it was mostly focused on timpani playing, but it was still interesting!

During the show, Ian recommended a few exercises he did with his teacher Markus Rhoten. Here’s Markus destroying a practice pad:

I could watch that stroke all day!

Tuning

Ian described using the tuning exercises from the Friese-Lepak book with a few modifications.

Examples:

Rhoten asked his students to play the exercise 3 ways:

1. As written.

2. Cutting the written multi-measure rests in half (2 measures instead of 4 in the first example).

3. Removing all multi-measure rests.

With no rests, the timpanist moves quickly and intuitively between the pitches, focusing on developing a connection between ear and pedal.

Floating, Not Gloating

For these and other situations, Ian also described “floating the pedal,” where timpanists keep their pedals unlocked to allow for instantaneous pitch adjustment while playing. This practice helps timpanists ensure that pitch remains steady even when playing at the extremes of the range (loud at the bottom range, pitch goes up; loud at the top of the range, pitch goes down), as well as at the extremes of volume (loud → generally sharper, etc.). While standard among professional timpanists, it’s rarely practiced by students, particularly those accustomed to playing on balanced-action timpani. Give it a try with these exercises, and you might find your sense of pitch becoming more sensitive!

The exercises Ian suggested make a nice counterpart to the common-tone tuning exercise I shared in a previous post:

Try it pedals unlocked!

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II. A Poll

I’m completing work on my snare drum book and have turned my eye towards engraving. I feel like I’m sitting in the optometrist’s chair, so I thought I’d ask the opinion of my expert readers. What’s your favorite of these options?

Example 1

Example 2

Please let me know what fixes you might suggest to maximize legibility for these.

III. Things I like this week

• This GIANT pencil. Normally, I’m a Stabilo 88 person, but this incandescent green pencil checks all the boxes. Huge lead (1.3mm, far wider than my typical .9) for intentional marking, triangular shape (reminiscent of my grade school pencils and the good old Dr. Grip) for comfort, and cute, non-mechanical-pencil form factor.

• Readers will know that I love Sandwiches of History. Here’s a kindred account: Cookin’ with Congress, whose progenitor draws upon primary sources to cook an entire day’s worth of meals that might have been eaten by US presidents, first ladies, and other notable politicians. The Taft edition goes HARD!

• You all know I love maps, but I love MORE than maps is aerial photos of European cities. Cadiz 😍

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1. Take on Big Problems

2. Experiment on Yourself

3. Turn Your Music into Exercises

4. Turn Your Exercises into Music

5. Practice Multi-Modally

6. Record Yourself for Instant Feedback.

7. Be Curious

Today’s edition:

Record Yourself for Instant Feedback or

For many percussionists, performance anxiety is akin to working at Severance’s Lumon Industries: a Mysterious and Important, often inscrutable, affair.

For those who didn’t watch the world’s slowest-moving show, employees at Lumon Industries sever their work and non-work personalities, each remaining unaware of what the other is doing. While watching Severance(at 200% speed), I was struck by the similarity between the characters’ desire to know what happens “at work” and my own desire to understand what happens in my mind and my hands while on stage.

Perhaps you’ve experienced this as well?

I know my Innie—my on-stage self—is struggling with a number of performance-related issues, and responding to them in real-time. But, my Outie—my practice-room-based Mike—is unaware of what happens in the performance. At times, all I see is the results of performance anxiety: the missed notes, the flat, expressionless playing.

I know I should do something to work on this, but what? I recommend that musicians address performance anxiety through both their practice habits and a concerted study of the feedback they receive while performing under pressure.

We receive feedback in our playing from our peers, teachers, and coaches, and—most importantly—from ourselves. Since much of our time is spent practicing alone, developing the ability to critique our own playing is crucial for effective musical growth. However, self-feedback is challenging and often intertwined with emotional judgments, making it difficult to separate our performance personality from our critical thinking mode. Mastering self-feedback thus requires a shift in mindset: we must become our own coach.

Creativity

Why do I consider self-diagnosis a creative act? It combines active and objective listening with comparison against some notion of how something should be (a mental representation). It requires thoughtful and responsive ears, a deft touch with adjectives (try and come up with 5 specific words to describe your playing after hearing a recording), and the ability to determine a specific course of action based on what has just been heard. Sounds like creativity to me!

The best (and most creative) self-feedback begins with recording oneself. Here are a few ideas:

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Small Scale: Record, Refine, Repeat

There is a wealth of literature available on the power of Deliberate Practice. Sometimes, however, it can be challenging for a performer to diagnose their issues while playing in a way that enables the scientific rigor of Deliberate Practice. Recording helps!

1. Pick a small and troublesome musical span (preferably under 20 seconds).

2. Record yourself playing this section. Hopefully audio only!

3. Listen back three or four times, each time focusing on a different parameter, such as phrasing, timing, tone quality, intonation, or pulse control.

4. Give yourself specific, actionable, dispassionate feedback, drawing upon your own mental models. (No “This sounds bad” allowed! Be clear: “The E-flat in measure 5 is sharp,” or “I’m missing the interval leap in measure 2.”)

5. Address one issue at a time, utilizing every available practice technique.

This process should take around 10 minutes. By focusing on a small section, this approach also develops process cues aimed at solidifying the memory and execution of musical material – it creates a mental “bookmark” in your repertoire at this section, allowing you to recover from issues more easily during a performance while helping you to more accurately and precisely execute the material under pressure. This approach also leverages spaced repetition while enhancing one’s mental model through critical listening. Over time, diagnostic abilities and the toolkit of practice techniques will grow.

What if you don’t know what’s wrong, take a cue from another one of my newsletters, and leverage Design Thinking: Brainstorm potential issues. Prototype a variety of changes, interpretations, or other variants, and try them quickly, getting feedback on their efficacy.

Medium Scale: More “Performance Mode”

When we practice, our goal is to think critically about our own playing, diagnosing issues, and planning our next steps. When we perform, that immediate feedback can short-circuit the flow state associated with peak performance. At times, our performances on stage fall short precisely because of this urge to offer critical feedback in the practice room: we have not spent enough time in “performance mode.”

We can grow our performative skills by putting ourselves into “performance mode,” recording the performance to facilitate critical thinking after the fact. Over time, one can quickly enter this reflexive performance mode more readily. A formal performance is not required to enter this performance mode: playing for peers or coaches, or even simply pressing “record,” can often be sufficient to foster this mindset.

I made an AI-enhanced video explaining this concept here:

1. Record a medium-sized chunk of music. Here, using a medium-sized chunk is essential. Too often, we practice our performance skills by running through entire pieces. This is akin to jumping from a warm-up to a marathon, with no smaller races in between. Not a great idea.

2. Before listening, reflect on the performance, noting your mistakes and keeping track of your emotional and mental state.

3. Then, listen critically to the recording and compare your perception to reality. Does it sound the way you imagined? If not, what is different?

4. Categorize the issues: are they randomized or consistent? Small things (missed notes, bad transition), or systemic—a lack of dynamic contrast or tendency to compress fast passages?

With time and effort, one can better articulate the impact of performance anxiety on one’s playing and learn to practice in ways that support effective musical portrayals.

This technique can also be used to calibrate your interpretations to different acoustics and performance environments. Orchestral players will frequently use their colleagues or recordings to help hone their sound in different acoustics, calibrating their sense of their sound up close with the reality from hundreds of feet away. In chamber music, I find listening to a performance at a later date can help me calibrate my interpretations: did that moment land the way I wanted it to, or was my inflection too small for the space?

—

For a more detailed guide to recording yourself in the practice room, please see here:

Recording in the Practice Room — Michael Compitello

Happy Practicing—wait, I mean happy performing!

A reminder of the process (I should use Design Thinking to improve my graphic design!)

Now let’s dig a little bit deeper, exploring (a) how improvisation can make the prototyping and feedback areas a recursive loop, and (b) how to incubate and refine the results in such a way that they create lasting impact.

Our musical problem? The first measure of Etude 1 from Joseph Tompkins’ Nine French-American Rudimental Solos.

Our Method

1. Use Design Thinking-inspired improvisation (where prototyping and feedback are dynamic and constant) to explore what kind of variations might help us develop our musical and physical technique

2. Codify the most effective exercises and incubate their development

As I mentioned in the post above, performing musicians require a specific type of design, where promising prototypes are refined over several practice sessions before being deemed effective. Simply improvising and creating exercises one time does not lead to encoding and recombination: the performer must practice a similar exercise over several sessions.

So, our process looks a bit more like this:

Why this works:

A. Improvisation

My practice session begins (and ends) with the first measure of the Tompkins:

Here’s a transcript of a short (~10-minute) practice session. I halved the note values to increase legibility. My goals:

• Determine what is challenging in the piece

• Improvise some musical fragments that might help isolate and address these challenges

Analysis

Blind imitation of my practice is dangerous. Imitation with analysis (and later synthesis of the imitated ideas) is essential. Before moving on, ask yourself some questions:

• Could you guess my diagnosis of the challenges in this measure from this transcript?

• Might you ascertain what techniques or musical ideas I was targeting, and when?

• How might you describe my method?

For my part, my diagnosis of the challenges:

• Inflection of double strokes within a quintuplet, particularly trying to eliminate wrist and finger tension

• Familiarity with a RRLRR/LLRLL sticking

• Rhythmic accuracy with some lilt and without tension

Reminder: these are my challenges. Yours might be different.

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B. Incubation

Next, we select the most valuable exercises from the improvisation session and organize them into musical nuggets that can be revisited and practiced over several sessions. Musicians need time to build in physical development so that their muscles learn how to do the new idea. These musical morsels should include some fragments that are easier than the piece at hand and others that are more challenging than the goal repertoire. The mission is to approach them with all the verve of Deliberate Practice, where the player is focused intently on the task at hand, enacting a loop of receiving feedback, intuiting solutions, and assessing whether the solution worked.

Here are my top picks from this session. I printed them out!

Remember, these work for me. Or, they worked for me at the time of writing. The same exercises might prove useful to you—at the very least as a way of seeing how someone else operates—but they will not be as targeted as the material you create or organize yourself.

Musical Post-Its

Your answer will vary.

I lean towards Post-It. I don’t think what I created above is worth wasting ink on, and I know that my needs and desires will change. I don’t think they are as cool as these tablets from Rome’s Palazzo Massimo:

Pruning

In fact, all exercises lose their utility over time. As we improve, we become immunized to their challenges, and this process should be undertaken again, pruning and replanting your practice.

In my own learning, I prefer to do this improvisation feedback loop each time I practice. I find that one does not need to do the exercises every time they practice. But working on something like these exercises will help address the major challenges of the piece consistently, imaginatively, and “soundfully.” For more information on incorporating these “tropes” into your practice, refer to the following article on warming up for Delécluse

Happy improvising!

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7 Practices for Creative Practicing

1. Take on Big Problems

2. Experiment on Yourself

3. Turn Your Music into Exercises

4. Turn Your Exercises into Music

5. Practice Multi-Modally

6. Record Yourself for Instant Feedback.

7. Be Curious

This post might be especially applicable and valuable for non-percussionists. If there’s someone you think might be interested, please share it with them!

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One reminder this week:

Practicing “creatively” is not about alleviating boredom in the practice room. It’s about being proactive, inquisitive, and investigatory. These habits help you hone your mental representations and make your musical learning more durable and effective. When I say creative, I’m referring to thinking creatively in addition to making new musical material: articulating issues, brainstorming solutions, and testing those ideas quickly. These are the essential principles of Design Thinking, and they serve us well in the practice room.

5. Practice Multi-Modally

By getting to know your repertoire from a different angle, you develop a more nuanced and durable mental model representation, which reduces performance anxiety.

There are MANY ways to do this. Here’s one: try to think in terms of axes.

Horizontal

If a passage is moving primarily horizontally, practice it vertically. Likewise, if you are addressing musical material that consists of vertical sonorities, practice them as horizontal passages to hear the inner voices.

Here’s a passage from “Fleet,” the second movement of Jacob Druckman’s Reflections on the Nature of Water:

The music here seems to undulate and flow horizontally. That said, the primary musical idea is harmonic, not melodic. The graceful voice leading helps the music flow and ebb, setting the stage for the sfz notes to come. Although the primary technical challenge is a 4-3-1-2 permutation, it’s not a great use of one’s time to hover unnecessarily over the evenness of the 32nd notes. In fact, the timing of the smallest notes is a powerful interpretive tool. Here, I recommend practicing each group of 4 32nd notes as a single block chord. This practice allows us to hear Druckman’s voice-leading more clearly. It also allows us to hone in on the real difficulty in this passage: moving between positions. All of a sudden, the double lateral strokes are not such a big problem…

Working this way accomplishes three more goals.

1. These practices provide a built-in analysis as you develop your own exercises.

2. You are hearing different elements of he piece as you practice, solidifying your mental representation of how the passage can (and later, should) sound.

3. At the same time, practicing multi-modally develops memory.

Musicians tend to activate three types of memory in performance: visual, aural, and kinetic. Percussionists tend to rely on kinetic memory, leading to some nasty surprises if something sounds or looks different in a performance than in a practice session.

If you think you know a piece, try testing your aural memory and singing it or playing it on a different instrument. Or, test your visual memory by ‘looking’ your way through a piece.

Cheat Sheets

Another “mode” to incorporate is the type of memory used in a passage. When we perform, we tend to activate three types of memory:

1. Visual. What does the passage look like?

2. Sonic: What does the passage sound like?

3. Kinetic: What does it feel like to perform this passage?

Together, these three “memories” are a significant part of our mental representations. Over-reliance on one can lead to disaster in performance.

I like to work on blending and testing these three memories by making cheat sheets for repertoire I’m learning.

This practice leverages a desirable difficulty called Generative Recall, where working hard to remember information and reproduce it in different arenas helps solidify learning and improves recall under pressure (in performance).

Here’s a cheat sheet I made for a movement of Robert Honstein’s Down Down Baby, for two performers on a single cello.

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And here’s what the score looks like in its original form. Can you see what I did to create the cheat sheet?

This is my part for the final movement, “Down Down Baby.”

And here’s a cheat sheet I made for Han Lash’s Start, for solo snare drum:

• Structure

  • Making the cheat sheet forced me to think about how the music was structured, to look for self-similar sections and think about how they are represented, to conceptualize the music from a different point of view. Isn’t that analysis?

• Kinetic

  • At the same time, writing something down that represents a number of encoded physical actions is a powerful way to cement the kinetic memory needed to perform each of these works.

• Visualization

  • Reviewing the cheat sheets helps me to visualize myself in performance, which can alleviate performance anxiety.

  • Finally, having less to look at simplifies my visual pathway through a piece on stage, enabling me to look and listen more closely to my own sound and motions.

The cheat sheets accomplish precisely what the Druckman exercise did: they allow me to address the problem behind the problem. Yay!

Final thought:

running through all these ideas is my tip #7: Be Curious. Curiosity about sound, motion, and structure is what led us to these decisions, and these decisions are what make us better musicians. Curiosity leads to creating, and creating is…creative!

Happy practicing!

Coming soon: How to record yourself for instant feedback:

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Here’s the backstory…

Percussionists often face the challenge of melodicizing music written for woodblocks, cowbells, tom-toms, and other non-pitched instruments. How best to create phrases out of short, particulate sounds?

Try thinking of inflection instead of accent, using the arm to help facilitate changes of weight rather than abrupt changes in timbre. This shift enables the distance between accented and unaccented notes to be variable, which leaves space for a constantly moving phrase with greater capacity to convey the meter—our most basic goal—without simply accenting each downbeat. Remember: evenness is a technique, not a way of life.

By mobilizing inflection, an astute percussionist can draw distinctions between the overlapping spheres of structure within a musical work:

• Meter

• Phrase

• Inflection

While one might easily draw an example from the extant repertoire, in the spirit of invention, I share a passage I penned, heavily inspired by the single-stroke exercises in Guy Lefèvre’s Le Tambour.1 The entire text is highly recommended and is perhaps the most significant work of its kind: a collection of highly melodic, focused, and interesting exercises that introduce us to the world of French rudimental drumming from various eras. The book is worth your time and effort.

The phrase might be clearer if written thusly:

Play this snare drum exercise for a non-percussionist. Can they tell what meter in which you are playing?

We test our work in a similar manner to the “throwing” exercise shared earlier:

Compare accents of weight to accents of color. In the first, one uses more arm to slow the stick down, ensuring the note comes out heavier and darker. The fulcrum is closer to the back of the hand. In the second, the wrists and fingers accelerate the stroke, with the fulcrum being at the front of the hand. You don’t need to write this down, but here’s how it might look:

Technique Check:

• Relaxed grip, low grip pressure, very little finger flexion. How can the accents be as slow a stroke as possible?

• Listen carefully to the sound quality of your accents. Can they be open, rich, and full of color?

Unlike most of the exercises in this book, testing on extant repertoire is more effective than inventing our own variations:

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Testing: Cirone 1

With inflection on the mind, let’s reframe Etude number 1 from Anthony Cirone’s Portraits in Rhythm with more melodic, inflected accents rather than a 2 height texture.2 How would you characterize the change?

An attempt at notating what I consider to be required inflection…

Testing: Delécluse 1

Another inflective opportunity: the opening of Delécluse’s Douze Études.3

My conclusion is that the text of Delécluse’s body of work, the influences surrounding the composition of this corpus, and the testimony and performance practice of his students heavily imply that his works should be approached with maximum color, melodicity, and dynamism.

With a goal of highlighting inflection above evenness, how might we mobilize weight and color to show both meter and phrase in the first few measures:

Original Version

• M.1: The first ruff can be fast and bright, and the 2nd a little less effusive.

• In m. 2, can you make a long-short-short sound?

• M. 7: Can the downbeat be stronger than the grace notes after it?

• M. 8: What about showing a sequence here? The first two notes of the bar are answered by two accented notes (at F) and followed by two rhythmically diminutive accents leading into m. 9

I made some markings to illustrate some of the inflections to consider with one’s newfound sonic malleability.

Once you’ve established the meter, try something new each time you approach the etude.

Testing: Keyboard

Try this type of inflection on a keyboard piece you’re practicing. Notice any changes?

Happy practicing!