I felt this nauseating feeling rising up from my 8 year old gut to my tight throat as my mom pulled the van into the parking lot. This was day 3, and things hadn’t gotten any better. My parents had insisted that I’d be fine and that I’d get over it, but I wasn’t feeling any less terrified than I was two days ago. These people I had to face every day this week were trying to kill me, and I couldn’t come up with an escape plan. But today was day 3, Wednesday. Only 2 more days and this agonizing week of swim lessons would be over.

My fear of water wasn’t going anywhere, and it looked like I’d be living the rest of my life forever fearing drowning. This was embarrassing as an 8 year old, because all my friends were learning how to swim and were diving head first off the diving board. But I was the kid curled up in a ball in tears on the concrete - a good 6 feet from the edge of the pool. I was terrified just to jump into the pool without...

“Yeah… he…um- definitely has some…potential,” the music store employee gingerly observed after I laid down my very first sick beats on a real drumset.

The only problem was, my 12-year-old beats were not sick. At least not in a good way. I had no coordination and no idea how to hold my sticks. I actually remember just hitting everything I could as fast as I could in my nervous excitement. After all, I didn’t know when my next opportunity might be. Getting a drumset was way out of my reach. I was already pretty involved with playing piano, which I’d been learning since 3rd grade. My parents weren’t eager to sign me up for a second instrument, and I doubt they wanted the noise around the house either. Playing the drums and becoming a drummer was a very, very far-off dream at the time. Getting a drumset wasn’t going to be a quick and easy process for me…

Everybody dreams of something. Maybe you dream of retiring so you have...

5 years ago I ran out of cash in New York City and almost didn’t make it back. The funny thing was…this was on my honeymoon.

My wife and I decided to do somewhat of an East Coast road trip for a week after we got married, and our tightly budgeted trip included a day trip to NYC from Washington DC. I’d never been to New York, and now was the perfect time to finally make it there - even if it was just for an afternoon. I’ve always been really excited to go to a place I haven’t been to, and this was no exception. 

Now if you do the math on those drive times, you’ll find that we were easily going to spend more than 8 hours driving that day. I had carefully scheduled out our time in the city, planning every detail of what we’d see and do and when we’d do it. We’d get to the “Top of the Rock,” stroll Central Park, see the new One World Trade Center, walk the Brooklyn Bridge, stroll the High Line…literally do...

During several college summers and falls, I worked at a local high school with the marching band. I generally worked with the front ensemble or “pit,” which consisted of all the mallet instruments, synthesizers, and other auxiliary percussion. This was a lot of fun, and a lot of it was right up my alley as a percussion performance major in college. I had never played in marching band myself, but I knew and understood the instruments the kids were playing.

To be honest, though, I always felt a little bit like a fraud in this job. This was classic “imposter syndrome,” where you feel like you don’t really know what you’re doing and you’re going to be “found out” at any moment. I felt like I was teetering on the edge of that cliff the entire time I worked this school job. The kids were great, the instructors were great, and the band director was a great guy to work for. But I always felt like I wasn’t really cut out for doing...

I sat on the outside deck of a coffee shop, overlooking the Chattahoochee river near Atlanta on a perfect day in June. I was sipping probably the best frappuccino I’d ever had, and my girlfriend (now wife!) sat across from me. This was one of our favorite date spots when we were in college, and this summer afternoon was the perfect moment to drink coffee to the sounds of a river. But then I received a text that instantly reversed the carefree mood.

My wife and I were both in music school together, and our university was launching a marching band the coming fall. I had opted to stay out of marching band for a few reasons: Number one, it was a huge time commitment on weekends, and I was already a gigging drumset player at the time. I didn’t want to sacrifice my paying drumset gigs to go play in marching band. Number two, I’d never even been in marching band before. Never in high school, and I literally had zero interest. Number three, I was entering my junior year of...

The envelope sat on the kitchen table, staring up at me. This was it. This moment would decide my future. What was about to take place would set into motion the course of the rest of my life… what friends I’d have, what kind of music career I’d have, where I’d live…who I’d marry. All of this would be determined by one of two words: …pleased… or …regret… Which would it be?

Hundreds of emotions coursed through my unemotional persona on this spring afternoon my senior year of high school. Would my dream college accept me? Will plan A work? I had worked so hard for this. I had practiced like crazy all through my senior year, preparing for a music school audition I honestly had no business attempting. I had never played percussion before, yet I had signed up for a percussion audition. I had never played jazz drumset before, yet I auditioned for the drumset program. My high school drum teacher had put me through a crash...

Nervousness and a little bit of fear hung on me as I walked into my very first drum lesson. I was a young 15 year old who had taken piano lessons for 7 years, but even those 7 years hadn’t prepared me for this new step out of my comfort zone. I liked the familiar, and I even thrived off of habit and consistency. But I’d known deep down inside for a long time that I really wanted to take drum lessons… one day… when I was older… when I was less scared of learning something totally new. One day I’d be more grown up and confident, able to take on a new challenge with ease and proudly join a band and be a great rock drummer. After all, that really had been my ultimate dream for a few years now. But now on this afternoon in May I found myself stumbling directly into this distant and even terrifying dream, and there was no turning back.

Armed with my SD1 drumsticks I’d purchased a few years before for a “junior drumline”...

I had the opportunity a little over a year ago to attend a masterclass by one of my all-time favorite drummers. This masterclass wasn’t a clinic, though, where a bunch of folks gather in a music store to listen to their favorite fusion drummer shred for an hour. This was a true “masterclass,” where the objective was to actually just hang out and have a Q&A session.

Only 12 slots were open, so the group attending was kept small. This allowed for more of a “hangout” kind of vibe, where the masterclass was all about group discussion instead of watching a performance. The entire event lasted for 3 hours, and it took place in a recording studio.

For the first hour and a half, we all sat in a circle in the tracking room and just asked this drummer questions. We talked about the music industry, getting paid, working in studios, how to learn songs, and lots more. It was really fun being in a room with 11 other guys my age who shared my exact interests and...

In February of 2015 I was wrapping up my college career and enjoying a final semester of smooth sailing to the finish line. I had already performed my senior recital the previous fall, and I was just finishing up a few class credits in the spring. I also had the time and opportunity to take additional lessons outside of school, so I reached out to a respected drummer in town whom my percussion teacher recommended. He solved a big struggle I had at the time by giving me some very counter-intuitive advice.

Now I was playing a bunch in jazz band at this time, and I was really working at being a solid jazz drummer. At the same time, I was also playing at my church every Sunday and playing in a cover band as often as possible. Genre-wise, I was gaining a lot of versatility just from these three groups alone. I had a problem, however, in the jazz realm.

Our jazz band director was constantly hounding me for not having the right feel in my ride pattern. Straight-ahead swing is...

My wife and I were on a trip recently, and we had the pleasure of hanging out with and observing an expert blacksmith.

He was working on crafting these iron rods into a decorative “track” on which you could slide a barn door. He was spending most of his time working on hammering out the end of the rod to create an end piece that looked like a leaf. This required a lot of precise hammering, which meant he was constantly going back and forth between the fire and the anvil. In talking to him we learned all about melting point temperature and the methods of heating up the fire over the years. We learned about anvils and their importance in metal-craft, and we even talked about how an anvil is often used as a percussion instrument in orchestral music from time to time.

But I noticed something in particular that the blacksmith kept doing over and over that fascinated me.

Every time after he struck the iron rod he was crafting, he’d let his mallet bounce off onto the...