Surprise!

Jeremy just called, he drove into Decatur around 5:00 AM. So now we’ve got someone else to hang out with on this weekend of celebration of our Independence. I wish he would have gotten in yesterday because he probably could have gone to the drum clinic.

Yesterday’s Recap.

Left Decatur at 3:45 PM. Dropped off some stuff at Shane’s house, and then proceeded to Famous Dave’s BBQ for a cornucopia of tasty pork treats. Turns out Jenny had given us slightly incorrect directions on how to get to the drum clinic, but after realizing we were heading to like Kentucky on 24 west, we turned around and got on 24 east. Arrived at 6:45, just as the announcer got on stage. Perfect timing.

Man that show was absolutely sick. Thomas Lang was the dude on showcase. Just imagine if Arnold S. was a drummer… that’s what it was like listening to Thomas talk (Austrian accent). It was kinda funny because I was running in my mind, the skit of “Hanz and Franz” from SNL. Anyways, his limb independence was simply amazing, and his double bass technique was insane.

What I loved about the whole thing was, the Q and A portion when the crowd was asking Q’s. Thomas would go into this long answer with examples and conclude with “and so forth and so on” just like Arnold S. always says. The other common comment was, “Practice this in all possible time signatures with all possible sticking combinations.” and “Just play that for long periods of time.”

I was telling Jon it’s like when I read stuff from Vai and Satch it’s the same thing, “Practice these patterns in all keys using all possible finger combinations.” What it boils down to is, if you’re not spending at least 3 hours a day practicing your instrument, you’ll never become proficient at it.

Well there is a lot of media as we were taking pictures and video like we were from Japan and it was our first time in New York City. Those will be posted later today.