… A Bit About Me
I grew up with a constant fascination with percussion and rhythm. Two of my cousins were drummers and I would watch their hands move with a sense of bewilderment and inability to comprehend what they were even doing - it was like magic to me. As a child, the drums seemed to me to occupy an aura of complete mystery, because unlike other instruments, they were an amalgamation of many different, separate shiny parts. And I noticed that the drums had not just one, but many sounds to them. Listening to a drummer sounded to me like 3 people playing at once.
The sound of the cymbals caught my attention first - sharp, bright. The toms, and the bass drum, thunderous and boomy. Then the snare drum, with its unusual, brushy sound. It sounded completely different to the other drums and I had no clue as to how it produced such a noise. The way that all of these different sounds interacted together fascinated me, and furthermore I couldn’t fathom how somebody could use all four of their limbs to play them all at the same time. I wouldn’t get my first drum set until I had finished my first year of high school, but in the meantime I played on found objects at home - namely pots and pans, using wooden spoons as drumsticks. I still need to pay mum and dad back for the kitchenware I destroyed.
I got to play the drums for the first time when I was in year 7 of high school. There was a kit set up in the school hall for an upcoming performance, and I arrived for the rehearsal but didn’t get the memo that it was cancelled. So I got to play for 30 minutes, uninterrupted. It was some of the most fun I’ve ever had and is still a memory I cherish, as it marked the start of my 15 year long (as at the time of writing this) journey playing drums. My interests in high school also took me to learning to play bass, after listening to the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and later on guitar and singing.
After I graduated high school I decided to pursue music as a career, simply because there was nothing else I could envisage myself doing. I had the great privilege to learn of exemplary Australian drummers, and develop my musicianship through an intensive curriculum of playing with other wonderful musicians and studying the work of world’s great drummers of the past and present.
My teaching journey began after I graduated university. It was a real challenge, and gave me a deep appreciation for the great teachers who had taught me in the past. Learning drumming can be overwhelming and my experience teaching has helped me to find ways of breaking down difficult tasks into manageable chucks appropriate for the level of every student. Many times in university I struggled to know what to practice, so helping people find their own journey on the drums has been a deeply gratifying experience.
During the COVID lockdown in Melbourne, I began teaching my students online. There was a great deal of skepticism about this as neither me nor many of my students had confidence that a Zoom call was an appropriate medium for a lesson, but to our mutual surprise the lessons worked wonderfully. I now conduct half of all my lessons online, to great results. After this online success, I was inspired to learn off of my favourite drummers in the world and started taking online lessons from Rick Dior, an amazing teacher and player in North Carolina US who’s online catalog of drum lessons will leave you aghast.
My ongoing practice of teaching has been a privilege and led me to meet some wonderful people, and I am always delighted to facilitate those same feelings of excitement and inextinguishable fun that I felt when I played the drum set in the school hall in year 7 all those years ago.