Monthly Archives: October 2010

DrumChattr – A New Percussion/Marimba Resource

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A new percussion/marimba resource has been added to the Internet recently. That resource is the website http://www.drumchattr.com.

This site is the brainchild of Thomas Burritt, Shane Griffin and Dave Gerhart. More information about their story can be found at their About Page.

It has only been a month or so since they have been live and already the quality of content is pretty amazing. There is a podcast where the hosts talk amongst themselves and cover topics from the forums. They also interview famous percussionists like Peter Erskine, and Paul Rennick, and others.

Sites like the Percussive Arts Society already have percussion forums for discussion and I don’t believe it is the intent of DrumChattr to replace that. But this does give another place to discuss specific topics from graduate auditions to being a professional. They also post high quality percussion performance videos.

I have added this site to my RSS feed and will be visiting frequently and I encourage you to do so as well. If I think of a really good idea, maybe I will even contribute an article in the future!

Sight reading exercise at Marimbalogy.com

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First of all congratulations to the Minnesota Twins for making the playoffs and for getting home field advantage in the division series against the Yankees! This series will come down to which team has better pitching in my opinion and I am excited for it to start. Now on to the post.

I am very excited about the other marimba bloggers out there and one of them is Charlie over at http://www.marimbalogy.com. He has done some great episodes about the Burton grip recently as well as a number of other great episodes.

Charlie recently posted the sight reading of the week for marimba and I couldn’t resist trying it. Remember the purpose of this was to sight read this without any practice at all. Here is my performance:

So there are wrong notes and tempo issues but for the first attempt I was happy with the fact that it is mostly right. I was also able to think about the crescendo and some accents. I consider myself pretty bad at sight reading so I am happy for the challenge. Thanks again to Charlie for writing this piece and posting it!