Yankee Doodle Drumming

Supriya and I spent about an hour this morning working on "Yankee Doodle Dandy", and she made some serious progress. We worked on understanding the structure of the song. She had not connected the words "verse" and "chorus" with parts of the song, so we started there. She already has 2 or 3 drum patterns under her belt. We labeled 2 of them #1 and #2 and assigned #1 to the verse and #2 to the chorus. Yesterday we had worked on adding a flourish at the ends of the verse and the chorus. With all this, the drumming part became rather complicated, but after a couple of tries she mastered it. I want to run this a couple of times today to cement it in.

I realized something else: our breakthrough happened when we labeled the two patterns #1 and #2, and also when I clarified what verse and chorus mean. The labels are short-hand for a concept or an idea, and when the lable is internalized, you can use that as a building block for the next level.