A few weeks ago, I fell victim to some writer’s block: an unexpected loss of motivation to get a post out. For some reason, I just didn’t feel like writing about anything. The following week I eventually got something together, but it was really a struggle.

I’m starting to fly by the seat of my pants a little bit with regard to keeping the blog updated. Before I launched the site, I had a few dozen transcriptions that were already done or at least a good chunk of the way done. Sharing the sheet music I’ve created was really the impetus behind this whole thing.

But transcriptions are a lot of work. Just selecting material to pick apart can be challenging enough. Then I have to notate the selection by ear, proofread it the best I can, properly engrave everything so it looks nice, write the actual text of the post, proofread that, and then finally share it.

Charts and grooves don’t take as much work; the issue here is just picking the right kind of music.

Book reviews and the “Know Your Tempos” posts aren’t terribly difficult, as writing normally comes easy to me. I just don’t want to rip through all of the books and bands that I really appreciate, since it can take a few years to really appreciate a book or an artist’s catalog, so there’s a risk that I could go a while without posting anything of that sort.

Rants & Raves can be some of my favorite posts, so long as I have something interesting to write about. But the sad reality is that there aren’t a lot of interesting discussions happening in the drumming world right now.

The biggest drumming circle I’m a part of is Reddit, where I frequent a few different drumming subs. And a lot of the stuff that I see get posted doesn’t really give me any material to work with.

Most of the posts are people sharing photos of their drums, which is cool. There are videos of people basically showing off, but most of the stuff I see doesn’t really interest me musically. And then there are a lot of beginner questions as well: how to hold drumsticks, what kind of drum kit to buy, etc. I guess I could talk about those to some degree, but I can only answer the same question once, even though the same question gets asked over and over again.

There always seem to be fascinating discussions and questions happening on places like r/MusicTheory. Take this one for example. I really don’t see anything like that happening regularly in the drum world. Sometimes it’s hard to even imagine anything like that happening.

I’m not even sure what I would like to see, but I want to see something since I really enjoy talking about drums. But I need something to talk about!

I’ve cooked up a few topics that I might be able to write about long–form. But I can’t be sure if they will work. When I wrote about the world’s first drum set book, I didn’t know if I would be able to get to the bottom of anything. If I didn’t wind up with a good answer, I may have had to scrap the whole post and then try to come up with something else late in the week.

I remember seeing a post recently on r/drums where someone was bemoaning the lack of substantive discourse on the subreddit, much like I am right now. I think the post got deleted by whoever started it; I saw a few comments that basically said “lol dude that’s your problem”. And maybe it is.

I am aware of the old–school drumming forums like Drummerworld that have about the same amount of users as something like r/drums. I guess I could start perusing them, but I don’t know if I have the time to frequent all these different groups. Maybe I do though; it seems like it would certainly cut down on the general silliness I see on Reddit…

I still want to diversify the material on my site. I’ve only scratched the surface of sharing original practice material, and hopefully the more time I spend writing, recording, and producing music will give me more insights to share. And of course, I haven’t talked about any web development stuff yet either. Maybe there’s a way to repurpose those posts I always seem into something that would be more interesting for me to write about. So stay tuned…