Greetings fellow drummers !

My name is Paul. I'm 53 and I've been a webdevelopper since 1996.

I have two passions in life : Wing Chun kung fu that I've been practising for 12 years ( and teaching since 2019 ), and drumming.

I started drumming when I was 17 and like so many of us, I was interested in playing the songs I loved, but not particularly in practising rudiments.

I stopped playing for 20 years when I had my daughter and must admit it was a pretense to be lazy :(

I started playing again when my daughter left home, back in 2013, in part because I sang for a year in a Zappa cover group ( thoug I'm not a singer ), and mostly because with Youtube I discovered the amazing Tony Royster video where he does a solo dedicated to Tony Williams.

This video blew me away and pushed me back to drumming which I have not stopped sinced, practising up to 2 hours a day for years.

Unfortunately for me, I'm not a very good drummer.

I'm what some would call a specialized drummer : I make scores of the songs I like, I study them and then I play them with as much fidelity as I can.

I've been into progressive rock since I was 17 and was largely influenced by drummers such as Christian Vander ( Magma ), Bill Brufford ( King Crimson/Yes ), Phil Collins ( Genesis ), Pierre Moerlen ( Gong ), Terry Bozzio ( Zappa ), Vinnie Colaiuta ( Zappa ) and some others.

Thanks to Youtube, I've now discovered hundreds of fabulous drummers coming from all horizons, my all star heroes currently being Dave Weckl ( whom I call Mr Smooth ) and Gavin Harrisson ( who currently plays with King Crimson ) and Larnell Lewis ( Snarky Puppy ).

I've learned to play about 200 hundred songs but I remain an intermediate drummer though I've studied with several teachers for 3 or 4 years.

Like so many wannabe drummers, I've tried to improve by following videos on Youtube, but the problem remains. I know it very well because my kung-fu students have the same issue : vocabulary is useless if you have no flow.

I've studied rudiments as much as I could : singles, doubles, paradiddles.... Some more than others evidently but I feel I'm lacking something.

I've recently discovered JP Bouvet's channel and it gave me an outlook on drumming none other teacher could. JP was at Berkeley for some years and though he was the leading student there, I did not hear from him for several years. Then I discovered his channel and he has an approach which is really amazing. Check him out, it should do you good.

During my apprenticeship, I always felt that methods were not enough to learn flow. I felt I needed a tool to help me : I often said to myself : I've worked this rudiment for monthes, and that other one too. What would be helful is a tool that would create scores using these two rudiments to help me improve my flow using them.

As I said, I like making scores, but not for exercises ! Making scores remains a chore and is time consuming. And how could it help me because I would need hundreds of variants to solve my problem.

So, as a webdevelopper, I started thinking about a tool that would do just that : create scores using rudiments.

This tool is now in its alpha stage, for me, but also for you !

Please bear with me : it is only an early apha version and should improve in the weeks to come.

Drumchallenge will remain absolutely free for all in its basic use, though I'm thinking about a subscription option allowing to save challenges and other useful features for hardcore players out there.

I hope you will find it useful.

I wish you all a good drumming !

Paul

For those who would like to see me play, check out my account on this wonderful online collaboration tool : Bandhug.com. My alias there is BlackPage.