Percussion and Drum Stuff: Tools and Resources

Below is a list of tools and resources I personally use (or have used) to help me with drumming, filming, composing, putting together my sheet music, and creating my blogs and websites. I highly recommend each and every one (and wouldn’t list it here if I didn’t). Some of these premium services do come with a price (just being honest here), but seriously I wouldn’t risk mentioning them here if I didn’t know they work great and will save a lot of people time and money.

Where to Get Your Percussion Questions Answered

Drum Forum coming soon!
Contact Me: Either send me an email or comment below and I’ll do my best to respond to you in a timely matter but due to the number of emails I get daily I may or may not be able to.

Learn How to Play Drums and Other Lessons

Djembe Drumming Lessons: 27 Djembe Drumming Lessons with master drummer and African Achiever of the year award winner Lamin Jassey.
Beat Generals: Beat Generals helps you unleash your inner super producer by teaching you all the techniques and tricks the pros use to create the hottest beats on the radio today.
Stick Technique - Drumming Technique and Advanced Drumming: Want to master your rudiments on drums easily and quickly? Want to double or even triple your dynamic range? Want to get your fundamental drumming technique as perfect as possible?

Sheet Music Resources

Toontrack Superior Drummer 2.0: Virtual drummer
Finale PrintMusic 2011: professional music software for arrangers, composers, teachers, students, and other musicians.

Website Tools

Aweber: The internet’s most powerful email opt-in service and email marketing and broadcasting tool. This is what I use to build and send my free email newsletters.
HostGator:Website hosting with easy to use, one-click automatic WordPress installation, and excellent customer service. I highly recommend Host Gator for your first website. Read my top ten reasons for building your own website.
Kontera: Help pay for your website by placing relevant in text ad links on your blog posts and articles.
Namecheap: Very affordable site to quickly and easily register your perfect domain name. I registered scripting4v5.com here.
Socrates: This is the WordPress theme and framework that VB Scripting for CATIA V5 runs on, with built in navigation and easy customization.

Percussion Jobs

oDesk: oDesk is a great website where you can find jobs if you’re looking for work or you can outsource work for freelancers and others. Hire a virtual assistant and make life easier by lessening your own workload.

Percussion and Drum Stuff Books

How to Write for PERCUSSION: An extremely detailed and helpful book, not just for beginners but intermediate and advanced musicians as well. Whether you have years of percussion writing experience or no idea how to even approach it, this book will give you hundreds of great new ideas and will show you exactly how to realize them in your music.

Miscellaneous Links

Winter Guard International: Indoor drumline organization main site - find show schedules.
Excel Spreadsheets Help: Need help with Excel spreadsheets? Excel Spreadsheets Help has some of the best FREE Excel templates, especially for project management applications. Learn some useful macros by joining their email newsletter.
JustCloud: Backup and protect your computer files online in the cloud and access them from anywhere, at any time, from any device. I work on multiple computers and JustCloud makes it easy to work on the same files from many different locations.
Give Yourself a Raise: a free report on how to make a residual income from the internet in your spare time – this book gave me the inspiration and the tools to build this website (when I had no experience creating a website before). Highly recommend reading it (and it’s free so why not?)!
Drumline Sheet music app! Get drumline sheet music on your cell phone or tablet!