Hello!

Welcome to my blog. I wanted to start this project as a way to express some of the ideas and opinions I have about drumming, music, and life on a weekly basis. As someone who is not a particularly good writer or content creator, please bear with me on the first few posts (I’m sure they will get better). Some posts will be centered around talking about certain techniques I may be currently exploring, or analyzing specific parts from records that I may be studying, or maybe some revelations I came across while teaching. I hope someone out there finds the info I share valuable in some capacity and can use it in their day to day life.

As a little bit of background of who I am, my name is Benjamin Grant, and I am currently a percussionist and educator based out of Brooklyn NY. My experience playing music started at a young age, like many with my mom making me take piano lessons. As a 6 year old, I wasn’t inherently super interested in what I was doing, however after seeing someone play at a higher level, it became clear to me that that’s what I wanted to do. I later started playing percussion in my school band, and around 5th grade auditioned for a local youth percussion ensemble which is when things really picked up. Here I learned about the vast world of percussion and what it means to play in a chamber group. Whether it was marimba solos, or snare etudes, or multi percussion solos, it all really fascinated me. I took the next 8 years or so and really harnessed my skills as a percussionist. During this time I was also playing drums and vibraphone in my school jazz band. In college I continued to study classical percussion, but as many who go down this route, I eventually got burnt out and felt as though I wasn’t expressing myself as much as I wanted to with what I was doing. It was then that I switched from studying percussion to music industry where I focused most of my time on working in studios engineering and producing projects. This side of music was very new to me, and as a result really reenergized my love of music. For a while I made beats, I worked on mixing sessions, and I played drums for many peoples records.

After college I wanted to move to NYC but stayed home for a year (it was 2020 so we can imagine why). During that year I worked in a studio recording and mixing mostly hiphop artists. I got a lot of experience working in a fast paced environment, but definitely missed playing a lot. In 2021, I finally made the move to NYC with no job lined up, and just a stimulus check in my bank account. Big eyed and busy tailed I was finally doing THE THING of being a musician in the greatest city in the world. Well that first year here, I really learned what people mean by being a “starving artist.” I spent that year doing anything and everything to get my foot in the door in any way whether that meant being in a studio, or playing with any band I could, or teaching in some way. That year consisted of very little music unfortunately, and instead doing anything I could to make a buck. I was shoveling snow in front of businesses for $50, or traveling across the city to teach a lesson for $40, or sometimes taking the LIRR to Long Island for lessons. Anything I could do to pay rent I was doing.

I was on the cusp of quitting until finally, I landed a role as a teacher at a music school in Brooklyn. That also triggered a chain reaction of me getting lots of gigs around the city with a number of different bands, and since then I have had relatively consistent work as a drummer an educator in NYC.

It is a long process to get to where you want to be, but the beautiful (and maybe terrifying) part about it is that you never actually get there, and you constantly move the goal post of what you want and wish to achieve. I’m happy with where I am now, but am excited to keep pushing where I can go. That is why I’m starting this blog, as a way to keep expanding what it means to be a freelance musician in our modern world and I hope to inspire others who may be where I was a few years ago, or who are where I want to be a few years from now.

Well that’s enough of the boring stuff, next week we will start getting into why you’re here in the first place which is to talk about specific topics regarding drums and music.

Thanks for reading!

Ben