I continue to practice about an hour each day until I start my lessons back the first week of July. I am ecstatic about lessons! I can't wait.  But for right now I've picked the lesson before the last one I took in the summer of 2009. I'm working on perfecting this lesson-getting faster and trying to play the whole page without mistakes. My left hand still lags. That's gonna take time, but I'm determined. I've heard that if you want different results you can't keep doing the same thing. So I gave up the wishing and I'm doing. No matter how tedious going over and over the same piece of music is. I do find that I get kinda excited when I can play more than the first few measures without getting tripped up. I'm working on snare drum music with the base drum. Very primitive, I know. I don't know yet how to read music for the other drums. I do have a page of simple drum beats with fills that I practice, but again, its snare, base and the high hat or ride cymbal. But I love it. I love practicing. I want to make my practices 2 hours a day. I think morning and night will be good. I will start that tomorrow. Some days that will be hard because I'm a nurse and I work 12-14 hour shifts 3 days a week. So on those work days I will have to kick in the old discipline and just friggin do it. No excuses.

I consider my drum teacher to be my mentor. He is famous in his own right. He's been a part of many famous bands and recorded and played with famous musicians. However, I want a girl or woman drummer to aspire to as well. I did an internet search and was only able to come up with a few women drummers. There are many many male drummers living and dead throughout the ages. But coming up with more than a few women drummers was not happening. Another thing about the women drummer info on line, which kinda pissed me off, was there was always some reference to how most women drummers were not very good. I don't know how true that is. I know I couldn't really find any famous names out there for a woman drummer, like an equivalent to Buddy Holly.  I did come across one woman drummer that intrigued me though-Viola Smith. According to my research Smith was the drummer in an all female jazz band in the 1940s while the men were away at war. Her talent was compared to the noted drummer Krupa. But there was very little info on her. I'm not sure if she's living or dead. It seems that once the men came back from war Smith didn't play anymore. There was a picture of her online. She was a cute petite thing with medium wavy brown hair. The set of drums before her looked enormous. But if she's been compared to Krupa, she must've been good. I must do more research. I want to know more about her.

Having my own studio is so awesome. I'm so ready to start some real lessons!!