55 | The Metronome

The Mikes take a practice break and tackle a trivia challenge of epic proportions: a Candy Bar Roll Call. Not quite a short, not quite a full episode, it’s a Fun-Sized diversion from your summer practicing, and all but intolerable in audio format!  Links to the quizzes featured in the show, so you can follow along:  Chocolate Cross Section: https://www.sporcle.com/games/PencilPal/candy-by-cross-section Candy Identification: https://www.sporcle.com/games/googlebird/candy_name_images_candies

Mike C has a new book about creativity, practice, and the snare drum, and is eager to share how it might positively or negatively impact your practice. If that’s not enough, the Mikes offer a “what we’re loving right now” segment. Mike C’s book, Unsnared Drum Lab, is available through his website (www.michaelcompitello.com) and through Steve Weiss Music.

The Mikes go deep on the music of Steve Reich. Can they stay aligned or will they phase!?

The one and only! Tune in as we talk to Colin about his newest album release: Steve Reich Sextets (available April 11, 2026). A true pleasure to talk with someone at the top of our field on Steve Reich, chamber music, pedagogy, concertizing, and, briefly, puzzle tables!

The next episode is our interview with Colin Currie, Scottish percussionist extraordinaire. This episode was recorded afterwards, where the Mikes reflect, reminisce, and otherwise ruminate about Colin's transformative interview. We hope this piques your interest for the next episode!

Whether you call it "The Met," "The 'nome," or "My best friend who always loves me," we're all talking about the same device: The Metronome! Are we using it the right way? Are we using it too much? Not enough? Oh, jeez - we've got to get the bottom of this!

Just an epic level of opining on this episode. The Mikes try to figure out how we evaluate music performances, specifically in the college audition cycle. It's tough. We don't think we solved everything, but ideas were had, opining saturated the airwaves.

We were flabbergasted by Hannah Collins. So inspiring, so many lessons; we HAD to debrief about it. This episode gets emotional, personal, honest, and full of MikeDroperties.  What do you think?

Thanks, ChatGPT, for the podcast description below, in the style of J. Peterman.   Somewhere between Willow Grove and the low skies of the Netherlands… two men misplaced their plan — and found something far better. This is not an episode. It is a wandering. It begins, as many modern pilgrimages do, in a warehouse in Pennsylvania — the mythic stronghold of Steve Weiss Music — where, once upon a time, paper catalogs arrived like sacred manuscripts and snare drums were cushioned in the Sunday Philadelphia classifieds. Rooms and rooms of instruments. Hand-packed boxes. The faint perfume of newsprint and ambition. There are Pearl Musical Instrument Company Philharmonic snare drums under fluorescent light. An Evans Drumheads pull-cord drum key that growls like a lawnmower in spring. A hanger drum once owned by Steve himself. The whispered possibility of a showroom yet to be built — a temple to mallets, tambourines, and tap shoes. And then — inevitably — the catalog. Not just any catalog. The sort made famous by Seinfeld and the indomitable J. Peterman, where a pair of brogues begins at Waterloo and a tunic vibrates with contentment beside a Peruvian river. Our hosts linger here, turning pages in memory. The purple edition. The beige edition. Eight-thousand-dollar marimbas before eight thousand felt like eight hundred thousand. The slow seduction of browsing. The thrill of ordering mallets softer than soft simply because they existed. But the road bends. Across the Atlantic, in Eindhoven, the drums begin to gather again for the Tromp International Percussion Competition — reborn, reimagined, restless. This is not merely a contest of velocity and vertical leap. It is portraiture. A black-box confession. A curated vision. Thirty minutes of artistic autobiography. A commissioned work placed like a compass needle at the center of a recital. A final collaboration with a visual artist — sound made visible, rhythm given silhouette. There are jurors with reputations forged in rosewood and resonance. There are young players on the brink of becoming leaders. There is the eternal question: when we crown someone “winner,” what are we truly naming? Somewhere in Delaware, between traffic and technique, a clinic titled Supercharging Your Marimba Technique hums with improbable confidence. There are jokes about turbocharged mallets and Philips Sonicare tremolo sticks. There is earnestness beneath the humor — the quiet desire to help another musician unlock something freer than grip and freer than fear. And woven throughout: a gentle anxiety about judging. About applications. About the strange modern ritual of compressing one’s artistic soul into a recording file and sending it into the digital void. This episode roams. It laughs. It speculates about Olympic scoring and the metaphysics of cookies. It remembers the thrill of a first competition and the ache of waiting four years to try again. It is, above all, a catalogue entry for a moment in time — when two percussionists, temporarily out of their dens, take inventory of what matters: Curiosity. Community. Craft. And the lingering hope that somewhere, in a warehouse or a black box theatre, someone is still turning pages.

The Mikes just had to jump on the call to ask each other how we're keeping up with our practice routines. This is the short result, plus a bonus "What do you think of this?" from Mike C.