Teaching Philosophy
How the
syllabus works.
When building a percussion syllabus, a teacher can pick one of two approaches.
Either go for academic rigor for its own sake — every combination, every permutation, every possibility within a time signature — and bury the student under a deluge of homework (urgh, that forbidden word).
Or curate a small, friendly path and quietly leave most of the rhythmic landscape untouched. It takes students far enough, but falls short of true satisfaction.
I've found a way to make it
deep and fun.
It takes two elements ↓
On one side
Mathematical
Comprehensiveness
A large compendium of patterns, logically grouped and ordered by difficulty.
On the other
Musical
Intention
Every rhythm tied to the genres that use it and the emotional effect it creates.
You don't just learn a pattern; you learn what it's for, where it lives, and what it makes you feel.
That tie between pattern and purpose is what makes a vast amount of material digestible rather than drowning. You want to learn the rhythms because you know where each one fits; you have an empty cup and you want it filled.
Here's what it means for you in practice. I don't expect any one student to learn everything in the syllabus (though I'd love to meet the one with the capacity and tenacity to try). With the full map in hand, I can pull out the parts that fit you — the music you love, the feel you're chasing, the goals you've set.
You end up with a wide rhythmic toolkit — or really, a buffet. Pick what you like, leave out what you don't.
The only question left is
What do you want to
create today?
And if you don't have an answer yet, that's fine too — finding the path is part of what I'm here for.
The Four Compendiums
Cajón skill, organised
into four bodies of work.
Each Compendium is a self-contained ladder of skill — climbed at your own pace, in any order, to whatever depth you want.
Rhythms
Music theory, reading notes, and internalising rhythm so deeply it becomes second nature.
Techniques
How to use your hands — and later your feet — to draw every sound out of the cajón.
Grooves
Applying rhythm and technique to real beats that lock into the songs you love.
Fills
Filling the empty spaces with impressive rhythms — the foundation for soloing.
Three Difficulty Tiers
Explorer. Challenger.
Adept.
Within each Compendium, modules are graded by difficulty — so you always know roughly how hard a piece of material will feel before we open it up.
Explorer
Foundations.
Three stages of fundamentals — comfortable basics in technique, reading, grooves, and fills.
Challenger
Building up.
Three stages of intermediate material — trickier subdivisions, fuller textures, more independence.
Adept
Open-ended depth.
No fixed stages. A personalised deep dive into whichever areas you want to take further.
Your Personalised Path
You don't have to climb
all four ladders at once.
Most syllabuses make you finish every module at one level before letting you move up. This one doesn't. You tell me where you want to go, and I cherry-pick only the modules you actually need to get there — the fastest route to playing what you actually want to play.
Worked example
Goal: a groove from Grooves · Challenger · Stage 2
To play that one groove, here's the path I'd map out:
- →Rhythms · Explorer (Stages 1–3): quarter notes, 8th notes, rests — the reading foundation.
- →Rhythms · Challenger (Stage 1): 16th-note subdivisions, which the groove is built on.
- →Techniques · Explorer (Stages 1–2): the hand technique tips the groove relies on.
Anything from Fills, from Techniques · Challenger, or from any Adept module stays parked. It isn't needed for this goal — and that's the point. We can come back to it later, or skip it entirely if your next goal pulls you somewhere else.
Every student's path looks different. That's the whole point.