The article “Your New Side Hustle: Community Drumming for Cash, Creativity, and Connection” by John R. Beck highlights how percussionists can expand their careers by incorporating interactive group drumming, specifically through Comfort Sound® Drumming. This approach is adaptable to various settings such as universities, healthcare, senior centers, and schools, offering physical, social, and mental health benefits. Drum circle facilitation enhances musicians’ skills, fosters social connection, and serves as a valuable tool in mental health and community engagement, especially during challenging times like the recent global pandemic. Beck emphasizes that group drumming promotes entrainment—a synchronization that benefits both trained and non-musicians—and provides a meaningful side career opportunity for percussionists.

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Whether you are a freelance musician, university teacher, orchestral performer, or all of these, adapting your percussion performance skills to facilitate interactive group drumming is a great way to add to a marketable activity to your career. 

WHAT TO EXPECT
This hands-on workshop will introduce the PASIC audience to an adaptation of the HealthRHYTHMS protocol named Comfort Sound® Drumming, discuss its use in healthcare settings including research studies, and demonstrate how drum circle facilitation techniques can be used in a wide variety of settings, including college campuses during orientation and exams, percussion ensemble rehearsals, seniors in memory care, public school music programs, and pre-school Head Start centers. Participants will play Remo Versa Tubanos with Comfort Sound Technology® low volume drumheads and plastic egg shakers.

WHY SHOULD I CONSIDER THIS?
In the rapidly changing 21st-century job market, with fewer traditional performing and teaching opportunities for the overabundance of music school graduates, drum circle facilitation can fit nicely into an early career percussionist’s daytime schedule, as most private teaching, drum line coaching, or regional orchestra activities take place in the afternoon and evening. 

WHY SHOULD I ADD DRUM CIRCLE FACILITATION TO MY BUSY SCHEDULE?
Community Drum Facilitation is an impactful way for percussion professors to enhance the university student experience beyond the music department, and may even be noticed by the upper administration. Within a percussion studio a drum circle is a great icebreaker activity for new students at the beginning of the year that can help develop listening skills for better ensemble playing and sensitivity to tone production.

ENTRAINMENT IS A POWERFUL EXPERIENCE
The Cambridge Dictionary defines “entrainment” as the “synchronization of the beats of music with natural body function or processes.” When people become entrained through a group rhythm experience, powerful biological changes can be felt immediately. This is true for trained musicians as well as people who have not studied an instrument. Steve Gadd was once asked to define groove during an interview. He said, “A groove is an agreement with the guys you are playing with…when you lock it in, everything feels good.” The ability to quickly adapt to another musician’s rhythm is an essential performance skill that can be reinforced through improvised hand drumming and egg shaker movement.

IT’S IMPORTANT NOW MORE THAN EVER
In 2020 the world experienced a global pandemic concurrent with an ongoing mental health crisis resulting from the explosion of social media and the 24/7 news cycle. Interactive group drumming requires two hands (you can’t doom scroll and play drums), and it reinforces the social connection between people as they create music together. With the largest aging population in U.S. history, group drumming is a wonderful community connection for seniors that has physical and social benefits.