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Thank you George Aoyama for your donation!

Short-term, personal goal:

For the next 10 days, I will average more than two hours of concentrated, taiko practice per day.

My shamisen teacher was in town last week (videos coming soon!) for 10 days of non-stop nagauta, the music of Kabuki. While I made huge strides in my shamisen playing, I’ve neglected my daily taiko practice. See the pitiful amount of purple (personal practice) toward the end of the graph below? How sad! Working toward my goal of 10,000 hours of practice, I’m trying to average at least an hour a day. So I’ve got a bit of catching up to do.

Due to the way I calculate my practice time, two hours is actually more like four hours at the drums. And because I have appointments over the next week, I’ll have to aim for more than four hours most days to keep my average up. I’m stating this publicly with the hopes it’ll help me stay on track.

If you see me between now and Feb 2, tell me to stop chatting/skateboarding/whatever and to get drumming. If anyone else wants to practice, let me know! Strength in numbers!

At the beginning of the month I participated in Pilgrim School’s “Golden Week”, an intense week of Japanese culture classes for students kindergarten through high school.

JATV visited my class and did a short segment on the whole program. More after the break…

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Thank you for your donation Kim!
Kim Nakashima becomes the 101st FoundatiOn Team donor!

Thank you to Stacey Nakasone for her donation to the 2009 FoundatiOn Team! Stacey is our 100th donor this year and brings the grand total to $11,375!

Thank you again to all of this year’s donors! I will have updates from the hands-on workshops as they happen over the next few months. Thanks to the generosity of the FoundatiOn Team, On Ensemble is providing eleven taiko workshops to public school students!

I assembled a set of Five Fish preamps for Shoji and they turned out really well!  The preamps sound fantastic and thanks to the high quality of the kit and the great support offered by Five Fish, the build process was very enjoyable.  Here’s a time-lapse video of the construction!  Photos and a review of the kit follows the break…

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The following donors made contributions to the FoundatiOn Team, bringing the total number of donors this year to 99! Will we have a 100th donor?..

Thank you for your generosity!

Chikako Hara
David Wells
Tetsuo Uyeda

Thanks to recent donations from the following people, the fund drive isn’t done yet! In fact, we’ve passed $11,000, generating our eleventh, free, hands-on taiko workshop to public school kids!

Cathy Ginn
David and Kate Cowsky
George Abe
Lloyd Nakano
Michelle Fujii
Mikko Henson
Shira Mendes De Leon