Andy Bliss

Hey gang, There's a joke that follows every percussionist. You've heard some version of it — the one about the knocking that speeds up, the one about what you call the guy who hangs around with musicians. I've been hearing them for thirty years. I still laugh at the good ones. But here's what I've started noticing. Percussion is the only section of the orchestra that had to argue its way in. Strings were assumed. Winds were assumed. Drums had to make a case — piece by piece, composer by...

Hey gang, On Monday I shipped the first real mockup of glitch — my solo project for drum set and electronics. It's the most me thing I've made in years, and getting it out the door meant admitting it wasn't perfect and sending it anyway. But that's not the part I want to tell you about. The part I keep thinking about is a single eight-second sound near the middle. I spent the better part of three weeks on it. One idea — my voice, looped and stretched until it stops sounding like a voice and...

Hey gang, A couple of Fridays ago I was set to deliver a webinar, and the night before, a bug knocked me flat. The kind where you're writing the "so sorry, we have to move this" email at 10am, feeling like you've let the whole room down. This week it went out anyway — rescheduled, whole, better rested — and I've been thinking about why that felt like a small win instead of a failure. It's because the webinar didn't live in my head. It lived in a plan with a deadline. Most of us run our...

Hey gang, Most of us learned the sequence without ever questioning it: you learn a piece, you perform it, and if it goes well, maybesomeday you record it. Recording is the reward at the end of the road. I've flipped that order, and it's changed how I work. Learn it. Record it. Then tour it. Here's why. A microphone is the most honest teacher I've ever had. It doesn't care how it felt. It hears the rushed entrance, the note that spoke late, the phrase I thought was shaped that turns out to be...

Hey gang, The studio was dead quiet on Thursday morning. First time I'd sat behind the kit in weeks, coffee still too hot to drink, the building empty in that way it only is right before a semester swallows it whole. I didn't play anything ambitious. I just tuned a drum. Then tuned it again. Chased one sound around the room for the better part of an hour. And it struck me that this is the most important hour of my whole fall — not because of what I made, but because of how I started. In a...

Hey gang, One of the hardest lessons I've learned over the years is that creative work isn't finished when I think it's finished. It's finished when I decide to share it. That's a surprisingly difficult line to cross. Every project begins with excitement. Then comes the messy middle—drafts, task overload, meetings, budget, second-guessing, and the nagging feeling that maybe one more tweak will finally make it "ready." Sometimes that's true. More often, it's just fear disguised as...

Hey gang, We just closed out a full stretch of summer around here. Swim season wrapped with the kids at the City Meet over at Tennessee's Allan Jones Aquatic Center — all those early-morning chlorine hours finally cashing in — and my mom came to town for a good visit. And when I look back at these last couple of weeks, the days that actually stood out weren't the ones that just… happened. They were the ones I built with intention. It wasn't my mom's longest trip — but I savored every hour of...

Hey gang, My daughter Elodie just turned nine, and right now the two of us are elbow-deep in a new LEGO build — not a set from a box, but a MOC (LEGO-speak for "my own creation"): a custom diorama we're putting together to show at an upcoming LEGO exhibition. Here's something most people don't know about builds like this. We rarely start on a clean baseplate and go straight up. We build a hidden, stronger foundation first — a technique called MILS (Modular Integrated Landscaping System): you...

Hey gang, We just wrapped our family's annual week at the beach — the same stretch of sand in Kure Beach, just south of Wilmington, North Carolina, that we come back to every year. But the thing I can't stop thinking about this summer isn't the ocean. It's soccer. I didn't grow up with it. I'm finding it now, in my forties, and this summer it finally clicked. Half of it was the company. In the weeks before we left, we chased matches all over Knoxville — Orange Hat Brewing to watch Scotland...