X8 Drums Blog

Norton Healthcare is leading the way for music therapy in hospitals. The company owns Norton Audobon Hospital in Kentucky and, according to the Tri-Valley Dispatch, is dominating the burgeoning music therapy scene as part of hospital services. Norton Audobon Hospital recently received a $400,000 expansion and renovation to its therapy section. The hospital provides music classes, a music library, performance space, and other things that help make their music therapy program intense and effective …

Music therapy is a growing field as more scientists validate how helpful it is to people in medical situations. Music has been shown to help alleviate and reduce stress and anxiety, help positively socialize autistic children, and bring dementia patients into the present if only for a few minutes. However, music therapy is not all glamorous show tunes and walks down memory lane. For some post-traumatic stress disorder patients, music therapy can help bring too much pain to the fore, requiring de …

A group of women have taken to Argentinian drumming and love it. The Illawarra Older’s Women Network (OWN) in Australia provides space and activities for women over age 50. In Illawara, Argentinian drumming has become an important class offered by the wellness center. They now have a regular hour-long class, as well as a 30-minute beginner’s class. Illawarra Mercury reports that when the formal teacher for the drumming class could no longer make the trip to their town to teach, members stepped u …

A new type of event looks to serve parents and care-givers of autistic children in Illawarra, New South Wales. The Care and Share Autism Event offered a day of child-free pampering and drumming for the harried and often-overlooked care-givers of children on the autism spectrum. Illawarra Mercury reported that parents may find themselves consumed by the overwhelming task of raising a child on the spectrum, limiting social gatherings and leading to neglect of self. Organizers of the event hope to …

Waverly Community House in Scranton, Pennsylvania, offers a drumming program for special needs children. The Times-Tribune shares that Cheryl Mozdian leads the program, aiming to help children with self-esteem issues through the musical curriculum. The “World Music Drumming” program will begin September 11th and continue for 10 weeks. It is a call and response program run by Cheryl, the local high school’s marching band director. At the end of the session, the children will perform an ensemble p …

Since the beginning of time, drumming has been an important aspect of Native American life. In fact, drums have always been sacred in the cultures and drums are considered living entities. Frame drums, in Native American cultures, maintain the qualities of the lives that went into creating them. The plant whose life is used for the frame, the animal whose life is used for the skin and straps, these lives are still an important part of the Native American drum and are treated with the sanctity th …

More and more studies are confirming what ancient wisdom has told us all along: drumming is healing. An article in India Times reports that hand drumming helps reduce stress and anxiety by engaging the right side of our brains, allowing the left and more logical sides of our brains to take a rest. A long-term study in the United States among 112 healthcare workers found that six sessions of hand drumming was able to reduce a happier state of mind in 46% of the workers. After six weeks of drummin …

Drumming can be great exercise. Anyone who has drummed a gig for a few hours or just practices for a few hours a day can tell you that you can get a great workout by drumming a certain way. But, just like you wouldn’t want to run a marathon without warming up first, you don’t want to simply start a hard-hitting drumming session without a warm up routine. There are a few reasons for the importance of drumming warm up routines and some of them might surprise you. First of all, we have the common …

Music Heals is a non-profit organization in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and it is helping bring music to people in hospitals. The organization refurbishes old, donated MP3 players and donates them to music therapists, who then use them as part of their services to people healing from cancer, emergency situations, and any other reason to be in a hospital. Old CDs and DVDs are also donated and distributed through the program, according to a story by CTV News. A mobile music studio is also …

Never again can a drummer say that parenthood got in the way of her or his practice time. A dad who loves to drum and also loves his toddlers uploaded a video of himself drumming with his two year old strapped to his back and his twins in front of him. Huffington Post shared the video, proclaiming the drummer to be an “awesome dad”. The drummer was doing a one-handed rendition along to “This or The Apocalypse” by The Americans, a hard rock song that the kids had apparently heard plenty of times …