Buddy Rich practice pad, for someone whose practice pad is a sheet of paper

Two practice pads, one phrase

A drum practice pad is a silent rubber surface on wood, played with sticks, mounted on a snare stand or a desk. The point of the artifact is to make the daily, repetitive, unglamorous part of being a drummer possible inside an apartment, on tour, in a hotel room, anywhere a full kit will not fit and where the neighbors are at home. A drummer who is serious about the craft sits in front of a piece of rubber for a real fraction of their working life. The pad does not perform; it records that the work happened.

A Vipassana practitioner who keeps a daily practice has the same problem on a different scale. The work is silent, the work is daily, the work is repetitive, the work has to fit between a job and a family and a body that wakes up tired. The artifact in the meditator's case is paper rather than rubber, but the function is the same. A small, cheap, single-purpose surface that exists only so the practice has somewhere to leave a mark. The recording is the point; the content of the practice stays interior.

Disclaimer up front, because it matters here. I am not a teacher, not a drum teacher and not a meditation teacher. I am a working old student of the S.N. Goenka tradition, six 10-day courses behind me across three centers, with about forty days of dhamma service. The rest of this page is a reflection on a phrase, not advice. The technique itself is reserved to authorized assistant teachers inside residential courses, and that is the right place for it.

The Buddy Rich paradox

The reason a meditation page can write about Buddy Rich at all is that his name attached to a practice pad sits on top of a documented public contradiction. Buddy famously claimed he did not practice. He said it on television, he said it in print, he said it to interviewers across decades. The drum press has been turning that claim over for most of fifty years, and even the announcement copy from HQ Percussion when they introduced the official RealFeel Buddy Rich pads at the January 2003 NAMM show acknowledged the irony in plain words, that the man whose name was on the rubber had insisted he never needed it.

What he actually meant by that line is a real argument inside drum journalism, not a meditation question. Some sources read it as showmanship, the same kind of myth-making that makes a great drummer's legend interesting. Some read it as literally true, that he kept his hands warm on the bandstand and did not work the rudiments at home. Charlie Perry's interviews, archived and discussed by writers like Scott K Fish, are the long-form treatment on the practice-habits question. None of that is this site's domain to settle.

What is interesting from a meditation seat is that the paradox rhymes with something every long-term old student eventually meets. The teacher Goenka, in his recorded discourses, is firm that two hours a day is the recommendation, and gentle in the same breath about how rarely it actually happens for people working full time. Old students at group sittings rotate through the same admission for decades, that they sit less than the recommendation, that they sit at irregular hours, that some weeks they sit thirty minutes once and then nothing for four days, and that they keep showing up to courses anyway. The artifact (the rubber pad, the paper sheet) is what carries them through the gap between what the discipline is supposed to look like and what it actually looks like in a working life. Buddy Rich on the bandstand and an old student in a kitchen are doing parallel arithmetic.

What lives at /daily-sit-log/print

The meditator's practice pad on this site is not an app, a subscription, or a tracker. It is a printable HTML page at /daily-sit-log/print. The whole thing fits on a sheet of US Letter or A4 paper. The integers are not aspirational; they come straight from the source file. A reader can verify them by opening src/app/daily-sit-log/print/page.tsx and reading the MONTHS array near the top.

The reason this exists at all is that streak apps and gamified dashboards punish missing a day in a way that a multi-decade discipline cannot tolerate. A long-term meditation practice has sparse months. Sometimes a year has a month with eight squares filled out of sixty halves, and sometimes the month after has forty-two. Both are part of the record. Paper does not punish a blank; it just shows where the gaps were. The same thing is true of a drummer's practice log: the pad itself does not punish the weeks of tour where there was no time to sit at it.

Where the parallel holds, and where it breaks

Honest counterargument, because the page would be thin without one. The parallel between a drum practice pad and a meditation sit log holds at the shape of the artifact and the shape of the discipline. Both are silent. Both are daily. Both are unglamorous. Both record rather than teach. Both serve a practitioner who is alone with the work for the long stretches where no one is watching. That is real, and that is the part of the metaphor this page is willing to defend.

The parallel breaks at content. Drumming is an external craft with a measurable output: a recording, a performance, an audible result. Vipassana is an internal discipline with no audible result and no performance, and the technique itself is incommunicable across domains. A drummer can teach you a paradiddle; a meditator cannot teach you the technique on a webpage, and is structurally not allowed to. The two artifacts may share an outer shape, but mistaking the shape for the substance would flatten both of them. A reader who comes here for the gear is not wrong to leave; a reader who came for the meditation should not expect a paper sheet to do what a 10-day course does.

One more break, smaller. Buddy Rich was a virtuoso. The reason his name is on a practice pad is that drummers admire him and want some of his discipline to rub off through the rubber. The Goenka tradition does not have, and does not want, a single named virtuoso on the front of a sit log. The teacher in the lineage is the tradition itself, and the artifact has no famous face on it. That difference is structural, and it is part of why the parallel is a metaphor and not an equation.

Why the two artifacts share a shape

If you came here for the gear

The right destinations, plainly. The HQ Percussion (now D'Addario) RealFeel line has carried the official Buddy Rich pads in two shapes, the Crest Collector's and the Octagon Player's. Vic Firth carries co-branded RealFeel variants. Vintage hunters look for Slingerland Buddy Rich pads on Reverb and the discontinued DW two-sided Buddy Rich pad, sometimes paired with a 100th anniversary Vic Firth stick. For technique, DRUM! Magazine, Modern Drummer, Freddy Charles Music, and Drumeo are the right depth. For the long-running argument about what Buddy Rich actually meant when he said he did not practice, Charlie Perry's interview material and the various Scott K Fish blog archives are a starting point. None of those are this site, and pretending otherwise would be silly.

What this site does instead is the meditation half of the metaphor: old students of the Goenka tradition, the daily-practice problem, the printable sit log, and a small accountability program that pairs old students for silent video co-sittings. The technique itself stays where it belongs, at dhamma.org and inside an authorized assistant teacher's 10-day course. Everything else, including a tangential page about a drum pad, is fair game for reflection.

A reader who wants the printable artifact can find it at /daily-sit-log/print. A reader who wants the program can read /practice-buddy/how-it-works. A reader who wants the technique itself goes to dhamma.org and signs up for a 10-day residential course in the Goenka tradition, which is the only place the technique is actually transmitted.