Yesterday Neil Peart turned 61 years old. 48 years before that on September 12, 1965 Neil turned 13, and on his birthday that year his parents brought him a pair of drum sticks, a practice pad and some drum lessons with Don George at the Peninsula Conservatory of Music. Neil spoke about Don in a news update at NeilPeart.net last year:

... In 1965, at the age of thirteen, I started drum lessons with Don at the Peninsula Conservatory of Music in St. Catharines, Ontario. When he stopped teaching there a year or so later, I didn't see him again until the day of that first show in Toronto, on October 14, 2012.

In recent years Don and I had been in touch by mail and email, and he sent me videos of his current teaching ideas and methods. I was pleased to see that he was obviously still a gifted and dedicated teacher. For his part, when talking about this long-ago student, Don was once quoted, "Neil didn't have another teacher for thirty years, so I must have done something right."

And he did - Don gave me a strong enough direction toward what I needed to know that I could follow it through those decades. Most of all, he gave me the encouragement that I could be a drummer, if I worked at it. Essentially, Don kept me climbing that mountain for three decades, until I needed Freddie Gruber and Peter Erskine to guide me to higher elevations. ...

Don was recently interviewed for Drum Talk TV and discusses some of his collection of materials dating back to 1923, as well as demonstrates and talks about his magic formula for teaching drums to all ages. He also talks a little about his most famous student - Neil Peart. The interview was filmed with an in-studio audience and it can be viewed below or on YouTube at this location. Thanks to Greg Nosek for the heads up.

NOTE: Posts over 10 years old are partially archived. All comments, images and other embedded media have been removed.