DRUMMERS: Advice for a beginner

update: plans are being made
before too long (before the end of the year at least) i will have my first jam on the drums!

update: i have been playing along with songs more and managed to record one! the whole thing -- 5:05. i screwed up in the middle for maybe 2 measures and also had some trouble maintaining a steady pace, but i think it sounds ok. not great, but ok. i'm not ashamed of it.

playing along with songs i can actually keep up with has been top notch fun. and then i have also found that working on speed is more fun if i am trying to keep up with an actual song rather than just speed up til my arms hurt sans accompaniment.

I've just started to play around with recording drums (and guitar) and it's making me realize how awful I am at keeping time.

I guess the only time I ever actually played consistently it was for like two months ages ago with drunken people and it was all close enough but playing along with a metronome is super humbling.

update: my last lesson was supposed to be last night. unfortunately, when my teacher came up the stairs, i could tell that he thought he was going home and his face kinda dropped when he saw me. i confirmed that he had forgotten and also was on his way somewhere, so we agreed that this was unfortunate and planned to reschedule. this did not leave me with the best feeling, but it gives me more time to practice/accumulate questions so whatever.

on the bright side, i am not making leaps and bounds of technical progress, but i am much better at keeping up with songs. i recorded another one on tuesday. i'm not going to post links here but i'll share if anyone's interested.

practice time is still the bright spot of my day.

Progress in terms of facility may not be noticeable in leaps and bounds, but one day you'll be practicing or playing and you'll suddenly realize that what you're doing at that moment was something you had always wanted to be able to do.

Thanks, I'll take what I can get.

Ok, I have a minor dilemma. Friday was my rescheduled last lesson (that I had been anticipating tbh) and as I explained above, I basically went all the way there only to turn around and go home. I was disappointed, but it was a different kind of disappointment than I am feeling right now.

i emailed teacher on saturday, the day after our lesson that didn't happen, to try to reschedule. i also updated him on what i had been doing and what i was hoping to get from my last lesson. i thought this was reasonable, it was organized, contained minimal babble/no asides or jokes, and not too long. that was on saturday morning and he still hasn't responded.

to recap: final lesson was cancelled and rescheduled for a month later, i show up and he forgot, now he has taken almost 4 full days to respond to an email from an earnest (and paying!) student. and that student is me!

i'm not angry so much as disheartened. being a total beginner at something is a really big challenge, an steep uphill trek in every way, esp at this age and esp being who i am. all i am asking for here is what i consider basic minimum professional courtesy.

i guess i'm just disappointed and i don't like it. maybe i will write a song about it and then make him listen to it if he ever reschedules our stupid lesson.

an steep uphill trek
you can tell i'm mad because i added "steep" but forgot to change the article

:( It's possible whatever made him so tired/forgetful last week is also making him tardy at replying?

so? i mean, i understand shit going on in one's life, but like i said, professional courtesy. it's not too much to ask.

musicians, even professionals, have a tendency to be huge flakes

lol I was gonna say, what did you expect, he's a drummer.

i guess i take teaching/learning to a serious humorless extreme

no excuses

Dan otm

This is pretty much par for the course with many music teachers

I reserve the right to find that a laaaaame excuse.

i think it depends on how much teaching they do, how significant a part of their income, how much they need the money. i have friends that teach music lessons for the majority of their income, and they are not flaky. My drum teacher was primarily a musician and recording masterer who was barely scraping by financially, and he was very much not flaky when it came to scheduling lessons.

I never had a flaky teacher, and some of them needed the teaching money, some didn't. I'm at a loss to understand why this dude wouldn't respond immediately and apologetically.

unless he's on tour

He probably would've told me that when he saw me on Friday. I dunno, it's cynical and insulting to treat drummers/musicians/artists like babies who can't keep their shit together, so I tend to expect just a basic level of professionalism, like rescheduling before the better part of a week passes.

We'll see. In the meantime, I'll keep doing my best to improve and not lose steam.

also thank you for listening to my gripes

i think it depends on how much teaching they do, how significant a part of their income, how much they need the money.
about this -- he has mentioned that he needs the money on several occasions, and understands that the lessons are expensive, but I don't really think he understands how seriously i am taking this. and there's another thing, but i can't really explain it. i have made efforts to keep my guard down, but i always feel way overnervous and overexposed.

the teacher-student relationship is so weird to me! esp from this angle. it's embarrassing to talk about!

I would switch teachers if that happens again. It's not excusable.

drummers can be huge flakes all they want, and they can flake their way out of earning a living if they want too, but you don't have to put up with it

still haven't heard from him
have email drafted
so disappointed

BUT that hasn't stopped me from starting a new practice playlist and trying to expand my skill set, which is pretty small atm but jam is scheduled for this sunday so who knows

Ugh, that sucks about your teacher. What an unprofessional douche.

I feel bummed about it in a lot of ways but I don't really have emotional capital to spare feeling bad right now, so i'm not gonna make a big stink about it
still
wow, how disappointed am i

the stuff he taught me is the only somewhat cool sounding stuff i can do
i'm gonna need some more help at some point here and now i have to start all over with someone else? ugh indeed.

i couldn't wait and i sent the same email for a third time (after 10 days of silence) with a much toned down version of what i wanted to write, which boils down to "i honestly have no idea what is going on here and being confused about it is taking up too much of my energy so please let's settle this situation" and he wrote back.

not sure what will happen next but at least i don't feel edgy about it anymore

FIRST JAM: COMPLETE!

it was so fun that i feel the need to digest it a little bit but mostly i'm just enjoying feeling excited about playing music with other people. it is so fun.

Congrats! Yeah, playing music with people is pretty much the best thing ever. What'd you play?

weeeeell, since you asked...as previously mentioned, i had been practicing with a lot of VU songs because they're easy/familiar enough for me to anticipate what's coming next, so we played "lady godiva's operation" (my most comfortable song at this point), "femme fatale" (an easy slow one), and "what goes on" (started off as a little bit of a challenge, but wound up sounding really good! mostly because of NA not me, but i totally kept up!)

i hesitate to say that i didn't know what i was missing for lo these many years, but i don't think i fully did. now that i know, i feel extra super motivated! i also found an internet teacher who says "you can totally do this" at the end of every lesson.

VU songs are the most fun to play imo

I played with other people for the first time in like six years on Friday and it was super fun. I've got my drums in my MFA studio (long story involving a fake doom metal band) and two of the other grads have guitars and a bass around. It was the last day of the semester and we had a closing show for an installation and just set up in the hallway and had people playing all night.

I'd forgotten how much fun it is, and how much better you get when forced to keep up / pay attention to others. I can't do anything fancy but I can at least keep up a beat and I so want to turn this into a regular thing.

And we used to play What Goes On with my shitty short-lived band many years ago, it was my favorite thing.

they're easy/familiar enough for me to anticipate what's coming next

That reminds me of this Townshend quote on Moon:

You often find this with drummers, they have the most extraordinary memories. It's an extension of their work. Maybe their memories are centered in a different part of the brain, because they have to remember long musical phrases as pure data. It's almost binary. They must know exactly where they are in a song at any given time. The best drummers have the best memories.

keith moon, my birthday buddy!

i hope that's true about memories because i sure do have a powerful memory for certain things.

also joygoat your end-of-semester parties sound like a LOT more fun than mine

finally! my last lesson is complete. it was not without incident but i got some extra time and everything concluded well enough. i finally learned about bouncing on the snare and i'm on my way to a proper drum roll. i'm a little apprehensive about what to do next but i guess i'll figure it out. my technique is good and apparently my strokes are even! between the conclusion of my lessons and baby's first jam, i feel pretty good about the way this is going.

i finally learned about bouncing on the snare

Curious about this...can you elaborate? I'm kind of struggling with this a bit at the moment, as it turns out.

Well, I asked to learn the basic rudiments because I want to be the sort of drummer who knows that stuff, it seems important. I learned about letting the stick bounce 2x on each hand on the snare. Just a light bounce as the introduction to a roll? I could barely do it. He had to touch my hands to show me how to do it and it was a little embarrassing bc my hands are gnarly. I think I got the basic idea, and it's just going to take a lot of practice. Maybe a LOT.

xpost

a few things you can do:

the focus of your grip should be around the fulcrum between your thumb and the first knuckle of your index finger. The rest of the fingers on your hand are there to provide some extra balance and control. Eventually, your snare strokes will become less about flicking your wrist or moving your arms up and down and more about bouncing the stick with your free fingers using that fulcrum.

To get a bounce you can loosen your free fingers on the stick to get it to just fall on the snare and bounce up again. As you get more comfortable with this motion, you'll be able to control it more to get the kind of bounceback you want.

You could try practicing a pattern like RrLl where the lowercase letters are the bounceback on the snare. To start out try focusing on getting those bounces in time to a metronome.

Another thing to try is pressing the tips of the sticks toward the snare as you are doing this exercise. This should have an effect like a blurring of the drum strokes and will eventually lead you toward doing a press roll.

I forget how I learned how to do that exactly, but I think it came out of learning how to do a roll. My recollection is that I'd just let one stick fall and bounce as many times as it was gonna bounce, then do the same with the other hand, and then try to do that closer together. But yeah, knowing when to exactly tighten your hands/fingers to control the bounce(s) can be a struggle.

And yeah, what Moodles said. That's pretty much spot-on.

Yeah, that's almost exactly what my teacher told me; I was just having a hard time with it. I'm sure it'll get easier after I do it a couple zillion times.

I also need to do something about rearranging my drums so I can reach them easier. I played his drums in his practice space (rather than the ones at the school where we normally meet) and they were so easy to navigate. He's about a foot taller than I am and if his drums are set that close together, mine prob should be too.

Yeah, I have mine wedged into a corner of a room so that my elbows hit the wall whenever I try to play. Doesn't work particularly well.

the key with double strokes is getting the second note to be the same volume as the first. it takes some time to get the hang of iirc.

Any tips on gaining this skill with less practice?

i am looking forward to the practice! i like having one tiny thing to work on.

Any tips on liking practice then?

i think it's good to practice doubles without relying on rebound/bounce. one way to think about it is that the first note consists of dropping the stick (while still holding onto it with the first finger/thumb fulcrum), and the stick note is made my picking it back up. you can practice doubles on non-bouncy surfaces pillows, your leg, etc.

i think i only switch to using more bounce at a certain speed (ie a pretty fast roll).

For inspiration's sake:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RAT9sed_XFw

Nice press flams around 2:00 and then backbeat rebounds (the secret weapon in the Purdie Shuffle) at 4:00.

Any tips on liking practice then?

i don't practice anymore. :( except with hands/pens or warming up before a gig if i haven't played in a few weeks.

but for real, playing on a pad along to records + watching youtube videos of great drummers for inspiration.