What makes a good rock drum lesson? How do you balance having fun and progressing as a musician? These are questions I am constantly being asked by my private drum students, and that I have had a hard time answering over the years. However, after talking to literally dozens of students, reviewing the topics and techniques most rock drummers deem “important”, and taking a self-evaluation of how my personal lessons go – I hope to provide answers to these questions for you here.

Balancing Fun and Progression With Drum Lessons

Let me say this right up front – the drums, and any other musical instrument, should be “fun” above all else. If you are not having fun while playing an instrument, then being a musician probably isn’t for you. Sure there will be challenging times where you really need to focus on developing a few difficult techniques, but at the end of the day – it needs to be fulfilling to you. If you aren’t having fun, it’s only a matter of time before practices become a chore, and gigs become a hassle.

However, with that said – it’s also important that you look inwards to see the value of hard work and practice. In other words, the more you practice – the more fun you can Continue Reading...

Learning the drums for the first time can be a very difficult thing to do. There is so much to this massive instrument that somene could get lost very easy. Perhaps you already know how to play the drums but are finding it hard to progress with your skills. Whatever the situation is, learning the essentials of this massive instrument is a must. There are a few lessons that need to be learnt in order to be able to play and practice the drums effectively. Before starting any other lessons on the drums, make sure you go through these essentials and master them. If you are an advanced drummer already, you definitely want to go through them again to make sure you haven’t missed anything. There are a lot of drummers that do not know a few of these skills, which throws their whole groove off! Like I said; these skills are ESSENTIAL for every drummer!

The first essential skill a drummer must know before anything else is how to hold a drumstick. This is something that most drummers do not take the time to actually learn; they will just grip the sticks any way they feel comfortable. This is not the right thing to do at all! There are specific ways to hold the drum sticks for a reason, so make sure you go over all the different variations. Whether you play traditional grip, matched grip, or French grip, there is a distinct way to hold the sticks in order to get the Continue Reading...

As drummers, we strive day to day to find new and unique drum beats to challenge ourselves and carry us to a new level of drumming. With the variety of new music coming out these days, there is no stop to the amount of new drum beats that we can learn. But how do we go about learning these unique drum beats? And what about some very common drum beats, like rock drum beats, jazz drum beats or Latin drum beats? As drummers, we need to not only know how to play these, but also how to teach ourselves new drum patterns to keep our list of beats growing. Here are a few ways to learn new drum beats.

Be Sure You Can Read Drum Notation
This is a must for any drummer who is looking at developing new drum beats. When you are searching for new grooves, you will definitely need to be able to read sheet music and drum notation. This is similar to learning how to read drum tabs. If you can fully understand how to read drum notation, you will be able to learn so much more at a faster rate. There are hundreds if not thousands of drumming web pages online scattered with beginner drum beats all the way to advanced drum Continue Reading...