Learning to Drum, For Real
When I got to Juilliard, I thought I already knew how to drum.
It was my first day at Juilliard, the first private lesson with Buster Bailey, my percussion teacher for the next two years. Buster was a percussionist with the New York Philharmonic. He’d been there for decades, and was well into his sixties. Before that, in the early 20th century (back when we musicians say people could really play), Buster was a drummer for circus bands and vaudeville shows.
If Santa Claus shaved off his beard and mustache, he’d look just like Buster: A great round, shiny bald head, thinning gray hair on the sides, big round jelly-bowl cheeks, and squinty, twinkling eyes behind eyeglasses. His body reflected his head on a larger scale: a big round belly, big round arms, and pudgy fingers with neatly manicured nails.
His voice mirrored his body: happy, like a squeaky hinge.
In short, if you ran into Buster on the street, you’d never imagine he was the snare drum player in Ravel’s Bolero with the New York Philharmonic. You’d think he probably passed his time sitting with Wilford Brimley on the front porch of a Cracker Barrel restaurant. (Wearing suspenders.)
Being a 19-year-old kid from Charlottesville, Virginia (which in the 1980s was really a small town aside from the University of Virginia), I’d never heard of Buster. I only thought, my teacher is Santa Claus, undercover.
I taught myself to play drums and read music when I was 13, the summer before 8th grade. My best friend, who was was a couple years older, played drums in the middle school band, and I was envious. One day I bicycled down to the local Woolco department store in Charlottesville. There was a small music department near the center of the store, where they sold vinyl records, cassettes, piano songbooks and the like.
Poking around, I found a cheap little pair of snare drum sticks shrink-wrapped to a book with the title—in big, swooshing, Indiana Jones-style lettering—Learn How to Play Drums! Its copyright date was 1956 (this was 1975). I bought the sticks, the book, and a crude practice pad—basically a little chunk of wood with a four-inch square of rubber on one side.
Then I went home and threw myself into that book. First I learned quarter notes and rests: one, two, three, four…one (rest) three (rest). Then eighth notes: one-and-two-and-three-and-four. Over the summer, I worked my way through the whole book. When school started, I auditioned for the band and was accepted—the first of many auditions I’d win over the next decade.
Through middle and high school, percussion was all I cared about. I was a true product of public school music education. There was no drum kit for me in the basement or garage. We couldn’t afford one, and living in small apartments, we didn’t have a basement or garage. For years, all I owned was a few pairs of sticks and practice pads.
By the eleventh grade, my technique was largely my own, augmented by a few tips I’d gleaned from instructional books. I became obsessed with the 26 standard rudiments—the foundation of marching band snare drumming. Rudiments are modular, rhythmic building blocks with fun, onomatopoeic names like ratamacue and paradiddle.
Early in high school, it was obvious to me where I had to go to college. Everyone said, if you’re serious about being a musician, you must go to Juilliard. In my junior year, I began taking private lessons with a professional percussionist for the first time in my young life. My mother, the real hero of my musical life, drove 120 miles round-trip once a week for me to study with Don Bick, professor of percussion at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.
Don’s instruction was eye-opening. He worked with the technique I already had, adding nuance and more precise control. His instruction, along with timpani lessons from Fred Begun (the timpanist for the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., and a whole ‘nother story) got me into Juilliard.
So: my first lesson with Santa Claus, err…Buster. I was stoked. I wasn’t a cocky kid, but I was confident. (You won’t get into Juilliard without a healthy degree of admiration for your own playing.) I knew how to use a pair of sticks.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
If the purpose of boot camp is to break down recruits completely, then rebuild them into soldiers and marines, that was what happened in my first year of lessons with Buster. (Minus all the psychological torture and screaming.)
In that first lesson, I was ready to be dazzled on snare drums, dive into the intricacies of the xylophone and marimba, explore the myriad sounds of exotic tambourines and conga drums, shake the building with thundering timpani rolls. But there was none of that.
Instead, in the corner of the percussion studio, were two stools, and one rubber practice pad between them. I’d worked myself to death getting into Juilliard, and Buster wants to play on a practice pad? Okay, I thought. Guess he just wants us to warm up.
We started with how to hold the sticks, nuances like wrist and stick angle—requirements for the greatest mechanical advantage and least tension. Then we moved on to the single most powerful concept I ever learned from Buster, one that changed my drumming forever: THROW-drop.
To be a great drummer, you’ve got to be relaxed. I don’t mean walking-down-the-street or sipping coffee relaxed…I mean as relaxed as you are in a deep sleep. It’s amazing how many drummers I see with death grips on the sticks and tendons bulging. And even better drummers who look relaxed usually aren’t.
Imagine standing with a tennis ball in your hand. Now imagine throwing the tennis ball straight down at the floor. If you’re reasonably coordinated, pay attention to your hand when you throw the ball: your wrist is relaxed, loose, and follows through naturally after releasing the ball.This is how you should play the drums: you throw the stick at the head the very same way (except of course you don’t let go of the stick).
The opposite of the throw is the drop—equally natural, equally relaxed. Hold the tip of the stick an inch above the drum…then just let it drop. When the tip bounces off the drum, catch it. Easy-peasy.
Well, actually it’s not easy…especially if you’ve already learned the typical macho rock-n-roll way of drumming (which is about as efficient as you imagine it: cave-man style, blunt, with logs).
I spent the next few months with Buster working on THROW-drop. Every lesson was the same. We called them Bustercises—he on one stool, me on the other, a practice pad between us. There was no music. Buster just made up exercises on-the-fly that targeted a specific weakness.
Sometimes he’d scribble an exercise down in pencil on a scrap of paper. Years later, one of Buster’s students, Scott Stevens, percussionist for the the Metropolitan Opera Orchestra, collected these from many of Buster’s students and published them in what is the greatest manual on snare drumming ever written: Wrist Twisters: A Musical Approach to Snare Drumming. (Many percussion teachers don’t even know it exists.)
Eventually, once he was satisfied I’d grasped the throw-drop concept, Buster began hammering away at his second greatest teaching concept: drop-THROW. It’s one thing to throw the stick, then let it drop on the rebound. That’s easy. Vastly more difficult is holding the stick an inch above the drum, letting it drop naturally, then catching and throwing it on the tiny rebound.
Ask any drummer who wasn’t a student of Buster to do this, and they’ll fail miserably. I don’t care who they are or how good they are. That’s because it isn’t natural…yet it is. It just requires supreme relaxation. (Remember: the relaxation of deep sleep.)
And the one method Buster used to teach drop-throw—the one he threw at me in a bewildering array of made-up-in-his-head exercises—was to abandon the time-honored drumming practice of alternating single strokes.
When almost every drummer plays a fast series of notes (16th notes, for example), they alternate hand-to-hand: RIGHT-left-right-left RIGHT-left-right-left. (Or if they’re left-handed, just the opposite.) This is normal.
What Buster taught was this: RIGHT-left-right-left LEFT-right-left-right RIGHT.(I know this is getting technical, but bear with me just a bit longer.) If you look carefully at that pattern above, you’ll see drop-THROW: left LEFT. right RIGHT. This is insanely difficult to do fast. Trust me. Ask any drummer friend to do it and watch them struggle, then say “Dude, that’s messed up!”
I spent my first two years at Juilliard on THROW-drop and drop-THROW. Countless hours in hallways, in the park, sitting on steps, at home, wherever—with a rubber practice pad, doing endless reps of Bustercises. Typically I’d have to warm up for a half-hour before I felt like I was getting anywhere near being deep-sleep relaxed.
Buster’s gone now, and I miss him. He was one of the most brilliant, kind teachers I ever had in my life. And I know, with unwavering certainty, he was the greatest snare drummer that ever lived. Because his approach was so deeply natural…so dependent on being attuned to the absence of tension in even the tiniest muscles…that it still eludes almost all drummers.
In spite of my Juilliard degree, I don’t drum for a living. (You’d be amazed at how many Juilliard grads are not professional musicians. It’s a tough career choice.) But I still have sticks and a rubber practice pad. And I still do my Bustercises every chance I get. They center me, and put me back in touch with what is most important in life: existing purely in the moment, supremely aware of ourselves.
When I read these lines from Robert Frost’s West Running Brook, I think of Buster…
Our life runs down in sending up the clock.
The brook runs down in sending up our life.
The sun runs down in sending up the brook.
And there is something sending up the sun.
It is this backward motion toward the source,
Against the stream, that most we see ourselves in,
The tribute of the current to the source.
It is from this in nature we are from.
It is most us.’
Buster’s book: Wrist Twisters by Elden C. Bailey
