How To Learn To Play Drums

The drums is a musical instrument unlike any other. Drums have only the loosest connection with melody or tone. In their place, drums focus on rhythm: the complex coordination of your four limbs to create repeating patterns reliably.

Learning drums is the study of rhythm. It’s a way of playing on the primal parts of our brains which activate in response to repetition, and sudden lack of repetition. As with most music, listening to the drums is something which is largely done unconsciously. The playing of the drums is similarly subconscious. It’s simply not possible for your conscious mind to decide and respond fast enough, it can only be done from a state of flow.

• Budget to Get Started: $40
• Cost to Develop Hobby: $1000+
• Time Commitment: 10 minutes to 2+ hours a day, depending on interest

You can always skip down to the Curriculum section if there’s too much detail for you.

Why Drums

For me at least, learning the drums is 98% getting your hands and feet to do what you want them to, and 2% deciding what that thing should be. Each new technique you want to learn requires building up a whole new set of neurons, painstakingly going over the pattern over and over, gradually introducing new elements or greater speed. It’s a very visceral learning process, as it’s often immediately clear whether you can play something, or you can’t. You can either play a pattern at a given speed, or you can’t. There is no ambiguity.

It’s just as clear exactly how much practice it will take to get you to the next milestone of ability. A session with the drums, if you’re practicing correctly, will always leave you a bit better than when you began. Every skill is simply a matter of time, but it’s no clearer than when you hold two hickory sticks in your hands.

Playing the drums in a musical context is compelling both because it requires you to act faster than you can think. Drumming is simultaneously highly rigid (notes must be played in time) and incredibly flexible (you can play virtually anything you want, as long as it’s in time). You must play a repeating pattern for the brain to recognize it as music, but you can cause all manner of pleasure by altering and tweaking that pattern in subsequent repetitions. To play the drums you must be fully conscious, focused on what you’re doing, but those very actions happen too fast for you to really recognize them. When you run your body is seamlessly translating the idea of ‘I should go over there’ to hundreds of tiny muscle movements, similarly playing the drums requires you to translate your rhythmic intent into hundreds of nuanced motions ingrained through practice.

One of the great things about the drums is the only way to get that skill is hard work, it can’t be bought and once earned it can’t be taken away.

Skills

I divide my drum practice into five components. You can practice any of these components one-at-a-time, or as I do, touch on each of them in each practice session.

Rudiments

The basic hand and foot coordination building blocks of drumming, similar to the little diddies you might tap out with your hands on the steering wheel while driving. As the word ‘rudiment’ would suggest, the rudiments are the building blocks of essentially any pattern you might want to play on the drums. By learning the rudiments you build up the fundamental coordination you need to play these patterns without thought.

The advantage of rudiments is they create a language for drumming higher than individual strokes. The simple fact is single strokes happen too fast in most drum playing to think much about them. When playing a drummer will decide to ‘play a short roll here’ or ‘play a paradiddle between the snare and ride’ (don’t worry about this terminology) instead. Practicing the rudiments is how you learn that language.

The rudiments themselves don’t prescribe where on the drumset they are to be played, meaning you can easily practice with a practice pad and a couple sticks even if you don’t own a drumset. As you become more proficient, you will be able to play the patterns more accurately, more quickly, and you will be able to move them between drumset instruments (once you have one).

Practicing rudiments involves picking a rudiment you’d like to learn and playing it at various speeds (starting slow!). As you get better you will be able to play them faster and play with better control over which notes are accented (loud) and which aren’t (soft).

I include the basic technique of how to hold the stick, how to play notes quickly, how to control the rebound of the stick, etc. inside rudiments, as that practice is what will develop it the most quickly.

A full listing of rudiments is available online for free, but if you’d like a book I recommend the Drum Rudiment Dictionary.

Grooves

A groove is the repeating pattern you play each measure or set of measures during a song. You can change bits of the groove as you go, or switch from one groove to another during the song, but in general something must repeat at least some of the time for the song to be considered melodic.

Grooves can vary from very simple to very complex and technical. In general I fit all groves into one of these categories (but it’s far from universal):

• Rock/Hip-Hop/Pop
• Jazz
• World/Latin

Rock grooves are the classic rhythms you will hear on a Beatles or Led Zeppelin record. Jazz starts with the swinging pattern you will hear from Art Blakey or Benny Goodman and branches out from there. World music is based around the complex rhythmic patterns which originated in Central and South America and Africa.

To learn grooves is to pick one you’d like to master (or invent one), and practice it over and over. As you get better you’ll be able to play it faster and with more control, be able to count measures as you play to know where you are in a song, and be able to switch from one groove to another seamlessly. Once you ‘master’ one groove, there are always countless more to learn. The absolute best resource for grooves is Groove Essentials by Tommy Igoe, it’s utterly perfect.

Fills

Fills are the usually improvised passages you play when to punctuate your groove. For example, you might play seven measures of groove, punctuated by a measure of fill. Each fill you play might be made up on the spot, or it could be something you’ve practiced in advance. There is a tremendous amount of flexibility in what you play for a fill, it just has to sound good and be in time.

You learn fills by practicing them, first alone, then in their proper place inside a groove. You can find fills in books, compose them yourself from rudiments, or find many examples on YouTube or in songs.

Comping

Many people might not consider this it’s own section, but I separate it out in my practice. Comping is the practice of improvising on top of a groove which is almost always associated with jazz music. The idea is you play a repetitive rhythm with some limbs, and play improvised patterns with the others. It’s a very hard thing to get your body to do, and it is a true example of how drumming forces parts of your body to act ‘faster than thought’ (which makes it awesome!).

You practice comping by playing a repetitive pattern while playing a non-repetitive set of notes over it. For example your right hand and left foot might play a swing pattern, while your left hand and right foot improvise their own notes. Once you get that down, you can always play over new patterns and play more tricky comping over well-understood patterns, there is no end to drum learning.

The best resource I’ve found for patterns to comp with are the figures after page 34 of Syncopation for the Modern Drummer. You’ll want to play the jazz groove of your choice, while playing the notated notes on your snare drum.

Time

In a band setting, the fundamental job of the drummer is to keep everyone in time. This generally means that you play the same number of beats per minute at the beginning of the song as at the end (and everywhere in between), and that all the notes you play in between fall at the right place within the beat.

How do you practice time? Play with a metronome. The metronome provides a constant click which gently nudges your chaotic playing closer to the precision your audience and bandmates will appreciate. Timing consistency drives our rhythmic brain structures to lock us into the music and make everything feel ‘right’. Poor timing makes you a bad drummer, no matter how great your other skills might be.

You’re free to buy a physical metronome, but I use an app. Ideally you will practice everything to the click of a metronome, that’s the only way to really know you are mastering it. One of my favorite ways to practice timing is to put on a metronome and play one note per beat, then two, then three (triplets), then four, then five, all the way to sixteen. If you can do that seamlessly, jumping from one to another, and at various speeds, you will have fantastic timing.

Other Skills

I don’t consider them on the same level as the previous sections, but here are other things you should work on:

Reading Music

It’s hard to learn any instrument without eventually picking up the ability to read sheet music. Virtually every new technique or pattern you want to pick up will be expressed on paper. Drums don’t have ‘tone’ in the way other instruments do, but we use the same notation system. Rather than using each location on the staff to represent a pitch, we use them to represent different instruments on the kit:

Like other instruments though, we do use the note’s symbol to represent how long it sounds for. You can find a complete writeup of how drum notation works on DrumMagazine.com.

Transcribing Songs

Listen to a favorite song of yours. Now sit behind a drum kit and play back what you heard. Hard? It is for me. But it can be practiced, primarily by taking the time to listen to a song over and over, pulling apart the components and writing them down. Eventually you’ll begin to hear more and more without writing and they’ll become a part of your drum playing.

Counting

You would think you learned counting in kindergarden, but it turns out there are levels of counting you never dreamed of. In order to learn new patterns, it’s essentially mandatory that you learn the ability to count beats, and portions of a beat, out loud.

Gradually you’ll need to master the ability to count different portions of a beat, including quarter notes, eighth notes, sixteenth notes, and triplets (either a quarter note or an eighth note divided into three).

‘Band’ Practice

If you happen to have a bunch of aspiring musician friends who can play with you, that’s wonderful! If you don’t though, it’s still likely you would like to be able to hold your own when that day might come. The best way to get there is to play full songs, in time (using a metronome), with reasonable fills, ending the song on the right measure (by counting). The Groove Essentials book I recommended above is a great way to practice this, as it includes full song figures with backing tracks.

What Do I Need?

To get started all you need is a practice pad and sticks. You can begin by playing the rudiments to a metronome, and eventually spring the $6 for a copy of Stick Control for the Snare Drummer, a book which generations of drummers have used to develop hand control and timing. Frankly, you could spend the next two years working on that book with just a practice pad and it you would still have more to learn (I know I do). If you don’t have an easy spot to place your books, you may want to purchase a music stand as well.

Obviously at some point you will need to gain access to a drumset. What that looks like will depend on your living and economic situation. If you have the resources and no one minds loud noises wherever you live, by all means buy a kit. There are many serviceable kits at around $400, and they go up in quality all the way to $2000 and above. In general it’s useful to remember that Eric Clapton would sound like Eric Clapton even on the cheapest of guitars, you can’t buy your way out of having to practice.

Buying a kit itself generally only includes the drums themselves. You’ll still need to buy cymbals with stands, a seat (sometimes called throne) and a kick drum pedal. It’s very possible to pay less than $600 for a full setup, but $1000 might be more reasonable.

Drums are a very personal thing. If you can, go to your local drum shop and try out the gear you’re gonna buy. If you don’t love it, don’t buy it. It’s also very possible to acquire a kit piece by piece. You can start with just a snare drum, add a hi-hat and ride cymbal, and eventually add on the rest of the drums and a crash cymbal.

You can buy cymbals online, but be sure to always listen to a recording of that particular cymbal, as no two are identical. You can find those recordings through the Memphis Drum Shop and Cymbals Only.

If you don’t want to drive your neighbors crazy with your playing, you have a few options. There are ways of muffling drums to make them less deafening including rubber pads you place over the drum heads and special quiet drum heads. You can also buy quieter cymbals which appreciate a lighter playing style and lighter sticks, or even specialized low volume cymbals. You can also either find a practice space in your local area or get an electric kit. Practice spaces are great, but you have to travel to them to practice, and believe me, putting in the practice time is really the most important thing.

Electric kits can be great, but you get what you pay for. I personally recommend Roland kits, which tend to be on the expensive side. I owned an electric kit myself, but I sold it in favor of an acoustic because I felt that I wasn’t fully able to learn the dynamics of playing using an electric setup. That said, get whatever will allow you to practice the most! Frankly, your kit is not going to be your limiting factor for a long, long, time.

Parts of a Drum Kit

As will be discussed in the History section, the drums began as separate instruments played by separate musicians. Gradually these were combined into a single kit one person could play. Along the way, the hi-hat and kick pedal were invented, allowing a drummer to use his or her feet to play. These components still form the building blocks of the drumset.

Snare Drum

The snare drum is a drum which, fittingly enough, has snares strung across the bottom. Snares are strings of beads which rattle when the drum is struck, creating its quintessential sound. It’s generally tuned tight enough that you can easily play ‘rolls’ on the drum where you play multiple notes in quick succession. It also is commonly played on the backbeats of rock and pop music to create a feel which we all instinctively recognize.

Middle-schoolers demonstrate playing snare drums.

Tom-toms

The other drums in a kit are generally tom-toms. They are functionally the same as a snare drum, minus the snares. They are also generally either smaller (for a higher pitched tone) or larger (for a lower tone) than the snare drum. It’s common to have anywhere between two and four tom-toms on your kit.

Kick Drum

The kick drum is the large drum placed on its side which you play with your right foot, using a kick pedal. It provides the lowest tone on the kit, one you often ‘feel’ just as much as you hear. It is often played on the downbeats in Rock and Pop music.

Hi-Hat

The hi-hat is a set of two cymbals which you can press together using your left foot. You can make distinctive sounds by clicking the two cymbals together, by holding them together while hitting the cymbals with a stick, or by a combination of hitting and opening the cymbals. If you plan on building your kit one piece at a time, the hi-hat is probably the first cymbal set you should consider picking up.

It’s worth noting that the hi-hat conventionally sits on the left side of the kit (for right handed players), but is played with the right hand, by crossing the hands. This is done because the dominant hand is generally more capable of playing the quick rhythms you’re looking for as a part of many ride patterns. Most commonly you’ll be pairing your hi-hat pattern with hits of the snare, which is conveniently accessible to your left hand. When you need to use the rest of the kit (usually for a fill), it’s generally a time when your right hand is not needed on the hi-hat.

Ride Cymbal

The ride cymbal is a large heavier cymbal which is commonly placed on the right hand side of the kit (for right handed players). It’s commonly used to create the continuous ‘ride pattern’ of eighth or sixteenth notes which flow through a song, when that pattern is not played on the hi-hat. It’s also the cymbal commonly used to play Jazz ride patterns. I would suggest you spend a little time playing before choosing your cymbals, as the styles (and volume) you decide you want to play will decide what cymbals are best for you.

Crash Cymbal

A crash cymbal is a thinner cymbal which provides the quick ‘crashing’ sound which commonly ends a fill and punctuates a song. They’re generally too harsh and loud to be played continuously for a whole song (outside of certain loud genres). They generally sit on the left hand side of the kit, allowing you to quickly move back to the hi-hat after hitting the crash to punctuate a fill.

History

As with most modern music, drums have two basic lineages: Europe and Africa.

European drumming grew through the military, where it was used to organize and entertain troops. It also has a place in orchestral compositions. European drumming came to America with the British Army. Following the American Civil War, unemployed regimental drummers began touring the country in big bands. Gradually it became clear that if one drummer played two, three or even more separate instruments you could employ less drummers, and the drum kit was born!

Africans, on the other hand, have been drumming with hands and sticks for thousands of years, often as a part of large ensembles of drummers, each playing one part of the rhythm.

Those patterns only became more intricate when drumming was developed in Latin America. Today there are dozens of patterns, like the Songo, Rhumba, and the Cascara. Over the last hundred years these patterns have been adapted to the drumset, with each limb replacing a part which would be played by a separate performer. This can be very challenging, it’s on the far edge of what a human really can do, but it’s also incredibly rewarding to see your body play these complex patterns faster than thought.

African and European drumming combined to create Jazz drumming, a musical style which is quintessentially American.

Your Style

You will not like all drumming or drummers. You may learn to appreciate certain styles which you don’t actually like to listen to and have no real desire to play. You may also find that your drumming desires grow as you are exposed to more drumming and drummers. In general though, when you think of being a drummer, you will dream of being able to play music you enjoy listening to, and most people don’t enjoy all music.

I would suggest you take the time to learn a bit of all styles (rock, hip-hop, latin, jazz, etc.) as, for me at least, the process of learning broadened my interests. That said, you should play, and learn, the type of music you enjoy. That also means your style and equipment will vary.

If you enjoy jazz and don’t love harsh loud noises, you will probably gravitate to a smaller kit, with quieter, darker, cymbals. If you love rock and want to play live in loud clubs, you will probably choose big booming drums and bright, loud, cymbals. Similarly, a jazz lover might look to Mark Guilana for inspiration, where a rock lover will look to Neil Peart.

It’s also worth noting that your learning style might be different than mine. I personally like books because I can have a consistent visual reference to work from as I try a pattern over and over. Many people prefer watching videos (use YouTube or Drumeo). Finding an instructor is also a great way to provide you with structure, have someone to give you individualized feedback, and keep you accountable to practice.

How to Practice

There are two ‘modes’ of virtually any activity: practice and performance. Practice is when you consciously push yourself to do things your primitive brain doesn’t quite ‘get’ yet. It’s frustrating, but rewarding as you learn new things. Performance is where you use the unconscious skills you’ve developed, it’s fun, but you don’t learn all that much.

As fun as just rocking out can be, it’s usually not the best way to get better. You do have to actively apply your mind to new techniques which frustrate and challenge you if you want to grow. It’s supposed to be a little uncomfortable and a little frustrating.

The general formula for practicing is: find something you can’t play, practice until you can play it. The source for these things to learn can be a book, YouTube, an instructor, or your own imagination. When you first try to play a new groove, fill or rudiment, you will most likely fail miserably, with your hands and feet just not moving the right way at the right time.

The first thing to do is slow it down. Speed will come naturally as you get more and more used to the movements. More importantly, each time you play something your brain is adapting to play more like that. If you play fast and sloppy, no amount of practice will make you less sloppy, it will just ingrain the slop further. The solution is to practice slow and perfect, allowing the speed to come naturally. It’s also commonly held that you shouldn’t be tense when playing, if your muscles are tightening and you are forcing your play, slow down.

Slowing down also allows your conscious brain to keep up as you get the movements down. At a slow enough pace you can count each beat, or part of the beat, and manually move your limbs at the right time. You will gradually train your brain to make those movements, allowing you to speed up.

Another variable you can manipulate is the complexity of what you’re playing. Just as you weren’t ready to jump into calculus in second grade, you probably aren’t ready to play the most complex drum patterns when you’re just getting started. You want to manage the difficulty of what you try to learn to keep yourself challenged, but not so frustrated you give up. You can always mentally remove components of what you’re trying to play, get a handle on the rest, and then gradually add them back.

It’s critically important that you hear and identify your mistakes. Often they will be obvious, but sometimes it will be easier to hear them if you record yourself playing. Either way, resolve to not make that specific mistake as you continue to play the pattern over and over. Gradually you will run out of mistakes to make, and you will have learned the pattern!

Finally, it’s worth noting that you are making music, not becoming a stick moving robot. Pay attention to the tone and sound of what you’re doing, make it sound actually good to you. Again, recording your play is very helpful for this.

Once you have something down, don’t be afraid to increase the difficulty by adding in a new element or complication. Play around, find something you think might sound interesting, and get your body playing it. A general rule is: if you can’t play something, learning how will make you a better drummer, it doesn’t matter if it’s a pattern handed down to you or one you invent on your own.

Curriculum

Ok, so you’ve decided to get started, what do you actually do now? You have some options, in general you will need to do all these things, the ordering is up to you.

Rudiments

Buy a copy of Stick Control. Play through all of the rhythms starting very slow, gradually working up to 120 bpm (use a metronome!) and higher. Make sure you are holding the sticks correctly, that you use the provided left-right sticking, and that your accents are louder than non-accented notes. Listen to your playing, trying to get your notes even in tone and volume and spaced as written on the page.

This step can be done with just a practice pad and sticks, for as long as you need until you can buy a kit. Once you have one:

Grooves

Buy Groove Essentials. Start on Groove 1 Slow and go through the following progression:

• Play the groove on repeat to get it down
• Play the groove to the provided track, counting the measures so you end when the band does.
• Play the groove, inserting a fill (start with just eighth notes on the snare drum) every fourth measure.
• Play the groove using the figure, interjecting accented notes, pauses and solos as it shows.
• Do the same with each of the variations, ultimately moving between them in a single play-through.

You can then move on to either Groove 2 Slow, or Groove 1 Fast, depending on whether you care more about building your speed or versatility. If you successfully complete the book (don’t worry, there’s a sequel), you will be a killer groove player.

Fills

When following the groove lessons, you will have many opportunities to play fills. Gradually, you want to make those fills more and more interesting (even if it slows down your groove progression a bit). The general progression is to play a fill alone (to a metronome) over and over. Then, when you have it down, play three or so measures of a simple groove, adding in the fill on the fourth measure. Once that feels good, start using it in your groove practice, being sure you are playing in time.

If you run out of ideas for fills, start by playing rudiments between different instruments, that’s the essential building block of all fills. Experiment with varying the timing, inserting rests into your fills. You can also, of course, turn to YouTube, Google and your favorite musicians for endless inspiration.

Comping

Start by learning the Jazz swing pattern:

Comping is the skill of playing various things on top of a pattern like this.

To learn, buy a copy of Syncopation for the Modern Drummer. Start on Page 34, which shows a snare and kick pattern. Play only the snare pattern, on top of the swing pattern.

You’ll note that the snare pattern is written in eighth notes, not triplets. This is a common convention, and something your brain will have to adapt to seeing. You still play it using triplets even if it’s written like this:

You’ll want to mentally map the first note in each beat to the first note of a triplet, and the second eighth note in each beat to the last note of the triplet (never playing the note in the middle). You will find it easier at first if you write in the swing pattern around the notes printed on the page, but eventually that shouldn’t be necessary.

It will be invaluable to count out the triplets 1-te-ta-2-te-ta and so forth, as you gradually convince your body to do this strange thing. As you count, play the swing pattern with your right hand and left foot, while your left hand plays the Syncopation book patterns on the snare.

Once you’ve mastered that, you can move onto the patterns on page 38 and 39. Eventually you should be able to play those pages straight through on top of your swing pattern. Then you can start to use different jazz groove patterns like the shuffle. You can also do ‘hand chasing’, which I practice by playing the snare notes in the book with the bass drum while playing all the other triplet components on the snare.

If this is confusing, turn to YouTube for more direction and inspiration. The most important thing is you are pushing yourself to do something which you couldn’t do yesterday, but you have a shot at being able to do tomorrow.

Timing

If you play to a metronome or the Groove Essentials recordings, you will develop a sense of time. That said, there are some specific things you can do to improve it. One of the most basic (but challenging) is to play, alternating between various note durations. Start with whole notes, then half notes, triplets, quarter notes, then five strokes per beat, all the way to sixteen. When you can jump between those at random, and at speed, you will be in good shape.

Next Steps

If this sounds interesting to you, pick up a practice pad, load up a metronome app, and get to work! Please ask any questions in the comments and if I can be of any help reach out to 🙌@zack.is.

If you do decide to take this up, I strongly recommend you choose some concrete goals. The quickest way to lose interest in a hobby is to not know what you’re supposed to be doing when you practice. Pick some specific goals (I want to play through all of Groove Essentials, I want to play every rudiment at 160 bpm, etc.) and make some progress every single day.

Finally, I’ll encourage you to actually play music. All this practice is critically important, but at some point it’s time to forget what you’re ‘supposed’ to do, and just produce the music you think sounds good. Record it, post it to Soundcloud, or just jam with your friends. At the end of the day, that’s what all of this is actually for.

Shopping List

• Practice Pad A hard rubber pad which simulates the rebound of a snare drum without (much) of the noise.
• Sticks Nicely shaped bits of hickory. There are many different styles of stick you can experiment with. I personally use AJ1s, but 5As and 5Bs are the most popular.
• Stick Control The quintessential snare drum book. Like most of the books from this era, it doesn’t provide a ton of instruction, favoring instead page after page of things you should learn to play. I like that idea, because it makes the point that what you really need to be doing is practicing!
• Syncopation for the Modern Drummer Syncopation is playing notes which are a little different than what the rhythmic part of your audience’s brain is expecting. It’s what makes you a musician, not just a loop station, and this book will teach it to you. It’s a little light on instruction as well, but I’ve given some starting places in the Curriculum section.
• Groove Essentials 1.0 I really can’t fathom how this book could be better. It takes you through 50 grooves which both sound good and stretch your ability. Each groove has a backing track played by real musicians. I can’t see how you could play through this whole book (with attention to detail) and not be ready to rock out. Note that there is a DVD which will show you each of the patterns played by Tommy. You can buy it as an instant download here, but it’s not required. The book includes a CD with the backing tracks (rather than a download). I recommend ripping it to your phone or MP3 player, or finding a friend who has, email me for help.
• A Drum Kit This is too big a topic for me to really recommend any specific kit or cymbals. Feel free to email me if you wanna chat about what to get.