Stages of Drum Lessons

If you're the child who made a drum kit out of your mother's pots and pans, hopefully you have decided to take drumming one step further or beyond. Everyone has a sense of rhythm, we're just born with it, but deciding to harness this feeling and turn it into a real ability is a decision that involves many stages. It's fun, but passing from one to the next takes work. Here's a look at the journey.

Beginning to drum: at first, it'll be about getting your basic co-ordination down. The beats will be as simple as possible—playing a steady beat with consistent accents. The idea at this early stage is to get your hands working together, and to get both hands working in unison with your feet. There's a maxim that a drum kit isn't one instrument, but several arranged to be played interchangeably. In the first stages you must learn how to use some of the different parts. That said, it will be mostly about using your bass drum with your foot, the other foot controlling the hi-hat, and the hands will cover the snare, tom toms, and a couple cymbals. As you move on, you'll likely add other parts to your kit (though you don't have to), and these parts will be used in a bare, minimal way. To emerge from this stage, you must be able to hold down a steady beat. It don't have to be complicated, just very consistent.

Once you have the basics down, you'll add some more complex fills that involve syncopation. Aside from keeping a beat, ability to syncopate separates one drummer's ability from another. You'll start to play in between beats rather than just keep something steady on the second and fourth beat, for example. The ultimate goal is always the steady beat, but you'll make your accompaniment more interesting by alternating the rhythm instead of just playing steady. At this stage, you'll improve your hand and foot speed too, since playing off rhythms will require more control and dexterity of your limbs.

The advanced stage requires perfect control and facility of the skills acquired at earlier stages. Advanced drummers can give the illusion that the beat is lost before they dramatically tune back into it. This is more than just an accent, but a perfect sense of time. A really good drummer knows when to play steady and when interesting accents are necessary. An authoritative drummer will give the impression that the way they played something is the only way to do it, that that's how the song was meant to sound. You'll need speed and timing, but unique to this stage is a cultivated sense of style that develops after defining your own sound and from listening to the best musicians in your genre and others. Since the technical chops are mostly down (but never perfect! You can always practice those…) you'll be refining your style and sound.

To be sure, there's an unlimited amount of work you can put into timing as the world is full of different rhythms, and technical chops fall into the same category. Still, this is roughly the path you'll take in drum lessons. Have fun and good luck!

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http://www.long-mcquade.com/location/Ontario/Markham

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