That said, however, the fact remains: you will ALWAYS need drum teachers, teaching face-to-face, live and in person. Even video conference lessons aren’t good enough, especially for beginners, for teaching the basics and foundations of drumming.
Why? Because drumming is a very physical art. A typical beginner starts with very poor kinaesthetic awareness. In plain English, most people aren’t very aware of where their limbs are, doing what and when. And that is why you people keep hearing me go like this during lessons:
“Use wrist…”
“Less elbow…’
“Wrist…”
“Shins 90 degrees to the ground”
“Wrist…”
“Wrist…”
"Elbows more to the front…”
“Wrist…”
Because drumming is very physical, you all need immediate feedback and correction when you are doing things incorrectly. Bad habits are hard to break, and they affect not only your playing but also your physical health. That is why I start our lessons off with warm-ups that improve your joint mobility. These exercises help rehab your arm joints before modern life messes them up for you, and help prevent problems such as carpal tunnel syndrome.
If you have difficulty coordinating your footwork with your hands, I have to prompt you during your practice as well, either by demo-ing before you in mirror image, or even by gently prodding your limbs with a drumstick here and there.
During every lesson I am also listening carefully to your playing and counting. I am listening out for hints of where you are unsure of the counts. If your counting is hazy, your playing will be hazy too. I change tempo on the metronome often to check for this as well. I don’t want you to end up being able to play beats or fills at only a few speeds and totally messing up at other speeds.
Many beginners mentally miss out the very last eighth-note count (quaver) of the bar. When that happens it affects your fills. I’ve heard countless wannabes who speed up the tempo after every drum fill. 80%-90% of the time it is because they mentally shaved off that final count of that bar, bringing the start of the next bar even sooner. So the song gets more rushed as it goes along.
Most of the time this is merely irritating to trained musicians. But playing drums for church has become more musically demanding over the past 10 years. Songs like “Beautiful One” by Tim Hughes or “Hosanna” by Hillsong are quite unforgiving; you have to get the tempo correct and maintain it for the whole song, or the worship leaders and the congregation can end up struggling to sing those songs properly.
That is all part and parcel of learning what it means to count, to establish and build upon the pulse of the music.
We are also starting to see the connection between what we sing and what we play on the drums, especially with what I call the “Stand-by-me beat”. This is my biggest value-aid: I teach drums based on what best supports the worship leader and the congregation. This is when counting aloud in earlier exercises start to pay off. The connection we established between your mouth and your limbs will help you match your drumming with the singing.
That makes your drumming a better support for the singing. I worked with drummers whose playing was based more on whatever funky grooves caught their fancy rather than what helped the singing. No matter how good they are, their playing would mechanical and disconnected at best. Very often the playing was distracting, making it hard for the congregation and worship leader to pay proper attention to what they are singing.. Of course I could tell such drummers what to play, but they would easily forget and go back to playing distracting stuff. The musicality was not built into them at the very beginning, so it got more difficult to add that in later on.
So this is what we are studying at this stage of your journey. Work hard on all this material now; we will soon be moving on to things you will actually be playing on the drums for worship.
See you at the next lesson!
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