I promise you that reading drum music is nowhere near as hard as you think it is. My student kids are so young, they might have walked into the wrong public bathroom because they couldn't tell whether it said "Men" or "Women", but they were reading drum music as if it was second nature. And that's not just because I'm the world's greatest teacher. Look it up in the Guinness Book if you don't believe me. It's because reading drum music is easy. It's just a language.
The most important thing for you to understand about drum music before we actually dive into learning it is that it's just another language. One of the ways we can use language is to describe specific objects to each other. Let me give you an example. Suppose I wanted to describe to you something that I saw outside in the yard. I could say: "I saw this thing out in the yard. It was attached to the ground, it was brown, and it had green stuff near the top of it. What was it?" Your first answer would probably be: "That's a tree, silly. It's growing out of the ground, the brown part is the trunk, and the green stuff near the top are leaves. It's called a tree". But as it turns out, the object that I saw was a brown fence painted green near the top. If, instead of trying to describe the object using a whole bunch of words that could be easily misunderstood, I simply said the word "fence", you would have immediately known what I was talking about. Everyone knows what a fence is. That's why we use the word "fence" when we mean "fence".
In case you think I'm totally nuts for talking about trees and fences in a drumming article, let me tie it together for you. When there's something that I want you to work on, I can write it out in a language that we both understand so we can be absolutely sure that we're both thinking about the same thing. Music notation is simply a language that I can use to show you how to play something without being wherever you are and playing it in front of you.
It's sometimes true that the best way to learn how to play something new on the drums is to watch or hear someone play that something new in front of you enough times that you can begin to develop an understanding of how it's done. Then you can try it on your own with a pretty good idea of how to get started. But in my opinion, learning by seeing and hearing can only take you so far. By using music notation, you will have a deeper and longer lasting understanding of how something is played, because by knowing how to understand and read the notation, a concrete picture of what's being learned will form in your head.
So you want more reasons to learn how to read music? How about these? Another benefit of using notation to learn is that you will have an easier time retaining what you've learned because you have that concrete picture in your head of how a particular exercise looks and sounds. The more concrete the picture in your head of an exercise, the easier it will be to have total recall of that exercise later.
When you are learning to play the drums, there will be many times when we will take an exercise that we've learned in the past and add something new to it, thus creating a new exercise to play. In other words, we'll constantly add new things to learn and play that build on things we've played before. Because of this, it's extremely important that you remember every exercise that you've ever learned. You don't play something correctly a few times and then consider it done and completely flush it from your memory. You'll need to call up that exercise in your memory in the future in order to build on it to create something new, so you'll need to hold on to it. Unless you happen to possess an extraordinary memory, this will be a difficult task.
When you know how to read music, you will have a better chance of recalling an exercise because you'll have not only the memory of how it's supposed to sound, but you'll also have a memory of how it looked when it was written out. Also, if you know how to read music and your teacher wants to remind you of something that you've played in the past, he needs only write it out for you to jog your memory. I do this all the time with my students. I'll write out something that I know they already know how to play, but haven't played in a while. They'll look at it for two seconds and immediately remember it and play it perfectly. I can then take the exercise as it's written out in notation and add some notes to it to create something brand new to play. It's not like the students are learning something new from the very beginning. Instead, they're relearning something they already knew and adding to it without wasting time trying to relearn something they already know. Without knowing how to read, the students would have to rely on their memory alone to pick up where they left off.
Knowing how to read music will also allow you to learn new routines from drum books and magazines. You'll be able to open any drum book or look at any written example in a drum magazine and instantly pick up something new to work on. This ability will allow you to greatly add to your drum vocabulary. You might see a transcription of a popular song in a drum magazine that you'd like to learn, and if you know how to read, you can get started on it right away.
If you know how to read music, you can be in your school band. Maybe you have no interest in being in the school band because you think it's uncool. That's fine, but consider this: I was in every one of my school bands, and I'm the coolest dude in the world. Seriously, I'm a firm believer in pursuing every musical experience you can. Every musical experience that I've had in my educational training has contributed greatly to my overall musicality, especially working with a conductor. If you can learn to watch a conductor, look at your music, and play your parts all at the same time, playing a drum kit will be much easier. Also, you can make friends in band. I had some great times with some really funny people in my school bands. And you might make friends of the opposite sex that become more than just friends, if you know what I mean.
Both Albond & Alex Wess are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
Albond has sinced written about articles on various topics from Drumming Lessons. By Alan Bond who teaches how to assemble and. Albond's top article generates over 3600 views. to your Favourites.
Alex Wess has sinced written about articles on various topics from Drumming Lessons. By Alan Bond who teaches how to play and. Alex Wess's top article generates over 3600 views. to your Favourites.