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.