How I Learned to Play Drums
Occasionally someone will ask me how long I’ve been playing drums. (Poor suckers!)
Little do they know that when they ask a question like that, I’m likely to bore them to tears with answers such as the following:
I didn’t have actual drums when I started playing at around 11 or 12 years of age. Buying a real set was out of the question at the time. So I made my own drum kit out of different sized coffee cans, and using a piece of wire I tied it all onto a small wooden chair. I put a handful of nails in one can and called it the snare drum. I cut the bottom out of one can and taped it to the top of another to make a deeper floor tom.
Apparently my grandfather, who died long before I was born, used to play the bass drum in a marching band. My father still had the tarnished old cymbal that had been attached to that bass drum, so that became my one and only cymbal, attached to the back of the chair using a nail. I remember holding paint brushes (by the bristle-end) to use as my drum sticks. (We really were not that impoverished, although my saga implies otherwise.)
Sure! Go ahead and laugh! Get it out of your system. But I was a kid on a without a budget, and had an overactive imagination. There was junk available and I had nothing but time. What can I say? (It was the “perfect storm”.) And besides, I just discovered that I am not alone in this.
There may have been a connection between me purchasing real drum sticks and the fact that I used to routinely break through the plastic coffee can lids I used as drum heads. Since my parents selfishly refused to drink coffee at a pace consistent with my need for replacement drum heads, I was forced to patch the broken areas by melting pieces cut from other lids. In the process I found that I could get different sounds by making some ‘heads’ thicker than others.
That was my first ‘drum kit’. That is what I used to learn the basics of drumming on. That’s where I learned to make basic crossover moves and associate different sounds to different sized drums, (or in my case, cans). That lasted me until I was about 16 years old, at which time I managed to scrape together $150 for a cheap, used, 5-piece set, complete with some of the worst sounding cymbals I have ever broken.
It was at that point that I came to realize just how different playing a real set was:
- These ‘real drums’ were tunable. (What a concept!)
- They were much louder. (My parents rejoiced!)
- They were much larger and therefore further away from each other, requiring me to move quicker in order to reach from one to another.
- These drums provided more of a stick bounce which, in time, made actual drum rolls possible.
- Although they were junky, there were more cymbals to hit. (The classic “More Cymbals, More Fun!” point of view.)
- The biggest difference was that they required my feet to do something! (I had no prior experience using pedals, except those attached to my bike. Yikes!)
So just when I thought I could drum, reality set in, showing me in no uncertain terms that I was only using a mere half of my limbs, whilst real drummers ‘fired on all four cylinders’. (It may have been at that lull in my self esteem that I discovered the blues . . .)
I mainly played along to records and tapes. I guess my enjoyment for making music by drumming along to the music I loved, kept my interest in drumming alive and well, to the point that I stayed with it and saw my own gradual progress. I’m not sure I would have had the same enthusiasm or sticktoitiveness in taking lessons if I felt I was being burdened by rigidly having to practice flams and paradiddles everyday instead of playing along to In-A-Gadda-Da-Vida just for the fun of it. On the other hand, seeing what truly great drummers (such as Dave Weckl) can do seemingly effortlessly, builds a strong case for the structured learning that comes only with years of drum lessons.
Would I recommend drum lessons for beginners? Absolutely! There is no substitute for professional training by those that already know what their doing. And I’m sure that had I taken professional lessons I would have been greatly benefited. But I loved playing drums and learning in my own way, and at my own pace. So even though I never had lessons, all things considered, I think I do fairly well despite the fact that I’m self-taught.
Brad Kunz