5 flawed drumming philosophies you need to avoid

 If you’ve spent any time digging around the internet for drumming education material, you’ve likely found a lot of different opinions and methods out there. We like to trust that because someone is teaching online, they must therefore know what they’re talking about. Unfortunately that’s not always the case, so today we’re debunking 5 “flawed drumming philosophies” that you really ought to avoid. Let’s get started!

1) “You must master the snare before learning the drumset.”

Before I ever started taking drum lessons in high school, I owned a book that was sort of like a “beginner drummer’s encyclopedia” of everything drums. In a lot of ways, this book was super helpful. It explained a lot of the musical jargon we drummers use, including basic music theory and time signature. But this method strongly pushed the concept of learning snare drum etudes and mastering every kind of rudiment and roll before ever moving to the kit. What did this do for me? It made me thoroughly bored, as I bet it might with you too.

Don’t get me wrong - If you want to learn concert snare or marching snare, you absolutely have to work through rolls and rudiments. But if you want to learn drumset, LEARN DRUMSET. Yes, you should practice your singles and doubles (and even paradiddles), but there’s no need to go crazy with the rudiments (like inverted flams, ratamacues, or flam paradiddles) until you’ve mastered essential drumset fundamentals like basic grip & rebound, good time, good feel, and good dynamics.

“Concert snare” is its own, separate instrument. It's not a necessary “piece” of drumset. I know of guys who are extraordinary drum corps players, speeding through every hybrid rudiment on the snare. But then they sit down at a kit and don’t know what to do. Either their feet are sloppy, or they just don’t know how to express musical ideas because of years spent never improvising and only reading notes on paper.

Know that these are two separate things: snare, drumset. That's not to say you can't benefit from practicing snare. You just have to focus specifically on drumset as well. There's no reason to spend your first year on the snare...then "graduate" to the full kit. I hate it when teachers do that, because I believe it's counter productive (and boring for a student who wants to learn full kit). 

2) “Pinch the stick when you grip.”

This one isn’t so much a flawed philosophy as it is a flawed terminology. I think that books and teachers who say this mean well but throw off their listeners with the word “pinch.” We don’t want to pinch the stick, because any kind of non-looseness destroys natural rebound and makes it impossible to play smoothly and effortlessly and with good time. Instead, the stick needs to rest within the fulcrum you form with your thumb and finger, cradled gently but not squeezed.

Now the challenge here is finding that balance between looseness and control. You have to grip loosely, but at the same time you don’t want the sticks slipping out constantly. This loose control comes from a loose fulcrum (no squeeze)but from fingers gently wrapping around the stick and following its motion. The contact between the shaft of the stick and the palm of your hand provides the “stickiness” needed to keep the sticks from sliding out, and that’s the beginning of finding that balance. (Check out the "Everything Hand Technique" playlist on the channel for more.)

3) “You must build a fill vocabulary in order to have enough material for a gig.”

So this isn’t something you’ll ever hear a teacher say directly, but it’s something that seems to be implied by so many folks. This is lick-based learning, the concept that if you learn enough building blocks you’ll eventually be able to string them all together and form coherent sentences. This might be true in some circumstances when you’re playing a basic rock song with very simple, straightforward fills… But this method of learning will only take you so far.

What are you going to do when you’ve played through all your fills in your arsenal?

What are you going to do when you’re writing a new song with your original band, and you don’t want to just play the same things over and over?

There’s gotta be room for creativity, right?

Absolutely. And that’s why you can’t rely on a mental collection of fills to reach for. Rather, you must train your ear to create based on melody and other parts going on in the song.

Now this concept is way beyond the scope of this email, but if you want to go deeper check out the free e-guide, “5 steps to learning any song in under an hour.” In that guide we actually break down key listening techniques for drummers that help you learn songs quickly and perform more musically as a result. This will get you going with creative playing that leads to improvisation, so do check it out!

4) “In order to learn a song properly, you must find sheet music or drum tabs online.”

This is another one of those “unspoken” philosophies, because I doubt you’ll hear an instructor say this. But the number of YouTube videos out there teaching a specific song, groove or fill seems to prove otherwise. So many folks are teaching “how to play X song” or “how to play X fill,” and there are entire websites dedicated to providing you with note-for-note sheet music for numerous hit songs.

Now I’m not saying these are all bad things. I’ll admit that since the advent of YouTube in 2005, I definitely spent some time looking up detailed stuff like that when I was in high school. But there’s more to playing songs well than learning parts note for note. That will only get you so far.

Learning songs note for note is like being spoon fed. Eventually you have to grow up and feed yourself, in the end learning how to buy the ingredients and cook the food yourself (#growingup!). You have to ween yourself from this shortcut, which eventually becomes a crutch.

In my high school speech class, my teacher allowed us to write out our speeches word for word. I was already bad at public speaking, and this didn’t help at all. Being able to just get up there and read a piece of paper word for word taught me nothing, beside how to write well. But then in college my speech professor refused to let us do that, making us get up and give short impromptu speeches on the first day of class! I learned a lot in that class, and I became way more comfortable speaking and presenting ideas. Why? Because I was forced to ditch my "crutch" of reading a speech.

Don’t “read” a song that you’re playing. PLAY IT! How do you get better at this? By training your ear. Again, this gets pretty deep for a single email, so definitely check out the song-learning guide I mentioned a minute ago. This will get you rolling and teach you a system for learning any song by ear - without sheet music, drum tabs, online tutorials, or anything slow and cumbersome like that. Let’s actually have fun learning songs, and let’s be musical drummers.

5) “You need expensive gear in order to sound good.”

If you’ve hung around the Non Glamorous Drummer for long, you’ve heard me go on and on about how you CAN make cheap gear work. As a matter of fact, most of my videos pre-2020 used my old Ludwig kit that was nothing fancy at all. Even my Gretsch kit I use primarily now is not a crazy expensive kit. I paid around $1700 for it, and it sounds awesome. The old Ludwig was a $400ish kit that held its own through a whole bunch of gigs. (Check out this video for a fun comparison!)

The point is not to have the best sounding gear you can find. That’s an endless quest that will leave your ear unsatisfied and your pockets empty. Work to get great sounds out of what you have. This means putting fresh heads on your kit, tuning them well, then striking the drums properly. The most important part of your sound is YOU - then your tuning, then your heads, then your shells.It’s often really hard to hear a noticeable difference between a $500 kit tuned well and played well next to a $1500 kit tuned well and played well. Check out this recent video for a look at how to instantly make all your gear sound better!

Yes, cymbals are generally the exception seeing as how you can’t make a Sabian B8 sound like a Zildjian K dark ride. But you still don’t have to spend an arm and a leg to get good cymbals. Buy a box set of your favorite sounding cymbals, and you’ll save hundreds. There’s no reason to go shop for individual cymbals until you’ve really, really decided exactly what sound you want. And even then you can find a lot of good stuff used, which will save a lot of dough too.

Alright I hope you’ve enjoyed this long email! Feel free to shoot back a response with your thoughts, because we definitely touched on some controversial topics today. But that’s the best kind of stuff. :)

I certainly hope this was helpful to you, because I don’t want anyone clinging to bad drumming philosophies that can damage your long term growth. Let’s fix these things now so that we can accelerate our skill and become the proficient, creative drummers we’re called to be.

Stay Non Glamorous!

Stephen