Drumming is a very complicated instrument to play, you must have coordination beyond belief. You must be able to read music and a very good sense of beat.

Tom Frost (My source/teacher), a drummer from Fair Oaks, is a professional drummer who has played in many bands such as Journey, Styx, and etc. He has 16 years of teaching experience and 25 years of drumming experience. Drumming is more complicated than it looks, it requires you to be able to read music but 4 lines at a time. It requires a lot of hand-eye coordination.

While playing for bands, accidents can happen such as a flying stick. Every once and awhile, your stick will get stuck on a drum and it will go flying into the air. But if that happens you have to continue playing because if you stop, the whole band falls apart. Luckily, most drummers for bands have extra sticks sitting behind the bass drum just for that reason.

Drumming, requires serious concentration to try and keep the beat and to not screw up the rhythm. People do not recognise how complicated  it is to read 4 lines of music at once. Another challenge in drumming is independence between hands and feet, for example, if your foot is hitting the bass, and your right hand is hitting the hi-hat, your right hand will want to follow your right foot making it hard to play complicated rhythms.

Some drummers for bands start out with a basic beat and add on to it with a cymbal or just simply adding extra kicks or putting the kicks somewhere else in the measure. Take “Don’t Stop Believing”, The beat starts simple but then the drummer progressively adds cymbal hits at different beats.

Drumset is a fun but very complicated instrument. Many people are drawn away from it due to their lack of knowledge about it and its complexity. Drumming is harder than it looks but it doesn’t take much to learn.