For this project, I had planned my semester to some extent prior to the first seminar / 1 to 1 tuition session. I based my teaching around my intended plans outlined in my ‘first lesson’ essay from a few months ago. As I wasn’t sure who I would be teaching for my project, I wanted to leave some room for adjustment depending on the student’s ability, progression and interests within playing drums. I had mentally prepared 2 different paths with some crossover work, covering both the auditory approach of playing before reading sheet music (can be described as a ‘sound before symbol’ style) as well as a more visual and academic route of learning some sheet music basics alongside the playing.
As I was teaching Lily, a piano student, I made sure to include sheet music to support the basics as I know her abilities to read well from playing together outside of the module. One main focus of mine during our sessions was to make sure she was enjoying the lessons, and didn’t feel like a job or chore for the sake of the assignment of nothing else. Across the semester we were able to have 4 full sessions across 3 seminars and 1 longer extra session towards the end of the semester to make up for the missed time at the end of the semester.
One thing important to mention that will be obvious throughout my videos is that all of the footage I have used came from the longer session, as I only had a few minutes of footage prior due to storage issues on my old phone, and a lot of the older videos were accidentally deleted when I switched to my current phone, so in some parts of the video, I bring up a few points that I had filmed and gone over before, such as parts of the kit and basic stick and/or playing technique. From this point, each video clip is preceded by my thoughts, reflections and opinions on what happened at each point of this extended session and any relevant accompanying discourse.
Overall, most of my aims for the first 5 lessons were achieved, but where I believe I fell short in my teaching will be reflected upon later alongside the specific relevant clips. My main goals for progression were to get through the sheet of 20 grooves (titled ‘One Measure Rock Beats’ from Joel Rothman’s book ‘Basic Drumming’) that I was taught as a beginner, as well as some basic rudiments and some sightreading exercises. Alongside these, I wanted to offer something alternative/complimentary in the form of improvisation, fills and playing along to metronomes and songs to build the skills needed in a live performing situation.
Due to the pacing of the semester, there was over 5 weeks between our 3rd and 4th sessions together, so the start of the recorded lesson is just us going over the first few grooves from the page and discussing the progression in Lily’s playing since the start of this project.
We began by discussing the list of 20 grooves, and how it was a reduced version of a full drum clef. My plan was to move on to some full drum parts towards the end of the sessions but I underestimated the amount of time to get through this list of 20 together, which is very useful for future reference. Alongside this, I encouraged Lily to play without relying on what is written, and to take a more auditory approach when trying to apply these grooves in a live setting, which we partially looked at later. Along with this, I made sure to make sure Lily didn’t feel like she needed to show instant progress and to not be hard on herself if the difficulty seems to ramp up a bit too quickly.
One unique issue I came into this session that we hadn’t had before was that the person using the room before us was a lot taller than either me or Lily. I made sure to adjust the seat height while setting up, but failed to adjust the snare and hi-hat to match, causing slight playing problems for Lily to begin with- as a reflection on my teaching, it will be a useful (and fairly obvious now, looking back) thing to remember in the future, to adjust the kit before the student sits down, as Lily wasn’t too sure how to adjust things to her liking. This, however, was fully my own fault, and is something I will remember in future lessons. At this point in the session, I helped her adjust the snare, and the rest followed part by part later on.
In the next clip, I found 2 things of note. The first being our discussion of practicing multiple times to build consistency, in this case 4 repeats of each groove to build the muscle memory. This is a useful strategy to gain confidence at the kit, and is very useful to learn at an early stage, as it has been very useful in my learning as a drummer here at Leeds. As well as this, having spent a few minutes recapping and discussing the content off-camera, when asked to move to the next groove on the list, it was immediately together and accurate, compared to a more timid start at the beginning.
Another thing I tried to highlight during our sessions was to not place too much pressure or expectations behind the learning, as while high standards can bring more determination, they can make someone feel the complete opposite if not reached quickly enough. Luckily, in this case with Lily, she remained very positive throughout the experience, and she seemed to enjoy playing at every stage. This was important to me as I have found myself struggling with unattainable high standards for a large portion of my time as a musician, and while obviously Lily is already a skilled musician, it’s best to avoid creating these feelings at every step of the way, even when it doesn’t seem necessary.
Despite my original plan being to cover all 20 grooves on the list, by the end of our sessions so far, we covered half of them. As a result, I adjusted my teaching, as there would have been no point to force twice as much work on her to meet my standards. Regardless, I kept note of how I would have continued towards that goal, which I will include towards the end, after my notes for each of the clips.
An important part of playing drums is having limb independence. The first limb to need this is the right leg, which plays the bass drum, on which one should be able to switch up the feeling in a song by changing the placement of where in the bar they are pedalling it. We looked at some of the following grooves to work on this. Again, in this video, I adjusted the kit slightly to make it easier for her, something I believe I should have taken more time and effort into doing at the start, so as to not waste any time. There are points where Lily makes slight mistakes and is able to laugh them off and acknowledge them in the moment. This was something particularly good about her willingness to try to improve, as in hypothetical lessons with other people, I will have to make sure that positive reinforcement is both present and adequate, and that the student doesn’t feel let down or lied to when they do make the occasional mistake. Alongside this, by this point in our learning, I would let Lily read each groove and play straight away, rather than give any form of demo beforehand, so she can improve her sightreading and confidence on drums.
At this point, I decided to allow a break from reading and playing the exact same things by working for a while on fills and improvisation, using the first 4 grooves we had recapped on as a base. Discussing the concept and construction of a basic fill was important to me as it isn’t the aspect of drums that should be solely focused on sheet music. Most fills exist from moments of improvising and creativity, and learning about them should feel just as exciting. I made sure at this point to discuss technique for travelling around the kit, and advice to try and not get tripped up with hand and stick placement while moving around quickly for a fill. This is something every drummer has to deal with, and I would compare the learning curve to the technique of playing scales on a piano without messing the fingering up. We discussed this at a few points in the session, as I made sure to reassure her that her playing was improving, even if she wasn’t able to tell at times.
The following part was one of the harder aspects of teaching drums. We worked briefly on playing grooves with a metronome on, a useful aspect of practicing drums. The difficulty came with the assignment in my opinion, as I wanted to ensure this was captured for the supporting evidence of the project, so I had the metronome play out loud. On one hand, this led to Lily not fully hearing the click, so I had to stand behind the camera and visibly click my sticks together towards the end. On the other hand, it was a decent exercise of control and volume management, as being able to play quietly enough to hear your accompaniment is also a very important thing to be able to do.
For the sake of covering as much content as I wanted to get through, we only did this briefly, but Lily showed great progress throughout, and by the end, I’d say her timekeeping had gotten much better than it was in our first seminar session, which did have some video recorded at the time, which I sadly lost, as mentioned earlier.
We continued to work on fills at this point, and I made sure to bring up a few real life situations that were relevant to her playing at that point. Namely, I brought up something most performers will know, including herself already- that being the idea that any small mistake can go by unnoticed in a live setting if it is recovered from and also there’s no visible sign that anyone messed up. When beginning to try more ambitious ideas and fills, as long as you can recover from any slip-ups without letting the entire audience in on it, it will go unnoticed by almost everyone, and it shows your professionalism and skill to anyone who does notice.
I also briefly brought up her articulation on the crash cymbal, as it is treated differently to the hi-hat and ride in that it is typically struck lower on the stick, creating a literal crashing sound, rather than a tap on the hi-hat or a ‘ping’ sound on the ride and/or ride bell. The technique for snare and hi-hat was addressed earlier, so at that point, I brought up the importance of having confidence and conviction behind your playing, as a lot of her playing was confident up to the fills, where it was more timid. It was a great thing that she could notice and agree with the mistakes and solutions in her playing, and after discussing her confidence, she quickly adapted in the clip to correct herself when she played the crash incorrectly, a sign of an active memory and a desire to improve.
One important concept of learning drums in the early stages are the key rudiments- to me, at this point, singles/doubles/paradiddles cover most of what you would need to know to begin learning more difficult concepts as a foundation to build on. To me, this part of my teaching reflects both in and outside of music, as I would compare rudiments to fundamental concepts in both music education as well as language learning. The obvious comparison to me is that it helps build up from basics in the same way a scale does, where you won’t be playing it all the time in performance settings, but is incredibly helpful to make every part of playing easier.
In my opinion, rudiments serve the same purpose as learning basic phonics and letters/the alphabet in the language learning process. Having previously studied a foreign language in my education for 5 years, up to A Level standard, the similarities in usefulness seem important to me, as there is obviously something identical in how learning letter grouping to help read and pronounce words functions in the same way as learning basic rudiments and fills to help make your playing more fluid or ‘fluent’ in a live setting.
This, for me, was another point to employ a ‘sound before symbol’ approach, which was only ideal for improvised playing and rudiment learning in my opinion, as rudiments are mostly just playing order for hands, and specific rhythms within these don’t show up at this stage, with singles (played RLRL or LRLR, where L/R are Left/Right), doubles (RRLL or LLRR) and paradiddles (RLRR LRLL or LRLL RLRR) all being evenly spaced notes of any set speed.
The drums are a unique instrument in that they have no tuned aspect inherently within them, other than the fact that the toms are typically tuned in descending pitches. When working with Lily, one aspect of piano playing that I had to work on was my intonation, and making it sound musical and making it sound ‘right’, rather than just simply ‘correct’. I wanted to convey that to Lily by working on basic technique and building her confidence to play louder and stronger, as the instrument is inherently so. Along with this, we discussed ending phrases on the 1 in most situations, as it feels complete. Earlier, when playing each groove on their own, she would finish at the end of the last bar with no final downbeat. This is fine to do, but it is good to be able to stop with a final hit on 1, so that was something I encouraged her to work on in the future.
The following clip was recorded for the sake of covering lost content from our first session, as well as a chance for me to test Lily’s memory of that session, where we discussed the names of each part of the kit. This showed me that she made sure to remember the whole kit, of which she was unsure on a few parts at the beginning. This was a chance to assess Lily’s progress outside of just her playing.
To end the lesson, I decided to pick one of the harder grooves (up to number 10) that Lily had looked at in our previous session, of which I picked number 8. After some hesitation, she was able to play it 4 times with a fill to close it out, which she played much better than our previous session. Due to her not being around for the 4th seminar, it had been a few weeks since her last time playing drums, so to be able to skip from number 4 to 8 with only little hesitation was great to see, and that showed me that working on all the fundamentals does really help more than I had expected. The only slight mistake was a wrongful and accidental hit of the crash near the end, but similarly with the rest of the kit, I would only take that as a reflection of my slightly less-than-necessary set up at the start of the session rather than her own mistake, which I made sure to make clear in the moment.
To end our session, I reminded her of how to practice these grooves without a drum kit. I will briefly explain the method as I am not on camera while I do it. Whilst sat down, use both feet as if they were on their respective (bass/hi-hat) pedals. Place your hands on your knees or upper legs, and tap them down in place of a stick on a drum. This helps with the muscle memory of each limb, and the only connecting part needed would be the sticks to bring it to life on the kit. This was a method that I used exclusively for the first 20 months of my playing, tapping on my knees, legs, tables and other surfaces. By the time I had my own drum kit, I was finishing grade 5, and 18 months later had achieved a grade 8, so I will always personally use and endorse this body-percussion style of playing. Within this module of tuition, the concept of Dalcroze teaching very much resonated with this style of practice to me, as it focuses more on the feel, the coordination of the limbs and it doesn’t require an instrument to get better at, allowing the body to become its own powerful instrument both at and away from the kit.
Upon reflection of the progress made from the first session to now, I would consider relying less on the sheet of grooves and spend more time allowing the student to experiment with fills, improvising and building confidence and volume to their playing. In the future, for another session, I would finish the list of 20 grooves with Lily while keeping focus on playing more musically. I would also endeavour to allow her to decide on her own if she wanted to focus on her technical progression or if she wanted to work on something more creative. I had originally planned with both pathways in mind, but for further lessons, I would let her, or any student, decide for themself which they would rather work on first, so they feel more in charge of their own learning and can decide what they want to improve on first.
The most important takeaway from this aspect, as well as overall, for me, is that while I am the tutor in this situation, I should not be deciding everything for the student, as the drums have so many different approaches and every drummer has their own strengths, it would only make sense to allow each student to find their own progression with my teaching as a helping and guiding force.
