My Journey Into Drumming Literacy
If there is one thing in the world that I could not live without, it would be music. Music has been a part of my life since I was very young. My mother would play music in the living room and I would “dance” along by throwing myself onto the floor or couch. My uncle used to also play on his customized electric guitar for me, showing me the cool Guns ‘N Roses riffs he had learned and even some of his own original music. At the time, this was all that I knew about music.
When I was about six or seven, I began to go to a Christian church with my mom where they had a live worship band play the songs that the congregation would sing along to every Sunday. I was not always a fan of singing, but I instead really enjoyed watching the drummer the play. I do not know if it was seeing the energy he put into the music or hearing all the cool bangs and crashes, but something about watching him play made me want to play too. Every Sunday I would watch him play and pretend to mimic him from the pews. I would even get in trouble for slapping my Bible like a drum every once in a while. My love for drumming began at church, but I would not get to play on an actual drum for many years.
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The worship band of the church I used to go to
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My first experience learning anything about drums did not come until I was in sixth grade. In a music program run by my elementary school, I learned the basics of drumming, like how to hold the drumsticks and different simple rudiments.These things are definitely important, but it was not entirely what I was looking for. I wanted more. I could only play one drum at time, but I wanted to play on a drum set, which has multiple drums and cymbals. I would not get the knowledge I needed from this music program, but it instead came from a very unlikely source.
A Guitar Hero drum set similar to the one I played on
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In the early 2000’s, a video game series called Guitar Hero would come into fruition. In this series, the player uses a plastic guitar controller to play along to popular songs as if they were playing the guitar. Playing the game on its hardest difficulty, however, was nowhere near playing an actual guitar. But when I was in Junior High, Activision released a version of Guitar Hero that also included a drum set. This drum set had two cymbals, three drums, and a kick pedal, which is actually not far from the number of cymbals and drums on the average drum set. Thinking that it was just another ordinary video game, my loving parents bought this drum set for me, quickly making Guitar Hero become my favorite video game. I began playing on the easier difficulties, but would soon end up being able to play on the hardest difficulty. And unlike the guitar, playing the Guitar Hero drums is actually almost one to one to playing on an actual drum set. Replace the plastic cymbals and rubber drums with real ones and you have yourself a full-fledged drum kit. This, surprisingly, is how I learned to play on a drum set, but I needed more experience and practice.
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Without a real drum set of my own, my only way to play and practice was still Guitar Hero. I would never be able to truly develop my skills as a drummer without being able to play on real drums. My pastor of the new church I went to helped change that. One Wednesday while I was at church for a weekly youth program, my pastor noticed that I had quite a bit of rhythm and he asked me if I knew how to play drums. I said that I kind of knew how, so he sat me down on the churches drum set and asked me to play along with him to one of the songs that we would sing in those youth meetings. I did my best, which was apparently good enough for him, because from then on I would play with him every Wednesday for that youth class. This gave me plenty of experience playing on real drums and not just their plastic counterpart. Eventually, my pastor let me play a song or two with the worship band (which he was a part of) on Sundays, something I had dreamed of since seeing the worship band of the church I went to years ago. I was ecstatic, to say the least. I would eventually become a full-time member of the Sunday worship band, which I loved; I would smile every time I got to play those shiny red drums on Sunday mornings. These performances with the band gave me a lot of much needed experience being the drummer for an actual band and not just a drummer in a group of drummers for an orchestra. But Wednesdays and Sundays were still the only time that I had the opportunity to play on real drums. If I wanted to keep improving, I needed a real way to practice whenever I wanted.
My generous parents continued to support me in drumming journey by buying me my first drum set; this would be the key to unlocking my full potential. I was delighted to finally have my own drum set to play at home whenever I wanted. This is what I needed to keep progressing. I used that drum set all the time to play songs I had learned to play on Guitar Hero and to also try out new techniques and ideas. I learned a lot about my own drumming style at this time. With my own drum set, I could practice, improve, and develop my own approaches to songs to my heart’s content. At the time, I only listened metal and hard rock, so playing along to my favorite songs was probably a pain to listen to for my neighbors. Lucky for them, my high school band teacher would soon introduce me to a genre of music on the other end of the musical spectrum which would teach me even more about drumming.
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My very first drum set; cheap but versatile
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Me during one of my performances with the high school jazz band
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My high school band teacher, Mrs. Dailey, needed a drummer for the high school jazz band, so she asked me if I wanted to join. I accepted because I was initially enticed by the field trips the jazz band would take to music festivals and performances, but I stayed because of the music itself. Before joining the jazz band, I had hardly listened to any jazz. Through the four years I stayed in that jazz band, I learned to appreciate jazz and one of its key components, improvisation. Improvisation is when a musician ad libs part of a song, usually during a solo. I didn’t realize that basically every solo in any jazz song was improvised and made up off the top of the musicians head. This was something that I had to learn to do as well because I had my own solos in some of our pieces. It took a lot of time and more importantly a lot of practice, but by the end of my four years in the jazz band, I learned the invaluable tool of improvisation.
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After learning all of these key concepts to drumming, it was time to put it all together. In the middle of high school, three close friends of mine, Braden, Julio, and Enrique, and I decided that we wanted to put all of our musical knowledge together and created our own band. We named our band As You Wish, after a quote from the famous movie The Princess Bride. Unlike most high school bands, we skipped the phase of covering songs and went straight into original music. We made many original songs while together; we had two methods to writing our songs. In the first method, our band leader Braden would write the lyrics and a simple melody for the song and the rest of the band would each add their parts based on what sounded good. The second method (my preferred method) was creating a song by taking the best parts of a jam session, which is when we all improvise our parts together. This is how our first song was made. Most of our songs had unique and “edgy” titles, like March of the Paraplegics and Dance or Die (our first song). Our genre was hard to define, because we were a complicated mix of punk, rock, jazz, ska, and metal. We were lucky enough to have the opportunity to play at a few local venues; our shows were always filled with friends and family who came to support us, as well as strangers who came to listen to new music. Playing in our band felt like a culmination of everything I had learned so far. I put everything together to help create something new and original that had never been heard before.
As You Wish
From left to right: me (drums), Braden (guitar, tenor saxophone, vocals), Enrique (trumpet), Julio (bass, backup vocals) |
Drumming has been an enormous part of my life and a skill that I am very proud of. It has been a long journey that has taken many years, but I do not regret any of the time that I have put into it. But ultimately, I have to give the most credit not to myself, but to my parents. Without my parents’ initial gift of that Guitar Hero drum set, I would not have been able to learn how to play on a set to begin with. And without their continued support and amazing gift of my first real drum set, I would not have had a reliable way to practice, improve upon my skills, and make original music all in comfort of my garage. If there is anything that I have learned throughout this adventure, it is that practice makes perfect and I owe it all to my parents for giving me that opportunity to practice to begin with and allowing me to become literate in my favorite subject, drumming.