The Early Years

I became interested in the drums in 2006/7. I think it had been a seed that had been germinating for a while. In the 90's a bought a cheap electronic drum pad. It was terrible and mostly gathered dust. The kids played with it a bit. That was cool because I bought it for them. Really, I suppose I bought it for them because I was interested in it.

I can't remember any particular event that really got me interested. My kids have been playing music for years and my father is a musician. I have always been around music and I love listening to all kinds of music. One year I asked for drumsticks for Christmas and I went to St John's Music and bought a beginner book on drumming and a practice pad.

I played on that practice pad for about a year. Usually while watching TV, sometimes listening to music. But I wasn't worried about music too much. I wanted to learn basic timing and coordination so that if I started playing music that I would have that under my belt. I was happy to practice. I was very casual. I didn't have any ambition to really play drums. I was just noodling around. But I did start wanting something more interesting to play on than the practice pad all the time. But I didn't want to spend very much. I wasn't thinking about sound, just the mechanics.

I don't have very much space so I didn't want anything big. I also wanted something I could play any time of day without bothering people so I was looking for a little electronic kit. I wanted to find something for under $500 which proved to be pretty hard. There was one USB kit you could play through your computer. I thought that might work.

Then Rock Band was released and I was intrigued. It was at least as good as the USB kit I had seen and a lot cheaper. I wasn't thinking that the game would be so much fun to play but I bought one for the family for Christmas, 2008. It was ridiculous. The kids loved it. I loved it. The game was so much fun. We played almost every day for months. My daughter liked the guitar and my son gravitated to the singing. They knew I wanted to play drums and were kind enough to let me play most of the time. We'd switch around every now and then.

We wore out the cheap peddle in the first version and I bought a wooden foot plate on e-bay that kept it alive. The guitar also started having some problems. Then Rock Band 2 came out. It had a bass guitar and better drums so we bought it to replace the ailing drums and guitar and so the first guitar could be used as a bass. And we kept playing.

It was a riot but it actually helped me with my drumming. I don't think I ever used it as a practice kit but that was OK. I was growing in confidence and now I wanted a good kit. I looked at a bunch of electronic gear. I liked the Roland TD-9. They had a set at Steve's music downtown and St. John's Music, which had moved into my neighborhood, was a regular stop for my kids and I would noodle on the drums every time we went in. The kit sounded great but the rubber pads started to seem a lot different than using a real drum. I was starting to be more serious and thinking about maybe playing acoustic drums some day. If not planning to, at least I wanted to get a realistic feel so that if I ever played an acoustic set that it would be natural.

Roland had a version of the pads with mesh skins. They are a fabulous idea. Remo makes them for Roland and they are a mesh, woven like a window screen but flat. They are very like a real drum skin. You can even tension them to adjust the bounce. They were quite a bit more money but seemed like a good investment so I bought the TD-9KX for myself around Christmas, 2009.

I was like a kid in a candy store setting them up and I played nearly every day. Probably an average of about 15 minutes a day. We still played rock band and the first songs I tried to play were Rock Band songs. Metallica, Sandman and Stone Temple Pilots, Interstate Love Song.

I mostly still did drills but I downloaded the tabs for these and a few other songs and started trying to play them. It was slow going. I had to slow everything down. I couldn't play to the music for quite a while. I discovered that VLC media player let me slow a song down. It sounded a bit funny but it was quite useful.

I was surprised how hard it was to play with the music. I learned that I had a lazy foot. The kick drum was always delayed. The TD-9 has a very cool feature, a real time graph of the drum hits. I also learned that when I played with music that I anticipated the beats and played them a little too early. The graphing feature really helped. By watching it while I played I could see when I was on and not and when I was on I could feel how it felt to be right on.

I started to listen to the drumming when I listened to music and I discovered that you can practice drums without having drums or even sticks. Some of the coordination needed to play a new beat could be done just by tapping my fingers. When practicing with one finger of each hand I found that I could almost immediately play something I had learned on my fingers on the drums. I could practice anywhere. Meetings never had to be boring again. :)

I also kept a cheap little plastic maraca in the car and when I was driving I would shake it along with the music.

Around this time my daughter started having her extra curricular jazz band practice in a new school that had 2 music rooms and they would let the parents spend the 2 hrs in the other room. It had an acoustic kit! I brought my beginner book and some beat patterns that my daughter's music teacher had given me and played with my practice pad. The music room also had some posters on the wall with fingerings for some instruments and rudiments for the drums. I started trying to figure out the rudiments. I fiddled with them every week and I started to understand a few more things. Triplets, jazz and swing beats. Accents I had trouble with. I was moving into more complex territory.

While working on these skills I quickly noticed that it was hard to make my limbs to different things at the same time. I started practicing specifically independence. The beat patterns catalog had some good drills for independence and variations on jazz beats that stressed independence.

I started to hope there would be no other parents in the music room on those nights so I could play the drum kit.