How were drums taught back in the day?

KamaK not sure I agree with this part:
"The post-internet musicians have a remarkable degree of virtuosity"

The ways people learn and the fact that they can watch BP talk about his shuffle is radically different. But it also a whole lot easier for mediocre musicians to cut a record. There is a lot more music because of that.
 
a very large percentage of my students... when I ask them what they listen to and what music they enjoy they shrug and look at me as if I just asked them an extremely complex question that they have no answer for

the love for music is gone.

the love and excitement of digging through your parents or older siblings record collection and finding that record that changes your life is gone.

the nights of staying up all night flipping the record or cassette over endlessly while you read every word of the liner notes are gone.

the studying of the music you listen to out of pure love is pretty much gone for the most part.

I hear what you're saying, though I'm not sure if I agree. I think kids still love music, but there's no "he likes rock, she likes classical, he likes jazz".. Everyone likes music, regardless of genre. Discovery is now accomplished trough social media and trends, exposing everyone to (the same) huge variety of material and artists. It's a little uncanny for old-timers like us. I honestly don't know if it's better or worse, or if a proper measure can even be made of such an abstract thing.

On the flip side... Teenage boys still pick up guitars for the same reason they did 50 years ago. Because they think it makes them look cool in the eyes of their peers and will get them laid. Very few of us began out of our love for music... That love came as an unintended consequence.
 
I hear what you're saying, though I'm not sure if I agree. I think kids still love music, but there's no "he likes rock, she likes classical, he likes jazz".. Everyone likes music, regardless of genre. Discovery is now accomplished trough social media and trends, exposing everyone to (the same) huge variety of material and artists. It's a little uncanny for old-timers like us. I honestly don't know if it's better or worse, or if a proper measure can even be made of such an abstract thing.

On the flip side... Teenage boys still pick up guitars for the same reason they did 50 years ago. Because they think it makes them look cool in the eyes of their peers and will get them laid. Very few of us began out of our love for music... That love came as an unintended consequence.

I disagree

but thats fine

and I never played music to be cool ... i just loved it

... and I'm still not cool
 
I started in the eighth grade. 14 of us in one class learning rudiments using chairs back to back with book shelves across them. We were learning specifically for concert band and orchestra. My rock band experience was with a group with two horns dropping the needle and working out cover songs. My chops to this day still have a snare heavy influence because of the hours playing only snare parts. I never had a private teacher, just the high school band instructor.
 
Syncopation for the Modern Drummer...I still have my original copy, check the price. Many weeks and months going over and over the pages of this book. I had a strict but understanding teacher in that he would make me stick to rudiments and adhere to lessons including reading solo's, especially jazz but he also understood that youngsters of the time were into rock. thanks Ronny S..
 
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1964, private drums lessons, two drum books Ted Reed, Jim Chapin, AM radio, record player/turn table that I could play 45rpm's at 33 rpm's to learn drum parts. Back then a single radio station would play jazz, blues, r&b, country and rock....many styles...
Weekends and summer off from summer just try to figure it all out! Denis
 
Tony - man, you're painting a painting a pretty bleak picture bro. I think we're close enough in age so I def relate, but I haven't seen that the love is any less than what it's ever been. The experience of holding a physical record is gone for sure and that's a drag, but my bass player is almost 20 years younger than me and he's got more fire in his belly than most kids I grew up with ever had. I love playing with this guy. I'm sure he's not unique in that.

KamaK - Excellent post. We're travelling the same path. I started drumming pre-internet and was "self-taught" the whole way (is anyone *really* self-taught?), but have been picking up guitar and bass in earnest over the last couple years with YouTube as my go-to resource. I can find great vids on theory, practice techniques, maintenance and setups, as well as immediate gratification cheats that are just fun. I would go take lessons but I'm too busy learning and playing on my own! Also helps that the guys I play and hang around with are so knowledgeable and love to share. I think our practices would be a lot more productive if we spent less time playing each other's instruments!

I'm learning and gaining proficiency at such a speedy clip, it's almost scary. I think it would have been great to have such easy access to so much info when I was coming up.

Though, just as Tony described, I probably wouldn't have spent so much time replaying, dissecting, and really getting inside the drummers' heads on the handful of records I did have if I had such unlimited access to so much other stuff. Maybe I should be grateful having lived in both eras?

And as for the love of it, I'm pretty sure that's a timeless feature that transcends the tools and media differences available . Could be wrong about that since my love for all things musical is completely independent from my consumption vehicles, and everyone is different. To be honest, as a kid, I didn't factor in album artwork nearly as much as I did the music itself, and didn't miss it nearly as much when it went away as a lot of others I know. I saw liner notes and album art a lot like reading the back of a cereal box!
 
Yea, it was Fireball. Looking back, I merely approximated it on a single pedal, I can't do those continuous fast 8ths on a single pedal at that speed. At the time, I didn't hear it as continuous, I thought the kick stopped for the snare hit. Every drum part I know is really my best interpretation of what I think I'm hearing, not necessarily what's actually being played lol.

That's a good point, what you think you're hearing. Capturing the vibe and going with it. EVH and SRV have both said something similar. They hear something study a bit and make it their own. And they both didn't cringe when other musicians took their material and did the same thing. Pastorious was furious that people would dare rip off HIS style. Once it's out there... it's out there. Just like nudie selfies in the cloud. But I digress.

Larry... I think I wore the grooves out that Fireball LP, specifically The Mule.
 
On the flip side... Teenage boys still pick up guitars for the same reason they did 50 years ago. Because they think it makes them look cool in the eyes of their peers and will get them laid. Very few of us began out of our love for music... That love came as an unintended consequence.

I think this is a huge load of horse pucky. All of the actual good musicians I know who are still around and playing love music. All the borderline retarded idiots who used to walk around high school carrying their guitars to be seen with them and "get laid" washed out a long time ago and if they didn't, nobody really wants to play with them and they are left seeking others for their own ego projects which usually amount to a ton of boring shredding over boring rhythms.
 
I'm pretty much of the opinion that there are pre-digital/internet/youtube drummers and there are post-digital/internet/youtube drummers.

The pre-internet musicians had to slow down albums and reverse engineer parts. Musicians had less overall diversity but were highly original within their genre. Teachers were often mentors, and you could hear a teacher's influence in a students playing.

The post-internet musicians have a remarkable degree of virtuosity. They can play anything they want, and if they cannot, they can hit youtube and have it mastered in short order. Aspiring musicians now have a personal instructor, and access to several dozen virtual-instructors on the internet. You want to learn how to play the purdie shuffle? BAM! Bernard Purdie will magically/instantly appear on your screen and teach you how to do it! This was almost unheard of pre-internet.

I'm not seeing this at all. Most of the people who are good now got that way before the Internet was a thing. The web really had next to nothing to offer re: drum instruction/information before YouTube, which has only been around since 2005; and it took a few years for it to accumulate some decent content-- and a whole lot of weak-to-horrible content. And in the last few years, there has been a little more non-YT content. It's a very recent thing.

It is nice to be able to see how famous drummers hit the drums-- that's a real change from what we had in the past. I mostly had to wait years for that, until I could see Elvin Jones, Roy Haynes, Jack Dejohnette, Vinnie Colaiuta, Art Blakey, or whoever, play live. But I got a lot more information from that-- and from listening to a lot of complete records by them many times-- than people get seeing videos of them playing one drum solo or one tune.

The way people become good musicians has not changed: listening to albums, playing music, seeing other drummers perform in person, practicing a lot, performing, being around other musicians, studying with a teacher. Those are all essential things, and none of them has anything like a decent replacement on the computer. Like, 90% of the non-gear questions that get asked on DW would not arise, or could be answered instantly, completely, and clearly, in person, if people were doing the above things. Online text-only explanations from a random sample of web users, or video demonstrations-- good ones, even-- cannot clarify every issue an individual is going to have with something. Someone speaking to you in person can tell if you're getting it or not, and explain it to you ten different ways on the spot, until they're satisfied that you get it.

As someone that learned guitar pre-internet and drums post-internet, I have to say that I prefer the latter. While I'm a highly unique sounding guitarist, I have to say that the struggle and cost was far too great, and I would have preferred the instantaneous "Whoa, I know kung-foo?" that our new matrix overlord affords us.

That's not what the Internet does, though-- what it gives you most often is "Whoa, a bunch of random guys have sort of showed me one Kung Fu move in isolation from the rest of the system, and absent any context, and now I sort of know that one move! Which is also the only thing a couple of million other people know about Kung Fu!"

Re: the original question-- I don't know, I wasn't around in the 40s and 50s, but I'd look for clues in Charley Wilcoxon's Drum Method, and Rudimental Swing Solos, and Jim Chapin's Advanced Techniques FTMD, and Stone's books. I don't feel like drum set instruction really matured until the 60s and 70s, after the first 2-3 waves of really modern drummers, and when the more advanced methods related to Ted Reed's Syncopation became widespread.
 
I got the Matrix reference, and while it's perhaps overstating it somewhat, it's a point is well-taken. Even if you don't wake up and say, "Whoa! I know Kung-Fu", and even if all you do is wake up knowing a little something about a Kung-Fu kick, you still know more than you did before.

Learning and progressing is always a series of little bite-size chunks that add up over time, and yeah, most chunks don't have context all by themselves. But that isn't the point cos it's up to the person who just learned it to find that context.

I'm not at all surprised to hear that the most vocal critics of YouTube learning are teachers since it's effectively cutting into their business. Complain all you want about how crappy YouTube teachers are in one broad brush stroke, but I can spot a hack and I've found tons of gems on there. As your critique goes shrill, your credibility takes a nosedive.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against most teachers, but some apparently feel that students need to have their learning micro-managed and heavily supervised, which to me is just a recipe for churning out robots or teacher clones.
 
I got the Matrix reference, and while it's perhaps overstating it somewhat,

Indeed. I may have overstated for dramatic effect. By pre-internet, I mean "Before the broad availability of freely streamable media on the internet". By "I know Kung Foo", I mean "Taking 2 weeks to be able to play a proper mambo at speed rather than 2 months"

The speed at which I'm learning to play this instrument astounds me, and I'm only having to invest a fraction of the time as I did learning to play guitar.

I still love having a private teacher, though I only meet with him once every month or two. He fixes my broken bits, Answers questions regarding the stuff I would like to do, and gives me direction so I know what to work on over the course of the next month. The man amazes me in terms of both playing and teaching ability, and I'm in constant fear of not being a satisfactory student and getting dropped.

This month is samba, and I'll be damned if I don't sit and watch a dozen other drummers on youtube explain it over and over in order to gain as much insight as I can. I want to watch Half nekid and drunk Brazilians playing the individual instruments in the streets. I'm tempted to take a dance class that focuses on latin beats, just so I get a better understanding of the spirit of the groove. I can type "samba" into a search engine and have enough listening-material to immerse myself for a lifetime. In the time it used to take me to drive to the record/music store, I can now be sitting at my kit working out the parts.

The kicker is... I really don't fancy latin music. I simply see its value in that it will give me greater command over the instrument.

Compare this to 1990, when I would have to go to the record shop and buy a couple "Latino Heat" compilation cassettes off the clearance rack, and put them in my Fostex 4-track so I could slow them down. Maybe buy a Tito Puente CD for full retail, or order whatever CD my instructor told me to listen to off BMG Music Club.

I wholeheartedly agree that the love of music needs to be there for either learning methodology to work. I guess I take it for granted, and I probably shouldn't.
 
I'm not at all surprised to hear that the most vocal critics of YouTube learning are teachers since it's effectively cutting into their business. Complain all you want about how crappy YouTube teachers are in one broad brush stroke, but I can spot a hack and I've found tons of gems on there. As your critique goes shrill, your credibility takes a nosedive.

Sorry you couldn't find anything of substance in my comment to respond to, and you have to talk about alleged ulterior motives, and my tone, as you perceive it.

Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against most teachers, but some apparently feel that students need to have their learning micro-managed and heavily supervised, which to me is just a recipe for churning out robots or teacher clones.

Yeah, that's a bad way to teach.
 
The speed at which I'm learning to play this instrument astounds me, and I'm only having to invest a fraction of the time as I did learning to play guitar.
I've been ruminating on this and was going to ask your opinion on it even before you posted this.

Do you think the speed at which you're learning drums has anything to do with you already knowing how to play guitar?

Reason I ask is because I'm amazed at how fast guitar and bass are coming along for me. I don't think it's cos I'm a genius or anything, but because I already have a developed sense of rhythm and musicality. I'm getting pretty geeked out on the theoretical size (scales, chord structures, etc), and while my dexterity still has a ways to go, I'm amazed at how fast it seems to be dialing itself in ... it's like I already know how to play music so the nuts and bolts of how to play on another instrument isn't nearly as mysterious as I remembered it being when I first started on drums.

It's weird because I've been playing drums for 30+ years and I don't think getting my guitar playing up to where my drumming is in 2 or 3 more years is all that unreasonable.

Maybe my drumming's not all that good and I'm aiming for a low bar? Haha! No, I think translating from one instrument to another, even instruments as dissimilar as guitar/drums, is not nearly the stretch I once imagined.

Thoughts?
 
Three ideas. Yes even when I was in school, the 60's the goofs lugging guitars around did wash out. They were into it for the wrong reasons. Two, kids who need there instruction micro managed, problem expect it because that is what they get at home. And three, the crossover from one instrument to another is somewhat like the crossover in sports. If you play one sport and have a sense of timing and balance you should learn another faster than one who has never played sport at all. You hear phrasing, rhythm, melody, etc and it just fits.
 
I've been ruminating on this and was going to ask your opinion on it even before you posted this.

Do you think the speed at which you're learning drums has anything to do with you already knowing how to play guitar?

Reason I ask is because I'm amazed at how fast guitar and bass are coming along for me. I don't think it's cos I'm a genius or anything, but because I already have a developed sense of rhythm and musicality
Thoughts?

You're possibly right.

It might be a matter of "Learning Italian is easy if you've already learned Spanish". Basically, you have 70% of the vocab, and the experience of having learned one language.. All the rest is conjugation, tense, and nuance.

That said, I'm seeing kids playing in bands with far more refined ability than the kids did back in the 70's through the 90's.
 
the nights of staying up all night flipping the record or cassette over endlessly while you read every word of the liner notes are gone.

Tony, I feel very nostalgic... sigh

These gone by days were magical, I wish we could travel back in time...

I wouldn't change anything how I learned drumming and music... err, no, I lied... I would love to go back, listen and practice even more than I did then.

Having said that, I think it's wonderful that we can access music and drummers so easily these days, there's all the educational DVD's too... it's kinda cool to have Benny Greb teaching you the wisdom of drumming in your living room... but the "magic" and excitement has gone, all of you from the pre-internet and YT know what I'm talking about...

Yes, I am an old git :)
 
.

You were wondering what kind of drum teacher we had a long long time ago.
Here's one from thousands of years ago.


Hummm. This one looks kind of familiar.....................


ringoCaveman.JPG


.
 
It is nice to be able to see how famous drummers hit the drums-- that's a real change from what we had in the past. I mostly had to wait years for that, until I could see Elvin Jones, Roy Haynes, Jack Dejohnette, Vinnie Colaiuta, Art Blakey, or whoever, play live. But I got a lot more information from that-- and from listening to a lot of complete records by them many times-- than people get seeing videos of them playing one drum solo or one tune.

This resonates with me. I saw a lot of local rock, fusion and jazz groups when I was young and inevitably absorbed things from them. Being relatively isolated in Australia, I saw only a few big shows of my favourite bands, and I'd see the occasional top OS group on TV (pretty well just GTK and documentaries - the pop shows were usually mimed). Plenty of it was in in B&W and poor quality. We were comparatively information poor, especially with visual information.

In an environment without much visual information like that you are forced to really listen - to isolate the sound from the visuals. Usually sound comes as an audiovisual package and the McGurk Effect shows how much we "hear with our eyes" - how visual impact shapes our perception of sound.

The availability of music videos since the 80s inevitably changed the way we listen and perceive music. It's changed the way we absorb music, especially for those born in the 80s and later. I find the audiovisual package a "richer food" than an LP, and feel less desire for repetition after listening to a song. I used to play songs over multiple times, not so often now.

Also, I am now so accustomed to the audiovisual package that I don't often listen with eyes shut today, something I did as an almost religious experience when I was younger. (Hmm, I should do myself a favour and do this more often).

So there is a smaller proportion of music being made today that is complete as an audio only package.

More music today is designed to accompany visuals, dancing or social dynamics. In a way we are returning to the pre-recording era, when the sound was only disembodied from accompanying visuals through selective attention or barriers, eg. curtains, crowds.

You could say that music itself was promoted from accompanist to soloist from the 30s to 70s, when vinyl was king. That period saw the flowering of many great jazz and rock artists and styles through the 30s to the 70s. There were always visuals - the look of a band and LP covers, but visuals were less intrinsic than today.

So music videos in the 80s music once again demoted music to an accompanist role in the world. All aspects of modern music that I deem as negative probably stem from this situation. That's to be expected, given the above.

Sorry everyone about the digression, Todd just got me thinking.

I don't know much about teaching drums, but as a former workplace trainer, I can be sure that today's teachers have many resources to choose from that the old teachers would have loved to have had at their disposal, and no doubt many of inferior quality, like everything on the web - the good, the bad and the ugly.

That means today's teachers need a new skill - to be able to sift through the vast range of teaching resources online and apply them to advantage in aiding students' progress. No doubt easier said than done.
 
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