I've wanted a drum kit all my life. Any time I occasionally tried to play a friend's kit over the years, I just ended up sounding like a kid having a tantrum. I finally bought my own kit in April 2018 and have been studying it seriously ever since.
These two videos are acoustic guitar/drum kit duets. I have not spent a lot of time working on improvisation so far on the drums, so no solos yet. I've mostly been trying to play the drum parts I need for my compositions. They were originally created on the guitar, arranged to sound complete, solo on the guitar. They are both now, moving towards ensemble arrangements. I have lyrics coming together for Cardboard Shuffle and more melodic material for Palindromatically Inclined, which will remain an instrumental. I have written drum parts for both, which the videos demonstrate.
I started out with a first grade course book to get things moving. It clicked almost straight away - playing drums is a huge amount of fun and it's very addictive. There's a lot of good stuff on the internet and when I've found someone particularly helpful I've bought one of their books.
There are two fundamental aspects to work on, the first being sticking skills and foot pedal skills, that is, the physical manipulation of the sticks and foot pedals and the second is coordination, that is the ability to voice the sound combinations you want to play and developing independence of your four limbs.
I spend a lot of time just working with drum pads doing all kinds of exercises for both sticking techniques and coordination. It would be impossible to over emphasise the importance of drum rudiments. Some of them can seem very obscure at first. I haven't learnt all of them yet, but all the ones I've learnt so far, eventually led to epiphanies in relation to the rhythmic effects one can create and the dimensions they add to navigation around a drum kit.
I'm very keen to get live drum tracks into the productions I'm working on. Since April 2018, I'd been composing drum parts directly in a score editor, which I can play back with a software instrument I created with samples of my kit. It's not the same as a live player, of course, but it's very serviceable when putting an arrangement together. I've been gradually working my way through a growing list of drum parts, which usually have some tricky aspects ahead of where I am and I break them down into bite size chunks and work on them until I can eventually play whole pieces in one sitting, continually pushing me forward.
Periodically, one or two become ready to record, and then, recording takes becomes part of the learning process, until I'm eventually happy with a final version, and so the process has continued. I'd been working towards applying the principle I've been using most of my life on guitar and that I've been applying to the piano for some time now, to get to a certain point based on concerted practice and experimentation, where it gives rise to ideas of something new while playing that's a few steps ahead of where I am and that drives my progress.
I'm happy to say that I made the transition to this through 2021 where more and more bits and pieces of drum parts were worked out directly on the kit starting with my Magic Fingers cover and finally in early 2022, with a new complex, composed multi section, multi time signature, jazz type thing, called Airbag Cascade, where I created the complete drum part just messing around on the kit. I still use the score editor, of course, to write the drum parts down after the fact, so as I don't forget what I'm coming up with while I'm experimenting.