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.
For the first few years I spent 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.