As a drum teacher and professional drummer, it’s not surprising that I’m constantly asked the same question over and over – what is the best way to learn drums, really?
In my experience, when practicing the drums, you have to tick two boxes – you want it to be as enjoyable as possible, and at the same time, you want to make as much progress as possible.
When you’re making good progress, the drums become more fun and enjoyable. And when playing the drums is fun and enjoyable, you make more progress, because you practice more often.
If you’re still wondering whether drums are realistic for you, my honest take on whether it’s hard to learn drums might put your mind at ease…the short answer is that it’s much more achievable than most people think.
By focusing on the right things, you can learn much faster, and therefore have a much less frustrating experience.
In this article, I’m going to explain all the things you absolutely need to know when learning to play drums – and possible pitfalls and traps that you want to avoid.
Drumming practice isn’t always super fun – you need a balance between the more enjoyable bits and the more ‘technical’ parts of practice – but if you get this balance right – you’ll see amazing results over time.
While there isn’t a perfect way to learn the drums – there are certainly far better and far worse strategies out there – so allow me to borrow 10 minutes of your time to save you finding many dead ends further down the road!
Alright, let’s get started!
The need to know essentials of becoming a drumming wizard
There are really only a few things you absolutely NEED to develop as a beginner drummer – technique, timing and coordination.
First off, you need to know how to hold the sticks, and play with reasonable technique.
It’s no use learning with poor technique, losing control of the sticks, and poking your grandma’s eye out as a result.
Technique is essential, and there’s a lot of debate as to which hand technique is the best. You’ll hear lots of technique names dropped around the place like ‘German’, ‘French’, or ‘Moeller’.
Here’s a bit of insider knowledge – it doesn’t matter which one you learn, but make sure you do learn at least one!
Don’t confuse yourself trying to learn 15 different ways of holding the stick, pick one to start with and go with it.
Buddy Rich, pictured above, famously had some of the greatest drum technique ever. His most famous drum solo is nicknamed the ‘Impossible Drum Solo’.
The second essential element of learning to play the drums is timing.
Just like comedy, timing is the key to drumming.
If you don’t get your timing right – the train won’t leave the station and any music you play along to will sound pretty awful. Even your grandma won’t be impressed.
Fortunately, you can work on timing and develop this key skill. You don’t have to be born with a robotic sense of time – it improves gradually as you work more on it.
The classic tool for working on your timing is to use a metronome. It’s a clicking sound that you play along to, to train yourself to be consistent.
Honestly, metronome practice isn’t super fun and does send some people to sleep – but it’s so important for drumming – it’s worth trying to keep yourself awake to practice with one.
Practicing along to songs also helps to further develop timing.
It’s useful to have a mixture of both song playing and metronome practice – not just one or the other.
“The drum is the heart of the music. The drummer keeps going, he can’t afford to stop”
– Jo Jones, famous jazz drummer
The third essential element of good drumming is coordination.
If you’ve got two left feet, or your feet think that they are arms – don’t panic. This is a skill that can be developed too.
When playing the drums, you need to play rhythms with multiple limbs at the same time.
This is going to take some practice – and you won’t be able to do it instantly. Don’t worry, this sorts itself out over time.
INCREDIBLY IMPORTANT TIP: When you hit two drums or cymbals together – you need to make sure you’re hitting them at EXACTLY the same time. This applies whether you’re using your hands, feet, or both hands and feet together.
If they don’t quite hit together – you get this funny higgledy-piggledy sound where one drum is slightly out of time with the other.
Make sure from the start of your drumming that you’re focusing on marrying each drum and cymbal together properly.
They should make a noise at exact the same time, there shouldn’t be any gap between the notes or any sound of ‘fuzziness’ between them.
If you have these three things sorted out, your future is bright as a drummer. Most real problems tend to be as a result of those three things, and if you can keep them in mind from the start, you’ll have a real edge in your playing.
In fact, I’ve put together a resource that covers exactly these kinds of issues (and more) in detail, I’ll share it with you at the end of this article.
“Playing well with others is important – not being too flashy, just keeping good time and of course, coming up with cool beats. A good snare drum, kick drum, hi-hat. Just getting good at the hand feet coordination”
– Chad Smith, drummer for the Red Hot Chili Peppers
What should I practice?
The best way to learn drums is to practice the things that drummers play most often.
90% of the time as drummers – we are playing something called a drum beat (also known as a drum groove). This is what you should put all your attention on when you’re first starting out on the drum set.
The other 10% of the time, we play something called a drum fill. Fills really aren’t important as a brand-new player, so don’t worry about these just now. You can still play loads of songs without them.
So if you’re going to be learning drum beats, what beats should you practice?
If you practice a beat that went out of fashion in 1902, you’ll have limited music that you can play along to.
If you can see into the future, and you play a beat from the year 2312 – that won’t be helpful either.
Learning the right drum beats is like a treasure map that points you in the right direction. You’ll learn far more songs far more quickly if you’re headed in the right direction.
Drumming is complicated in the sense that there are loads of things you COULD learn, but it’s quite simple in the sense that fundamentally, you can break drumming down into helpful little categories.
Most songs are built on a foundation of a tiny number of drum beats.
If you choose the right beat for the song you’re playing, what you play will be applicable to the track – even if the drummer on the track is adding snazzy extras and doing some super clever stuff.
So if we’re to get a correct foundation with our drumming – we need to start with learning the standard drum beats/grooves from popular music genres.
My guide to the most common drum beats walks through the essential patterns you’ll use in most songs — from the standard 8th note groove to shuffle and Motown beats.
“Grooves pay the bills”
Steve Gadd, famous session drummer
You could think of the drummers job in three parts:
1) The drummer lays down a beat which has a basic ‘skeleton’ – if you took all the fancy stuff away, this is the bare bones he or she would need to play to keep the song moving forward.
2) On top of that, the drummer can add variety to the drum beat – adding extra touches here or there to make it unique and match perfectly to the song.
3) To finish, the drummer plays a snazzy drum fill every handful of bars – to change the energy of a song or to simply add even more variety.
Learning the skeletons first, which is step 1, is a very logical way to get started on drums.
It makes life so much easier to know what the starting point of a beat is before all the other stuff is added.
This is probably the biggest mistake new drummers make.
Understandably, you want to learn all your favourite songs straight away – but your favourite drummer will almost certainly be playing lots of complex rhythms you can’t do yet.
It’s extremely helpful to have an order of priority for what you learn – if you try and learn a super fast rock song with crazy drum fills – you’ll have no context to understand what’s going on.
You can look forward to learning all that stuff later – but your starting point should definitely be the common drum beats!
And just as important as knowing which beats to learn is knowing how to practise them properly.
Two drummers can sit down with the same beat, and one will sound polished within a week while the other still sounds shaky after a month.
The difference almost always comes down to a few practice habits and technique details that nobody thinks to mention. Small things like how you’re striking the drums, whether your volume is balanced, or how you’re structuring your practice time.
These are exactly the kinds of things I cover in a resource I’ll point you to shortly.
How to get started
If you’re picking up drums later in life and wondering if that makes things harder, it really doesn’t…I’ve written about learning to play drums at 40 and why age is far less of a factor than people assume.
There are many ways to get started on the drums. But honestly, most of them cause you to waste a lot of time.
I actually had my own experience with this recently. A year ago, I started learning piano…and even though I’m a professional musician, I still had no idea which YouTube videos were important to my practice and which weren’t.
The problem with searching for random videos online is that you end up with hundreds of options and no way to tell which ones matter right now and which ones can wait.
You might spend an hour learning something that looks impressive but doesn’t actually help you play a single song.
What you really need is someone (or something) to filter all of that for you — to tell you: “Focus on this. Ignore that. And here’s the order that makes sense.”
That’s why I’d always recommend some form of guidance when you’re starting out. Whether that’s a teacher, a structured course, or at the very least, a resource that lays out the essential things you need to get right from the beginning.
Even if you can only practise for 15 minutes a day, you’ll make progress — as long as those 15 minutes are spent on the things that actually move the needle.
My recommendation for getting started
Throughout this article, I’ve talked about the three essentials of drumming: technique, timing, and coordination, and I’ve mentioned that most problems come back to getting those foundations right.
To help with exactly that, I created my Beginner Drummer Mistake-Proofing Guide.
It’s a PDF that covers the 25 most common issues I see with new drum students…the specific things that slow new learners down, sound wrong, or lead to frustration…and it gives you a clear, practical fix for each one.
It’s designed to be the filter I was talking about. Rather than figuring out what matters through months of trial and error, you get the essential “do this, avoid that” knowledge upfront, so every practice session counts.
Here’s what it covers at a high level:
- Timing — the specific habits that make your beats feel solid or sloppy
- Sound — how to make your drums sound clean and professional without learning anything new
- Technique — the adjustments that stop drumming from feeling exhausting
- Practice — how to structure your sessions so you actually improve
You can pair it with whatever learning method works for you — YouTube videos, online courses, a teacher, or just experimenting on your own.
It works alongside all of them, because it focuses on the underlying skills that apply to every beat and every song.
Check out the Mistake-Proofing Guide here →
If you’re completely new and want a free walkthrough of your very first beats, my article How To Play Drums For Beginners is a great place to start alongside the Guide.
However you decide to start learning to play the drums, I wish you the absolute best of luck with your playing and hope it becomes a true passion of yours!