Lessons or No Lessons

I believe it is important to learn the basics from a good teacher, like stick grip (if you ever wanna be able to play double strokes correctly), a relaxed attitude, control of the pedals, keeping time, reading charts, understanding time signatures...

It might sound ridiculous learning how to sit correctly or you might be convinced that you know how to hold a stick, but if you don't do it perfectly right, some time in the future you're gonna bump ounto your own limits. Then it will be much harder to relearn the basics. Having someone showing you how to do it and correcting you is a blessing.

Once you get a solid basis, you can work on your own. As long as you're self-critical and are willing to take it step by step.

Darren,
I love your website! A special thank you for those of us that are visual learners. I had a question about controlling ring overtones. I have been playing electric drums for about 8 years now and I decided to go back to acoustic drums for gigging purposes. I just purchased a Gretsch Catalina Stage 5 piece set and I really love it, but I was wondering what you do in order to control the "Ring" in your toms if you do anything at all. From your video podcast it looks like you have tape at the top of your heads, but that's about all that I can see. Is a lot of that taken care of in your micing as well as a good sound man? Thank you for your help and keep up the great work.

Best regards,
David J. Campos

Hey darren, I'm Jim, i'm 16 and i just started playing drums about 6 months ago and my bands drummer has been teaching me. You video lessons and his teaching are awesome together. But our drummer and i are wondering about playing the drums in a "Metal" style. Like blast beats and fills with double bass running through it or ending the first half of the fill and starting the next half of it. If you could go over all this and maybe more that would be awesome! Some band that loves what we're talking about is JOB FOR A COWBOY. They have a myspace that you can visit. thanks Darren!

Hi Darren,

I've been watching your podcast for a couple of months now and appreciate your time in sharing your experience and talents.

After watching the recent podcast where you touched on drum tuning I wished to throw this out there. I few months ago I purchased two new snares (DW Edge and DW 10/6-ply maple) and was curious about tuning them. Normally I take the approach you described, crank them until the lugs are about to pull out of the shell! I searched the Internet for awhile and came across "Professor Sound's Drum Tuning Bible" (http://home.earthlink.net/~prof.sound/). Printed this is a very long booklet which discusses wood types, head types different tuning styles for different music types and environments. All-in-all a nice reference. There is a condensed version for those wishing to simply tune the drums as well.

While the method described in the document is similar to the method you described in an earlier podcast, having a printed copy is nice while sitting down and tuning an actual drum. I used this method with the maple DW snare and was able to work the drum through several different pleasing tunings within an hour or so.

At any rate, thanks again for the great podcast!

Best Regards,

Steve Wagner
Seattle, WA
24-year veteran drummer

I just ordered this DVD. It's Fred Hammond, "Free to Worship." That's Calvin Rodgers on the kit. Two words: Oh my.

Thanks. That helped some, but I was also wondering about sound control. People say the last time they used drums, people were holding their ears. How do I keep the volume down while still having the drums sound good?