Episode 448 Scott Adams: 80% of How to Play Drums in 20 Minutes

Hey everybody, come on in here. We're going to do a little experiment today in which I'm going to teach you 80% of what you need to know to learn how to play the drums. And I'm going to do that in 20 minutes. Now that's my challenge. I haven't practiced this, but I'm pretty sure I can do it. And part of it is a test. So I'll let you know when I'm started the 20 minutes. I'm just going to wait for some people to come in. And we're looking for a bigger point of all this. The bigger point is online training. Can you make online training as good as in person training? My argument is that having the best online trainer would be way better than the average in person instructor. Now, I think I can play the part of a good online instructor, but you can judge for me when we get going here. So I'll start in a minute. I'll try to keep it to 20 minutes. I might even finish sooner. And I'm going to give you all the basics that you need to go from hey, I'm interested in playing the drums, or maybe my kid is, to what do you need to know to get started? So I'm going to start my timer right now. The lesson has now begun. So the first thing you need to know is the parts of a drum. If you don't learn it all from me, there's a company called Sweetwater who has an online, a lot of online help and you can call them and get a, get a consultant to tell you exactly what you need to buy. So you don't need to know much about drums in order to buy a drum set because you could go to Sweetwater's website. And by the way, I don't have any financial interest in any of this stuff about drums. And they'll tell you what to buy. So I got my drums to them. I have an electronic kit here. You could have a regular kit. And the advantage of course is that I can listen to the electronic kit on headphones or I can run it through a speaker as I have now. I've got it turned down so it doesn't overwhelm the microphone. Now here are the parts of a drum. There are three cymbal like things. There's the hi hat, there's the ride, it's called ride. And then crash. If you're a big rock star, you might have a few extra ones. You might have some cowbells, you might have some extra stuff. But these are the three Basics. The hi hat has two modes. If you're pressing down on the foot pedal, it changes. It changes to more of a dull sound. But if you have the foot pedal up, it's more crashy. All right. Now, the drums themselves are mostly these four. They all have a name. This one that's between your legs is the snare, and it does most of the work. You'll do more stuff on the snare and the hi hat than most other things. The other drum that you use the most is your foot pedal, which you can't see right now, but you can hear it. So that's my right foot on the foot pedal. My left foot is normally going to be on the pedal for the. The hi hat to keep it closed, because 80% of the time you have it closed when you're hitting it. This drum is very important to understand because it's optional. These three are called the Toms. T O M Tom 1, Tom 2, and then there's the floor. Tom. Tom 2 is optional and you'll see kits that don't even have it. And when you look at music, it's usually not even mentioned, but it's useful if you're doing some kind of a fancy thing and you just want to mix it up a little bit. But typically it's not even mentioned in sheet music. Now let me teach you sheet music. Turns out that you only need to be good at about three of these things. If you can hit the hi hat at the same time with your left hand, you can hit the snare and you can get your timing and coordination so that you can get the foot pedal in there. You've got most of what you'll ever need. Turns out that these three things, this, this, the snare and the foot are most of what you're playing. That beat that you just heard is the most common beat for normal rock pop music. If you didn't learn any other kind of timing except four, four time and those three things, you'd have most of what you need to play the drums. Now, the other thing you need to know about the drums is that there are two sorts of things you could be drumming. You could be playing the beat which is a consistent pattern like this. So it just repeats. And a lot of drumming is a consistent pattern. Now, they're different, but they're not that different. So here's one that's a little. A little different from that would be. All right. So they all have a little variation, but they're not that different. The other thing that's not the beat is called a fill. F I L L. The fill is sort of a transition and it's written in the music. So. So after you've been doing the beat a while, if the music itself transitions into a different mode, you might note the transition by doing some kind of a random looking pattern that doesn't have to be a specific way. Usually it's written in music a specific way, but there's no real right way to do it. So it might be something, could be that, it could be just fast. So that could be your fill, it could be that, but it could be something like that could be anything. That's just not a repeating pattern. So those are your two things, your beats, your fills. These are the parts, these are all the components. And then let me teach you sheet music. Now, if you're familiar with regular music, you know that where the note appears on the, you know, in the. What do you call this? Where the note appears tells you the tone of the note. So in other words, if you were playing a horn, these notes would tell you how you know whether it's a high or a low note. But with drums, the notations are just telling you what thing to hit. So that's all? Yes, the staff. Thank you. So where the notes are on the staff with drums tells you which thing to hit. So every note is a discrete thing to hit. So all of the notes that tell you to hit any of the symbols are little X's and they appear above the staff. So the one directly above the staff is this one, the one next up is this one, and the one next up is this one, which is convenient because that's how they are physically. So when you're looking at the notes, the lowest one is the lowest one here, the next one here, the next one there. If it's telling you to keep the hi hat open, it will be notated on there. So you know to take your foot off of it so it sounds different when you hit it. Now here's a typical practice set and I'll just show you close enough that you can see there's not a lot of complexity there. But wherever you see, for example, something above something else, it means that they're played at the same time. So it doesn't matter how many there are here, there are three things right above each other. These are played at the same time. So for example, the typical beat is I'm hitting the hi hat. And some of the times I'm hitting the floor tomorrow. So those are being hit at the same time. And then sometimes I'm hitting all three, sometimes I'm just hitting the snare and the hi hat. And those are the basic combinations. Now, if you've never seen anything involving music before, I'll tell you that there are things that are quarter notes, eighth notes and 16th notes. Here's the idiot's guide to what that means within a measure, which is just an artificial length of music on a page. And the measures are just sort of. You can. So you can keep track of stuff. They don't tell you how to play. It's just an artificial break that says, I'm going to put this many notes in this little measure and then I'm going to start again. So it's for organization and so it's easier to read, but it doesn't change how it sounds, the fact that there's the end of a measure and the beginning of a new one. But if it's a quarter note, it is typically going to sound something like two and a three. So the claps are the quarter notes and they would be like that one and two. And if you saw an eighth note, it would be twice as fast. So instead of 1 and 2 and a 3 and a 4, you would have 1, 2, 3, 4. So it'd be twice as fast. If it's a 16th note, it's yet again twice as fast as the 8th. So, right. So if you heard me playing, those would be quarters. If you heard me playing, those would be eighths. And then on top of that there would be the tempo, and that's usually given to you in the sheet music. So, for example, here's some sheet music I downloaded from, I think, online Drum source. If you just Google online Drum Source, you can download drum sheet music. And it has a little guide on the top and it tells you something called the tempo here. It's 158. Now, typically, once you've played enough, you can recognize what that would feel like. So a tempo of 100 would be something like a tempo of 158 would be about half again faster. So it'd be 1 and 2 and 3. So, and then within that, the eighth notes would be twice as fast as the quarters. The 16th would be twice as fast as eighths. And then it also gives you a little guide right here. So if you forget which instrument goes with which part of the notes or where they appear on the staff, it tells you right here. And then when you read the music, you can say, oh, wherever there's a note there, it's telling me the snare drum. So if you forget it comes right with the music. All right, we're exactly almost 10 minutes in, and I have largely completed the lesson. And I'm just going to reiterate so you catch it all the parts of the drum, you don't need to know them all. If you're looking for a drum, you can go to an online source such as Speedwater. They're one of the biggest. And they will tell you what to buy, they'll tell you why, they'll check with your budget, they'll figure out what your objective is, et cetera. This is a typical layout. This Tom is the one that's least used, and so you'll rarely even see it on sheet music. You know, I'm looking at a lot of music, and it doesn't even appear. The rest is mostly practice and mostly listening to somebody who's better at it. So that you know if this. Whether it sounds like actual music or not, because you have to sort of compare it to people who know how to do it. But this is the whole setup. If you can get these parts, you're already drumming. All right. Yeah. So drum notation is different in different places. I'm seeing in the comments. That's correct. So you can find some drum notation where they'll say that the notation, that is the hi hat is sometimes mixed with the ride symbol. But usually the sheet music will tell you they're doing that. So it'll say right on the sheet music what they mean when they have the notation. But the ones that don't change much are the snare, this guy, the floor tom, and the bass drum with the foot. Those typically are always the same on your sheet music. All right. If you're looking for. If you're trying to decide what kind of system to get, I've got a. Mine is a Roland, the electronic one. I have one that I inherited at Yamaha over there. And then upstairs, I have a regular kit that's called a pearl. So Pearl is the brand, and that's a pretty good kit. If you're looking to get a regular acoustic standard drum set. The thing that matters is the quality of the drum head, which you can buy separately from the drums and the wood that they use to make the drums. So walnut would give you a different sound than, I think, mahogany or oak. I can't remember what the other woods are, but those are the. You know, those are the differences between the cheap sets. And more expensive is what kind of wood. And your. Your consultant can tell you about that. Now, the other thing that is useful is playing with a. What do you call it? A metronome. So the electronic ones have one built in. So if I were trying to keep this time, I would try to play to it slowly, And I would work up from playing it very slowly because I don't know how to read music yet. I would have it on its lowest, slowest setting, and I would say, okay. And then as I got good at it, I would move the metronome up a little and try to match it again. So I'd go a little bit faster. Like that. Wipeout is actually a very hard one to play. Somebody. Somebody's asking me to play Wipeout. I actually looked at that. It's crazy hard. So it seems like it'd be easy, but it isn't. All right, so that is my entire lesson. I want to put this in context because as some of you might know, I have an app called Interface by wenhub. Let me open that up. And on it, there are drum teachers. So if you wanted to try out a drum lesson without a commitment, you could use the Interface by wenhub app and you could find an expert. So all I would do is type in. Let's see, I'm going to say find an expert, and I'm just going to type in drums. And I didn't know this would be the case, but there are lots of drum instructors on there right now. So there's drums, drums, percussion, arranging. Drums, drums, drums. So these. These people are all available right now. I'll click one, see what kind of. We've got $6 per hour. That's probably the least. We've got $50 per hour, probably worth it. We've got. Let's see, We've got a joke. That one didn't count. And we've got $30 per hour. So you have lots of choices. You can find somebody you like, and you pay through the app. So it just comes out of your credit card. So all you do is pay for the time that you're on. I'm taking my lessons now online, so every two weeks I talk to an online instructor. I started doing this before the app was up and running, so we're just doing it by FaceTime. But because I'm not using my app, I have to separately send him payment through another app. So I use two apps to do what my app would do with one, but eventually he'll get on there. Does anybody have any questions? And let me ask you, did you learn this in under 20 minutes? And do you Feel like you could go and start. Start into the process of learning drums. All right, I'm just looking at your. Oh, holding the sticks. Yes. So there are two basic ways to hold sticks. Sort of an old classic way is that this one's sort of like this, but you don't need to do that. And I don't know why anybody would do that. It feels like a dumb way to do it. Now, modern drummers, far more often, they're just holding it toward the end and they're holding it where it will move easily. And you test to find if you have the right place simply by seeing if you can do it for a long time without getting tired. So if you're gripping it too hard or you're hitting in a bad way, you just get tired really quickly. So you have to practice until it's kind of a loose. I don't know, a lot. All right, Just looking at your comments. Portnoy or Perle? Well, Pearl is the name of the drum set that I bought for my acoustic drums. All right. I think I've done as much as I need to for now. You can take lessons on the interface by WinHub app anytime you like. Just find an instructor and try it for half an hour or an hour and there's no commitment. And play in headset mode. Somebody says, well, if I play in headset mode, you're gonna. I'll just turn off the power so you can hear it. So actually, that's a good question. They're not silent in the sense that somebody's not gonna hear it in the same room. Because, listen, that's. So you're always going to hear that. If you have the headphones on, you don't hear as much the actual noise of the. Of the contact. You hear just the musical part. So. But it's much, much quieter for the neighbors. And that's all I have for now. I'm going to end on that. And one more question. Where to strike on the drum? Typically somewhere in the middle. You want to shoot for the middle, but we're giving you the 80% lesson, so there is some complexity there, but not much. And I will talk to you all later.