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

Date: 2019-03-13 | Duration: 20:08

Topics

The bigger lesson is online training The best instructor online, is better than an average in person instructor

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> [!note] Rough Transcript
> 
> This is an auto-generated transcript and may contain errors.

## Transcript

[0:09]

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 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'm going I can play the part of a good online instructor but you can you can judge for me when uh when we get going here so we'll start in a minute I'll try to keep it to 20 minutes I might even finish sooner and

[1:09]

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 all right 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 um 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 sweetwaters website uh and by the way I don't have any financial interest in in any of the 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 uh the advantage of

[2:10]

regular kit and uh 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 the uh microphone now here are the parts of of a drum there are three symbolik things there's the high hat there's the ride it's called ride and then crash if you're a big Rockstar you might have a few extra ones you might have some cowbells you might have some extra stuff but these are the three Basics uh the high hat has two modes if you're pressing down on the foot pedal it changes uh it changes it to more of a dull sound but if you have the foot pedal up it's more crashy all right now uh uh 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

[3:13]

your legs is the snare and it does most of the work you'll do more stuff on the snare and the high 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 uh the pedal for the um the high hat to keep it closed because 80% of the time you have it closed when you're hitting it um this drum is very important to understand because it's optional the these these three are called the toms Toom Tom one Tom two 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 you know mix it up a little bit but typically it's not even mentioned in sheet music now let me

[4:15]

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 high hat at the same time with your left hand you can hit the snare and you can get your timing in 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
[Music] 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 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 uh the beat which is a consistent pattern like

[5:21]

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 [Music] uh all right so they all have a little variation but they're not that different um the other thing that's not the beat is called a Phill f i l l The Fill is sort of a transition and it's written in the music 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 the music a specific way but there's no real white right way to do it so it might be [Music] something could be that it could be just fast so that could be your fill it could could be that but it could

[6:23]

could be that but it could be something like that could be anything that's just not a repeating um 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 um on the you know in the uh what do you call this uh the where the note appears uh tells you uh the to 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 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 discret thing to hit so

[7:26]

every note is a discret thing to hit so all the all of the notes that tell you to hit any of the symbols are little x's and they they appear above the staff so the 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 if it's telling you to keep the high 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 things are played at the same time um so for example the

[8:29]

the same time um so for example the typical beat is I'm hitting the uh high hat and some of the times I'm hitting the uh the floor tom 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 uh the high hat and those are the basic combinations now uh if you've never seen anything involving music before um I'll tell you that there are things that are quart notes uh eighth notes and 16th notes here's the idiots guide to what that means within a measure which is just an artificial uh length of music on a page and the 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 uh organization

[9:29]

start again so it's for uh 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 and three so the claps are the quarter notes and they would be like that one and a two and a quarter if you saw an eighth note it would be twice as fast so instead of one and two and a three and four you would have one two three four so it would be twice as fast if it's a 16th note it's yet again twice as fast as the eighth so you 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 uh given to you in the sheet music so for example here's

[10:30]

the sheet music so for example here's some sheet music I 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 in the top and it tells you something called the uh the tempo here it's 158 now typically um once you've played enough you can recognize what that would feel like so a tempo of a 100 would be something like a tempo of 158 would be about half again faster so it be one and two and so and then within that the eighth notes would be twice as fast as the quarters the 16th would be twice as fast as e um 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

[11:32]

oh wherever there's a note there it's telling me the snare drum so if you forget it comes it comes right with the music all right we are exactly almost 10 minutes in and I have largely completed the lesson and I'm just going to reiterate so you catch it all all right the 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 Sweetwater 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 ETC 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 it you know I'm looking at a lot of music and it doesn't even appear um the rest is mostly practice and mostly listening to somebody who's better at it so that you know if this whether whether it sounds like actual music or not because you have to sort of compare it to people who know

[12:33]

sort of compare it to people who know how to how to do it but this is the the whole setup if you can get these parts you're already drumming all right um 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 they'll say that um the notation that is uh the high hat is sometimes mixed with the ride symbol but usually the sheet music will tell you they're doing that so it'll it'll say right on the sheet music what what they mean when they have the notation but the ones that don't change much are the uh snare this guy the uh the floor tom and the 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 um I have one that I inherited a Yamaha over

[13:33]

have one that I inherited a Yamaha over there and then upstairs I have a 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 you know 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 down than I think uh 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 um now the other thing that is useful is playing with a um what do you call it it a uh 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

[14:45]

slowly and I would work up from playing it very slowly because I don't know how to read music yet I I would have it on its lowest slowest setting and and I would say okay
and then as I got uh good at it I would move the metronome up a little and try to match it again so I'd go a little bit [Music] faster like that um wipe out is actually a very hard one to play somebody's 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 uh all right so that is my entire lesson I want to put this in context um because as some of you might know um I have a an app called um interface by whenhub let me open that

[15:46]

whenhub let me open that up and on it there are drum teachers so if you want to try out a drum lesson without a commitment you could use uh the interface by when Hub 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 uh I didn't know this would be the case but there are lots of drum instructors on there right now so there's uh drums drums percussion arranging drums drums drums so these these people are all available right now I'll click one see what kind of uh 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

[16:47]

uh uh we've got a joke that one didn't count and we've got uh $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 isay for the time that you're on uh if you I 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 what my app would do with one uh but eventually he'll get on there um does anybody have any questions and and let me ask you did you learn this in under 20 minutes and do you feel like you could go and and start start into the process of learning
drums uh all right I'm just just looking at

[17:48]

uh all right I'm just just looking at your oh holding the sticks yes so there are two basic ways to hold sticks uh 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 modern drummers more 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 or you're hitting in a bad way you just get tired really quickly so you have to practice until until it's kind of [Music]
um all right just looking at your comments uh poroi or Pearl well Pearl is the name of the drum set that I bought for my

[18:50]

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 wind Hub app anytime you like uh just find an instructor and try for half an hour or an hour and there's no commitment and um play in headset mode somebody says well if I play in headset mode um you're G to I'll just turn off the power so you can hear it so actually that's a good question um they're not silent in the sense that somebody's not going to 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 um 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 oh

[19:51]

for now I'm going to end on that and oh one more question where to strike on the drum typically somewhere in the middle you you want to shoot for the middle um but we're we're giving you the 80 the 80% lesson so there there is some complexity there but not much and I will talk to you all later