Thank you for this excellent explanation. So, when I moved about 9 months ago I packed the drums up and they are stored in my gear closet. They aren't my main instrument, but I did play around with them A LOT when they were set up in my house. In fact I noticed a lot of mornings I'd go up to play guitar, and play drums for 40 minutes instead.
Anway fast-forward to last week. We're down here in Texas now and my kid is finishing 5th grade. Like a lot of schools 6th grade is "start band year" and they had this nice event where you could go try out different instuments. His mom took him, and sure enough he came home insisting: "I'm going to learn percussion". Oh geeze! His mom has no idea.
So, I went to talk to the drum teacher and basically the class is to learn to play in a drum line. Which I suppose is good, because you will learn rudiments and read music which is all good.
But I have this nice Gretsch kit just sitting in the closet ... so that's the full context.
I'm leaning towards trying to find someone to teach him to play the kit, and wondering about the traditional grip vs. match grip and didn't even know about the open vs closed thing until now.
Intrinsically it seems to make more sense. It's probably not up to me in the end anyway. But it's always amazing to find out you don't know something basic about something you think you know the basics about.
” Anway fast-forward to last week. We’re down here in Texas now and my kid is finishing 5th grade. Like a lot of schools 6th grade is “start band year” and they had this nice event where you could go try out different instuments. His mom took him, and sure enough he came home insisting: “I’m going to learn percussion”. Oh geeze! His mom has no idea.
So, I went to talk to the drum teacher and basically the class is to learn to play in a drum line. Which I suppose is good, because you will learn rudiments and read music which is all good.”
Fantastic he is interested! True musicianship is almost a lost art! And of course it is good, any and ALL practice of any kind is good! Wait till Mom gets a load of this! My Mom got me into it but my Dad ended up being much more patient with it. lol
Please let him have both avenues of advancement. There is no law against playing a drumline at school with traditional rudiments and having a set to play on at home too!!!
So here is what happened to me growing up. We were so remote we could not even get TV so it was reading or music for entertainment. I started teaching myself the drum kit by playing with songs and a lot of it was 50s stuff, jazz and country like Roy Obison etc. Then Dad hooked up an antenna to the multi-band radio to see if we could get more AM channels. Searching around after dark one night I found pirate rock radio! That was it... I was stuck and addicted to 60s hard rock that wasn’t even legal to broadcast in the states at the time.
So I got pretty good on the drum set at home first because I was dedicated. Then like your son I jumped into the school program when it was available. But back then our school band program was huge. Even when I started classes in school we had a lot of members, there was ten drummers in my first school class drum section. But what you might find is there are “Seasons”. We had marching band season during sports seasons, and concert band season when there was no sports in season. But we had a drum set available during concert band season and two of us were good enough to trade off on songs and contribute with the drum set. This opened up the ability as a band to play more songs that had rock drums. Like the music scores from “Rocky” and “Live or let die” from the Bond movie along with others.
But as soon as I was in junior high they had several categories of music classes. Band, which was both marching and concert depending on season, Jazz band, and of course choir. I took them all every year from junior high all the way through the rest of school. It was always an couple easy “A” grades in cultural arts... lol But Jazz band was my favorite of course, it was all drum kit work. Same with Jazz band, that same other drummer and myself traded off and competed our skills against each other and we both got very good.
But on top of that I would come home and put in several hours a day everyday at home. Every time a new album came out from one of my favorite bands like Rush I was on top of learning these new songs stroke by stroke until I had them nailed. Drums were just my obsession and lifestyle. I was pretty much married to it. On top of all this dedication at school and home I started to play with bands in dives on the weekends. Minors were allowed in bars if the bar served food.
So even underage I was already making a living playing in dives for extra money. When I got out of school I did this for a living for about four years along with some studio work here and there. I still go and play an hour or two a day to stay limber and in shape. And any genre that fits my mood at the time because all those years of playing dives with different clientele interests gave me a full spectrum of music styles. No two crowds are the same so your play list has to be extensive and have many different genres.
That country bar scene in the Blue Brothers movie is real, “Oops, time for a different play list”, been there many times. lol
Vlad,
For your son, in my humble opinion, I wouldn't start him on the kit. There are fundamentals that he'll need through all the rudiments that he might be better served with a drum pad.
The make ones that come with a stand that you can find on Amazon:
They seem to be mostly 12" to fit in the stand but a 6" pad would be better to really enforce discipline of striking the sticks so close together. A smaller pad attaches to a different stand:
Also, for the drum rudiments, he may learn the 26 standard in school but I recommend encouraging him to learn all 40 essential rudiments.