By: Joe Vecc
Submitted: 2010-11-03 18:05:51 | Word Count: 549
My interest in drums begun at an early age. I in fact switched from playing the trumpet in the 5th grade to playing the drums in the 6th grade because not any of the music I was hearing on the radio had much trumpet in it. I had nightmares of playing the trumpet in the mall with Santa Claus for a living. I guess I wasn't too overjoyed about the school band either. So since drums was in all the cool music I was hearing, I decided to make the switch.
My earliest drum lessons were given to me by a next door neighbor who used to rock out to Motley Crue, Metallica and other metal bands of the day. I used to ride my bike over to his parents home and take note outside his bedroom window on the second floor. He was older and pretty good on them drums. When he was finished playing along to the song through his boom box I would cheer him on.
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In next to no time I was invited into the dwelling to watch him play the drums. I was floored. I wanted to play. His brother played the guitar and they were mutually metal heads. I in due course approached him to tutor a few formal lessons. Those drum lessons consisted of a broken down cardboard box for the drum placed onto my mattress, two metal rods for sticks with me sitting on an extra chair for the drum stool. High tech stuff, I know.
He taught me every one of the drum rudiments from a sheet he had. It had something like 12 or 13 different standard american drum rudiments on there. He also gave a one more sheet with swiss rudiments on their for the further challenge. That one had all sorts of odd names like patta fla fla and anything else was formed by a swiss army knife on there. He had provided those rudiments from a local music store that he was receiving his drum lessons from. I in the end took drum lessons from a different drum teacher than he was taking from at that store.
By that time I had a snare drum with a little 6" cymbal attached to it that I had gotten from my middle school I imagine. That drum teacher used to write out drum beats for me in a empty music staffed half manuscript. So after a few months of training me distinctive syncopated drum beats and me going into my lessons each week and nailing the lessons, he asked me, "What kind of drumset do you have?" So I advised him about my snare drum and cymbal that had been beaten to death by that point. You see, I had been merely tapping my feet on the floor, imagining the drum pedals to play the drum beats.
Mission accomplished, I had demonstrated to my parents that I was serious enough about learning to play the drums for them to obtain me my first real drumset!
