Practising with headphones: playing along is the method

Ask most drummers how they learned and you get a story about records, not about a practice pad. Ask Brian and the answer is four words long.

Brian says: "Put some headphones on with your favorite music and play along. See what happens."

This guide is about how to actually do that, because "play along to music" sounds obvious and is easy to do badly.

What playing along teaches that a pad cannot

Time that belongs to somebody else. On your own, you speed up and slow down and never find out. Against a record you find out immediately, and you feel it before you can explain it.

Song form. Verse, chorus, the bit before the chorus, the fill that gets you there. You learn arrangement without anyone teaching you the words for it, which is most of what a band actually needs from a drummer.

A reason to keep going. Rudiments in silence are a chore. Playing a song you love is a Tuesday evening that disappears. The best practice routine is the one you do not have to force.

Setting it up so you can hear both

The hard part is technical rather than musical: drums are much louder than headphones, so people crank the music until the music is dangerous.

• Closed-back headphones, over the ear, not earbuds. They physically block some of the kit before the volume knob is involved.
• Isolation headphones made for drummers block more, so the music wins at a lower level.
• Earplugs plus over-ear headphones is the cheap version of the same thing.
• An electronic kit solves it completely, because the kit and the music arrive at the same volume.

The rule that keeps your ears: if you are turning the music up because you cannot hear it over the drums, block the drums instead. Ringing ears after a session are a warning, not a badge, and they are the one thing here you cannot undo. If ringing lasts into the next day, see a hearing professional.

Choosing the songs

Pick songs where the drums are easy to hear and the tempo is steady. Older recordings tend to be kinder than modern ones, because the kit is louder in the mix and less squashed.

Start with three songs, not thirty. One you can already nearly play, one that is slightly too fast, and one you love and cannot play at all. The first builds confidence, the second builds ability, and the third tells you what to ask a teacher.

Play the whole song, including the parts where nothing happens. Learning to sit still for eight bars is a skill.

Where a teacher fits

Playing along is not a replacement for instruction. Brian is clear that it was not for him either.

Brian says: "That's mostly how I learned, playing with headphones, but I did have a little bit of formal instruction, which can go a long way."

Brian says: "A good balance of formal instruction and playing along."

An hour with somebody watching you fixes things that no amount of listening will: how you are holding the sticks, why your left hand is late, why your foot and hand keep landing together when they should not. Those are invisible from the inside, and they get harder to fix the longer they are practised.

Two weeks, honestly

A workable shape: twenty minutes, four or five days a week. Five minutes loosening up and playing time with nothing else going on, ten minutes on the three songs, five minutes on whatever went wrong in those ten. That is it. Long sessions are not the thing that makes drummers; frequent ones are.

If it does not fall out of you straight away

Some people sit down and a beat arrives immediately.

Brian says: "...some people have a natural ability. Right off the bat, they're just playing a beat, and they don't need a whole lot of instruction."

If that is not you, it means nothing about where you finish. A natural start is a head start over the first month and irrelevant after the first year. The people who get good are the ones who kept turning the music on.

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Get the next guide by email. One short email when the next guide is written, and the three ways to make a kit quieter to start you off: send me the tips.

Want the hour that makes it click? Brian teaches beginners in Austin, outdoors, and the first lesson is 45 minutes for $29 - most people who book have never played: book a first lesson.