The topic I chose to do for In Depth this year is learning how to drum.

Over the course of this project, I will be learning from a mentor to learn the basics of pop style drumming. I chose this topic because I’ve always wanted to play the drums since I was younger. When I watch someone play the drums, I can’t help but admire them. This admiration also stems from my love of music. I’ve always been a very musical person as I can play many instruments, and I have a passion for making music. If I learn how to play the drums, I could play along to pop songs, and just love how much creative freedom there can be in drumming.

Due to my admiration for drumming, I started playing percussion in an orchestra, but the two aren’t as similar as I thought. Despite these skills not being too similar, I’ve still learned a couple of basic skills that I could apply when playing the drums, so I don’t plan on quitting percussion any time soon. From playing percussion, I’ve learned to be able to follow rhythms with precision, keep a good tempo, and basic drumming skills from playing the snare drum.

Although I enjoy playing percussion and I’ve learned quite a lot from it, I still have a dream to be able to play the drums to my favourite songs. So, I recently got an electric drumkit and I plan to finally put it to use.

These goals, dreams, and my admiration and passion for drumming will be the root of my motivation for this project.

 

For this project, my mentor will hopefully be Jason Overy. It’s been hard to get into contact with him, so if worse comes to worst, I’ll have to find a teach at Tom Lee. But I really do want to have Mr. Overy as my mentor because according to Mr. Trovato, he’s is very good at what he does.

When I first had the idea of learning how to drum for the project, I knew that I had to ask Mr. Trovato if he knew anyone. So, I went to his room, and he recommended Jason Overy and gave me his phone number. I was actually planning to ask Mr. Trovato himself to mentor me as I heard that he’s pretty good at drums himself, but I decided that Mr. Trovato would probably be too busy

In the beginning, Mr. Overy agreed to give me a discount on his lessons and act as a mentor, but recently, I haven’t been able to get in contact with him, so just finding lessons at Tom Lee would be okay too.

 

My ultimate goal for this project is to be able to have creative freedom when playing the drums, which means that I want to be able to just make up a coherent rhythm when listening to a song. By the end of this year’s In Depth, I will like to have learned 3 different songs on the drums with a lot of variety of rhythm in them. If I were to do this, I would get to learn many different patterns and basic rhythms. I would have a good baseline for my skills and I could build upon them in my own time after the project.

Another big goal I have for this project would be to have good control over the rhythm. This skill will require a lot of hand-eye coordination, precision, and control, but with lots of practice, I’m positive that I’ll be able to achieve it. The reason why I want to acquire this skill is because it’s pretty essential for drumming, but it also helps with being able to make up rhythms and “freestyle”, which is my ultimate goal.

 

During this project, I’ll be tracking my progress through videos of me playing and comparing those videos, so I expect to have a clip of myself playing for the next blog post. I look forward to learning how to play the drums!