Drum Instructor: Ron Tierno
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Reading Music
THE IMPORTANCE OF LEARNING TO READ MUSIC:
Don’t be fooled by flashy 60-minute drum videos of awesome technique that took tbe drummer years to perfect. What good would all that technique do if someone hired that drummer for a session, handed him a piece of music, and found out that he or she was a poor reader? All the chops in the world won’t help if you don’t know how to incorporate them into the song.
Every non-reading drummer will throw out names of great players who could not read well, if at all. Over a period of time, anyone could learn the streets of his hometown through trial and error. But would you venture into a new city without some sort of roadmap? A piece of music can be a very complex structure of layered sound, coordinating the various instruments using a common pulse, or meter. With repeated listening, our brains are capable of distinguishing those patterns and memorizing the order and arrangement of notes. But through the use of musical notation which documents the pitch, rhythm, and order of notes in a roadmap fashion, a reader can play without ever having heard it before. Initially, my students learn to read in very short intervals of time (usually four beats repeated). As a student progresses in each phase of fundamentals, I add instructional books and written exercises that focus on the varied aspects of reading.
Don’t be fooled by flashy 60-minute drum videos of awesome technique that took tbe drummer years to perfect. What good would all that technique do if someone hired that drummer for a session, handed him a piece of music, and found out that he or she was a poor reader? All the chops in the world won’t help if you don’t know how to incorporate them into the song.
Every non-reading drummer will throw out names of great players who could not read well, if at all. Over a period of time, anyone could learn the streets of his hometown through trial and error. But would you venture into a new city without some sort of roadmap? A piece of music can be a very complex structure of layered sound, coordinating the various instruments using a common pulse, or meter. With repeated listening, our brains are capable of distinguishing those patterns and memorizing the order and arrangement of notes. But through the use of musical notation which documents the pitch, rhythm, and order of notes in a roadmap fashion, a reader can play without ever having heard it before. Initially, my students learn to read in very short intervals of time (usually four beats repeated). As a student progresses in each phase of fundamentals, I add instructional books and written exercises that focus on the varied aspects of reading.
