Like any instrument, learning to play the drums is all about making mistakes and rising above them. As a beginner, you’re expected to make tons of errors on your way to achieving your drumming mastery.
Sometimes these mistakes can be tough to spot unless you’re a professional or have an instructor on hand. But if you’re a beginner, you can go a long time before realizing the pitfalls in your skills. And by that time, it’s usually too late, and you’re stuck with bad habits.
That’s not the kind of situation anyone would like to find themselves in. And dealing with it can be a bit overwhelming while still trying to get accustomed to your instrument. But have no fear, because we’ll be helping you catch your mishaps quickly. You’ll find five of the most common mistakes by beginner drummers down below as well as how you can avoid them.
1 – Not Being in Control of Playing Dynamics
Dynamics are a vital part of playing a musical instrument. As a human, you’re always expected to be in control of your expression by how hard and soft or how loud and quiet you play. But when that control starts wavering, there can be some severe problems.
The Mistake
The biggest problem beginner drummers have to face is realizing the right amount of force they need to play. Play too soft, and you might not even make your hits listenable. But play too hard, and you risk drowning out your sound on top of wasting energy and sacrificing speed.
But more than that, it also results in an uneven style of play. By thrashing your kit, you’re never really setting a consistent striking force for yourself. Some of your hits will end up sounding much louder than others. In the end, it’s pretty much a recipe for disaster.
The most common example of this is laying in too heavy on your cymbals. Not only is it likely to damage your equipment over time, but it just doesn’t sound any good either.
This kind of mistake is tricky because you never realise how much force is the right amount until you’re already past your beginner stage. By that point, you’re already on your way to be annoying towards any other musicians you play with.
How to Avoid It
Catching this kind of habit in its infancy isn’t impossible, but it definitely takes a bit of effort. You’ll have to place extreme focus on your playing if you want to get an adequate level of awareness.
Moving forward, one of the first things you want to do is practice away from the kit before you build up some sense of direction. Start with a practice pad and a suitable pair of sticks according to your hand size.
You want to be patient with yourself and give yourself enough room to master your muscle memory. Get yourself positioned correctly and hold your stick with a firm but relaxed grip. Try to get a feel for where the stick’s centre of gravity rests.
When you’re ready, hit the pad and take notice of how it feels. Everything from the drop of the stick to the hit on the pad and the rebound afterward will have a definite feeling. Try out different variations of your hitting strength until you can notice the differing sensation. When you’re ready, you can get back up on the kit.
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2 – Spending Less Time on Practice and More Time on Execution
Playing an instrument can often be about having fun with it. After all, why else would you do it? And a lot of that fun involves playing parts of your favorite songs. But when you’re only focused on playing the best of the best without putting time into fundamentals, that can be an issue.
The Mistake
Most players tend to gloss over structured practice routines and drills before heading to play something on their kit. If you end up doing this in the long run, you’re almost certainly setting yourself up to play with hindered abilities.
Practicing can be a slow and dragging process. More often than not, your real progress isn’t immediate enough to notice right away. This might leave you feeling bored and uninterested in trying to build the necessary skills up.
In the long term, neglecting key basics like this can cripple your playing. You might be able to brute force your way into playing a tricky fill, but it’ll be without the proper understanding and finesse. It almost always boils down to cashing out on the gratification of playing well without making the necessary time and effort investment.
How to Avoid It
Believe it or not, sometimes the best way to break out of this habit is to take your time when learning new drum parts. Start by listening to it a few times until you can accurately play it back in your head. After that, play it at 25% speed on your kit, making sure each of your hits is clean.
By slowing down, you force your brain to conceptualize what you’re doing. You’re allowing it to enter your mind before entering your muscle memory. This can be especially helpful for compartmentalising skills that you can recall at a later time.
At the same time, make sure you set aside a large portion of your playing towards practice. The ratio of time spent learning the execution can seem a bit unbalanced. But once you start polishing your skills, that time frame gets shorter and shorter.
Think of it this way. Every time you see your favorite drummer play exceptionally well, you can bet that there were countless hours dumped into practice to get there. So if you really want to chase their results, you should have to go through the same process.
3 – Trying to Be Excessive with Drum Grooves
The basic requirement for a drummer is hinged on their ability to keep time and provide a consistent rhythmic framework. Even so, the desire to add in something extra can be fairly strong. This kind of allure can often lead beginners to stray off and start overplaying their grooves.
The Mistake
Overplaying can be a reactionary response to want to have more fun with a song a lot of the time. You might get bored playing the same basic pattern and decide to spice it up. In your own time, that might not be such a bad thing. However, it can be a bad habit to get in as a beginner.
The situation gets worse when playing extravagantly is seen as playing well. Especially when a large part of the drumming community likes to paint minimalist drummers like Meg White and Lars Ulrich in a bad light. This can form some long-lasting associations with many novices.
Not only is overplaying unnecessary, but it can also remove musicality from your playing. If playing music is like having a conversation, then overplaying is like interrupting someone mid-sentence.
Nothing does a better job at making your look vain in the eyes of your audience and bandmates than stepping over your musical bounds. Worse so, it can even be seen as a sign of disrespect towards any musicians you collaborate with.
How to Avoid It
Admittedly, it’s easy to fall into the trap of being zealous with your drumming. All it takes is doubling your subdivisions or a few too many cymbal hits to start going into the excessive territory.
When this happens, it can help to take a step back and go back to basics. Try to think about how much you can strip away from your drumming until it’s just a skeleton of a groove. Then start adding elements only if they serve the song.
It helps to think of a song in its entirety rather than parts when playing. This will stop you from wanting to seize every opportunity to unleash your bag of tricks.
Keep in mind that overplaying can be a natural phase for many beginners. Wanting to play well and have fun can always lead you down to the path of sneaking a few extra hits in. The key is to acknowledge it when it happens and stop it from making a permanent place in your playing.
4 – Playing with Bad Posture
With an instrument as physical as the drums, posture becomes one of the entry-level requirements to start playing. But you’ll be surprised to know how easy it can be to start to fall into a lousy playing posture as a beginner.
The Mistake
The most common problems with bad posture involve not taking your frame into consideration. Everyone has a different height and arm length. If you don’t customise your kit to be comfortable for your playing, you’re setting yourself up at a major disadvantage.
Posture on the drum is no joke. The extreme demand for physicality means that it’s very easy to injure yourself or get inflicted with fatigue if you make things harder for yourself. All it takes is a slight deviation from a relaxed posture to make playing drums an uncomfortable experience.
But aside from serious physical consequences, bad posture can also have an effect on your sound. Hitting your drums at an unnatural angle can give you a bad variation of tone or wear out your drums quicker.
How to Avoid It
Good posture on the drums starts right from where you sit. Your first order of business should be to adjust your drum throne according to your height. You want it to be low enough to let your feet comfortably reach the pedals while also maintaining a 90-degree angle with the ground.
Next, work up towards your upper body. Start by keeping your back as straight as possible without hunching forward or leaning back. Relax your shoulders, elbows, and wrist by doing some basic stretches. Keep your arms loose and fluid at all times.
Finally, work on your stick grip. The way you hold your sticks should be relaxed enough to avoid excessive tightness but firm enough where you don’t let it slip from your hands.
While you work on correcting your posture, it might be a good idea to optimize your drum placement. When you assemble your kit, you want to keep your snare, bass drum, and high hat in a reachable position. Using that as your reference, you can position the rest of the drums around it.
5 – Limiting Yourself to One Style
Drums can be a universally encompassing instrument. Whether it’s hard-bop Jazz or heavy metal, almost every genre needs some rhythmic component to it. The trap is falling into one pocket of music for your drumming without trying to explore outside of it.
The Mistake
As a beginner, you might be drawn towards particular inspirations and styles when you first start out. It’s a regular part of your musical journey and can even be beneficial in building your skills towards a particular path.
The problem comes when you use it as a means to lock yourself down to that style. Music isn’t black and white. So there’s not really much to be gained from making your playing style monochromic, especially when a lot of notable drummers have always borrowed concepts from across a wide range of genres.
It’s a fast path towards limiting your listening and playing variety. You might even end up preventing yourself from learning critical skills that are a part of a different style of music than your own. There’s no worse outcome than that for a beginner drummer trying to work their way up.
How to Avoid It
Although it’s easy to arbitrarily limit your playing style, it’s even easier to break out of it. One of the simplest steps you can take is to be willing enough to listen to a large variety of music. It helps to hit shuffle on your favourite streaming service so you can experience a plethora of rhythmic variation.
Once you start building up a taste for different styles of music, you can start putting it into practice. Work on playing a song from an unfamiliar genre from start to finish. Then try dissecting and analysing the kind of rhythmic components you just played.
After a while, you’ll be able to start relating everything you learned back to your preferred playing genre. It’ll expand your mind towards what can be done behind a set of drums. And to a certain degree, you’ll be able to take concepts and apply them to entirely new contexts.
Always be on the lookout for drummers that manage to stray from the beaten path. You’ll thank yourself in the long run for breaking out of the cycle of monotony. And you might even gain yourself some newfound inspiration towards your playing.
Closing Thoughts
To summarize, learning the drums can come with the prospect of making mistakes and falling into undesirable habits. Luckily, you don’t have to get stuck with it for the rest of your drumming life. If you can realize your shortfalls and work towards rectifying them, you’ll be a better drummer in no time. And hopefully, this guide has helped you in achieving that.
