Good question! I’ll tell you: a rock rhythm doesn’t take long. Usually in a few minutes one can already get the basics and play along with a song. Learning a fill requires even less time and it’s a lot of fun. You fly on the toms, making noise and smiling, then you land on a big old crash to finish it in style. It goes boom! The crowd goes wild. Huzzah!
If you have a good teacher (I know one!), it is easy to build upon those foundations and explore all the concepts attached to drumming. Reading is not an issue and rudiments either. It’s just a matter of having a fun platform to try those on. I’ll give you a number, let’s say that the number is a month. What will you be able to do in a month? Among other things, you’ll have a set of tools to play rock and shuffle, you’ll be building your catalog of fills, you’ll get familiar with drum notation and with rudiments. You’ll also learn how to hold a pair of sticks and how to play without developing injuries. Not bad, I’d say. Not bad indeed because a month is not a long time.
In a month you’ll also have the time to decide if you want to pursue it. You’ll get a good sense of how much time and effort you want to dedicate to the craft and whether or not it’s worth purchasing an instrument.
If the teaching is tailored to you wishes, aptitudes and practice routine you’ll get to discover the treasures of a new hobby. Your ears will start to decipher what is going on in a song heard on the radio which always surprise people. All of the sudden, they can pick up what the drummer is doing. They might not be able to replicate it, but it feeds the dream, makes it more tangible, more real. You’ll also get to understand how to separate your limbs, the feet from the hands, for example. You’ll have a direction for your week or your day. You’ll start to think “I can’t forget to practice, I’ll see Sol in 3 days”. This will give you another reason to get up in the morning, or something to look forward to. Oh, I forgot, Sol is me, I’m the teacher in the story. What I describe here, the way people progress and how they enjoy their new skills is something I see every day. And what I see is that people love the journey of learning as well as the results they get from it.
