Dearest EA folk,

I am 25 years old and, as they say, not getting any shorter. I've played guitar for some 10 years and am an embarrassment to the profession. This I don't much mind as guitar solos arent my cup of tea any road. But I'm sick of it all anyway. My fingers cant do what my mind (and especially ears) want them to. I cant even tune my guitar by ear.

When I was 18 I played drums for a brief spell. I took to them very quickly and easily but I was just too enamoured with the idea of being a guitarist at the time. Plus a complaint was made and my drumkit had to be sold.

So, gentle reader, I ask you this: Have you ever switched instruments? Was it the right decision? Did you find you were drawn back to your first love? Is drumming only a good move if you're a natural born drummer who never entertained the idea of being anything but?

And a final question. What do we think of digital drumkits (specifially cheap ones)? Not for playing live but for learning and practicing. Are they too different from real drums?

Thank you kindly.

peace, love and lamposts,

RTX

(no, the other RTX)

I learnt all the theory from playing the piano, but I couldn't really do it that well, so I decided that I wanted to play guitar, which I was much better at quicker so I stuck to it.

If I were to be honest looking back I wish I'd stuck it out at the piano, when I listen to philip glass or chopin stuff I'm always thinking, fuck I wish I could do that.

Digital drumkits must be awesome as in theory you could have a 909 setting which you could then fuzz the fuck out of, and make all drums sound like Atari Teenage Riot.

In my band, we like to switch instruments every once in while. We think this is a nice performance-feat. We also think changing the configuration makes us a completely different band, which is kind of a lot of fun. I'm a guitarist, but I love to play drums. The other guitarist in my band is a badass drummer, perfect timing. I also play piano. But our drummer is a true hack at the keys.

I think digital drumkits are really cool toys. I love browsing through a Toys 'r Us for musical toys.

do it. switch. everyone should do it, if only breifly, as it really changes the way you understand what it's like from the other side of the kit.

i started on bass in '89. then in '91, i was introduced to another guy at my school who played bass really well, and i decided i should switch to guitar, since i had come across a really good bass player and didn't know any good guitarists. (this was highschool, mind you). i primarily played guitar for the next 8 or 9 years, though i would play bass here and there and would sit behind my drummer's drumkit any chance i got.

in maybe '96, a couple of my bandmates and some of their friends were putting together a beatles cover band for a one-off gig at an octoberfest type thing. so for a 3-or-so week period in the summer of '96, i spent pretty much every waking hour listening to beatles songs, playing with drumsticks on pillows, magazines, anywhere i could, and for a couple hours every afternoon, i played actual drums in one kid's garage. in 3 weeks, i had learned to be ringo, though i approached his drumming from a slightly more dave grohl angle as i was a big nirvana fan at the time, and the ringo/grohl connection seemed pretty obvious to me.

after that one show, i was back to bass and guitar, playing both of them in one band (switching during set kinda thing). then in 2001, when i was moving to DC, i decided i would *be* a drummer. i had little spark in me for the guitar or bass at that point, and had a real fire for drumming. so i took the pieces i had and picked up the rest of what i needed to put together my drumkit. and i moved out to DC as "a drummer". and started a band as a drummer, and did my best to not make much of a big deal out of the fact that i had been playing drums for, in essence, a month or two, and bass and guitar for over a decade.

i sucked ass on drums for quite some time. not that i didn't have a good understanding, because i did, coming from a bass and guitar perspective, and having listened to the drums as well as the strings for as long as i can remember. it was the technique. holy shit is learning proper technique hard! and building up stamina! wow!

after playing in that band for about 2 years, i was then ready to move back to guitar, which i did for my next band in DC.

then i moved back to chicago, and tried to get a band together where i played bass, since i knew a couple really good guitarists already.

when that didn't move forward, i was back to guitar, which is where i am today, very much on top of the guitar again, with more passion than i've had for it in years.

i would love to play bass or drums in a band again. love it.

the benefits of understanding the roles of each instrument are huge, i think, when it comes to being in a band. the experience of playing drums was a HUGE eye-opener for me. things like matching the tempo of the strings and the drums, or how much easier it is to play fast on guitar than drums, or what it's like to buy sticks and heads instead of picks and strings... it's easy to write stuff on guitar that's in a similar tempo and time signature and to see it as different enough because it's in a different key and it's clean or distorted or etc etc. but on drums, i found myself (in a band) being like "um, yeah, guys, these three songs are basically completely *identical* in terms of tempo, time signature, arrangement. and you guys didn't even notice that i've been playing the *exact* same drum beat for all 3 today."

it's just all so valuable toward being able to really understand your bandmates, if you've been there, sitting on a seat behind a giant apparatus, versus standing up right in the front, verus being the bass player where you basically have to be utterly perfect and often non-descript, otherwise you can ruin things, versus the guitar you can do well to cut loose and rip around and nobody will bat an eyelash, versus the drums are you gonna play ahead of the beat, on the beat, behind the beat, mix it up, etc etc.

i HIGHLY recommend playing all 3 of the real rock instruments, those being drums, bass, and guitar. fuck keyboards. fuck them in their pansy ass.

We (my bandmates and I) recently realized that our drummer was no longer going to be playing with us. This was very unfortunate because of the dynamics and the overall sound that we had been able to accomplish with this drummer. When we started to think about other drummers, we were faced with the stark fact that none of the other drummers that we knew were going to 'fit' with the band.

Initially, we thought that this was a really shitty thing. Here we were, three guitar players without a drummer. What the fuck do we do now?!? However, we talked about it and finally came to the decision that instead of letting this get in the way, we would look at it as an opportunity to expand what we were already doing and that we would move forward as just a three-piece.

Now, we're all taking on new roles and instruments within the band and now, believe it or not, we're 100x happier with the music that we're coming up with. It's taking 10 times longer to come up with new material and it's a pain in the ass trying to figure out how to do stuff live. But, it's really exciting because we've been 'forced' into a situation that 'forces' us to be creative.

So was it the right decision?...DEFINITELY.

Is drumming only a good move if you're a natural born drummer?...I think that it definitely helps, but I don't think that's something that you should feel that limits you.

Go out there and try it. You never know what might come from it.

just start playing anyways. drums are ridiculously fun.

i started playing drums in 1988, and haven't stopped since. my grandfather played, and so did my father. then my brother and i both had kits in the basement, so i felt like i had a slightly easier time picking up playing then most seem to. the chops were still a total pain in the ass to learn, since you still have to develop them right, but it's worth learning right the first time. i've recently had to re-teach myself double-bass, since i learned poorly the first time. learning and practicing was much easier to do when you had nothing else to do. this whole working thing really cramps my learning.

but, in January, i decided to start taking guitar lessons, just to add to the repetoire. i suck at guitar, but it's fun to play.

fuck it: do both!

as far as digital drums are concerned, they're great for practicing on if you live in a flat/apartment and need to watch the noise level. the roland V-drums are really nice to play on (feel pretty real, etc...), but are stupid expensive. the cheaper Roland electronic drums sound pretty good, but the plastic pads really hurt my hands after playing them for awhile. i was probably hitting them too hard, but i get carried away when i play.

Hey, drums, great!

I started out playing drums in bands in high school. Then I decided I wanted to play guitar, and did a poor job of that for about ten years. I've gone back to the drums for the last three years and it's been much better this way. I have as much input on songwriting as I did when I was hacking my way through them on guitar, at least in my band. I am more fulfilled because I feel I'm better at this instrument. As TMH wrote, it is really, really valuable to have seen the stage, songwriting, and recording from both sides of the kit. I learned to listen in a rock band in a way that's hard if you've never played over on the other side of the practice space.
You're not born a drummer any more than you're born a forklift operator. It's a skill, and some people will take to it quicker than others.
Things which are great/suck about playing drums:
The learning curve is kind of steep.
It's very physically demanding and physically rewarding.
It's very exposed: You're aren't allowed to fuck up like you are on guitar.
You dictate so much of the performance.
You are constrained by all this damned furniture you drag around with you. I cannot remember who called it furniture, but I like that description.
You stay warm during winter practices in poorly climate-controlled spaces.
Tuning is harder.

Electronic drum kits are fun in music stores. They are nothing like a drum kit, and probably not very useful as a learning tool, unless you want to learn to play the electronic drums. It seems as though you wouldn't develop the necessary muscle memory.

Can you read music? If so, the Jim Chapin book "Advanced Techniques..." is pretty amazing. It's all about the idea of coordinated independence, making your limbs work independently. Hard, hard, hard. But cool, cool, cool.

Play the drums! They are great!

It's not switching, it's adding.

I play a number of instruments (guitar, mandolin, accordion, lute, drums, keys, bass (hahaha!!)) to varying levels of proficiency. I'm a pretty solid guitar player (played since I was 13); certainly far better than I am at any of my other instruments, but sometimes I get bored of the guitar. What better insurance policy against tiring of music-making can there be than having a number of instruments available to choose from?

Also (I haven't read the other posts yet, sorry!) the old cliche about the influence that learning a secondary instrument will have on your primary instrument is so, so true.

Do it.

i just thought to mention, the band i'm in now, the bassist has played drums for a long long time, and the drummer started off as a classically trained pianist. he introduced me to debussy back in highschool!

and also i realized the beatles cover band was the summer of '95, not '96.

play the drums. everyone who can possibly play the drums should do it!

i dunno about where you're at, but hot damn if you look on craigslist in chicago there's almost always a kickass oldschool ludwig or slingerland kit selling for $500 or so. it's CRAZY!

another thing worth mentioning, and again i dunno about how it is where you're at, but here in chicago and also in DC, good drummers are VERY much in demand. there are a gazillion guitarists out there, but good drummers are always the hardest to come by, it seems.

play the drums.

also, my dad has a Pintech electronic drumkit that's pretty fun to play. it's got heads that are tunable just like a real drumkit, with rebound and all that. the only thing i really can't stand is the action of the hihat. there's opened and closed, but it's way too discreet of a thing, unlike the real hihat where you've got a wide range of open and closedness.

Also, if you ever want to play an instrument professionally (jobbing! Don't kill me, muso-snobs!) then drums is your best option rock-band-wise.