How Long Does It Take to Learn Drums?
I sat down one day recently and tried to count up how many hours I’ve spent playing my instrument. I reckon I’ve logged about 16,000 hours just practicing, probably closer to 22,000 when you count up all the time I’ve spent playing music with people in rehearsals, jam sessions, or gigs. Most days, I feel like I’m still just getting started on my journey.
In music circles, I have often heard the idea thrown around that “it takes 10,000 hours to master your instrument!” This idea was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” (2008) and is based on a study conducted by Anders Ericsson in the early 1990s. Ericsson et al studied violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music, an elite conservatory, in an effort to learn about the lives, habits, and behaviors of players in three categories: rising stars at the top of their peer group, solid students who were meeting expectations, and the population more interested in pursuing careers in music education than elite-level music performance. The study revealed that the top-performing group had accumulated around 10,000 hours of practice by age 20! Quite a staggering number that has been widely bandied about as a standard any serious musician must live up to in order to self-actualize.
So, how long does it take to learn drums?
I’m really not sure! But I’m here to offer you a few thoughts that I hope you will find encouraging as a beginner, or someone considering walking along the beautiful path towards mastering any instrument.
Studying instrumental music performance is not about getting from point A to point B. If you want to have a healthy relationship with instrumental music study, you need to accept that this is a lifelong journey. Imagine a horse with a rider on its back who holds a carrot tied to a stick out in front of the horse’s face. The horse runs forward, onward and onward forever, but never reaches the carrot! The horse’s own forward motion keeps the reward away from the animal as the delicious treat is propelled along in lockstep with the beast. As we practice and hone our skills, our ears and our musical imaginations develop! The standard you have for what it means to “learn drums” as a beginner will be completely different from the standard you have for what it means to “learn drums” when you are one, five, ten, or twenty years down the path. It’s important to learn to view the process of practicing and improving as THE PRIMARY THING, not a means to an end, because the more you grow as a player, the more your vision, your inner ear, and your expectations will grow!
It certainly doesn’t take 10,000 hours. Ericsson’s study was conducted on students already attending an elite conservatory. My back-of-the-envelope math tells me the odds of a high school student enrolled in music programs in the U.S. going on to pursue a higher education at an American conservatory are roughly 1 in 300-500. While it might take 10,000 hours to become a top 10% standout within such an elite population, we don’t all need to be 1 in 3,000 level talents. I reckon that within the typical local music scene (i.e., outside of a globally significant metropolitan area), being one in a dozen is more than enough.
After eighteen years of playing the drums, the progress I make through the hours and hours of practice I commit every day is incremental. It feels like splitting hairs, or trying to empty a bathtub with a teaspoon or something like that. As a complete beginner, you have the magical benefit of having NO IDEA WHAT YOU ARE DOING! The process of going from a state of total unknowing and non-understanding of a concept or piece of material to a state of kind of knowing and kind of understanding is MUCH, MUCH faster than the process of refining and optimizing for .5% improvement in efficiency on a motion I have done for thousands of hours over decades of my life. As a new player, you have the potential to be a happy beneficiary of Josh Kaufman’s First 20 Hours rule. It will probably only take you about 20 hours of focused practice on a brand new subject to get from a point of being completely unable to understand or execute to being kind of able to understand and execute! This is the joy of being a beginner.
I believe there are three main areas we need to keep up with in our practice: technique and fundamentals, musical core strength, and repertoire. If you pour 20 hours into really developing the full stroke (see videos by renowned educator Dom Famularo and others), you will be off to a great start in developing your technique and fundamentals! If you devote 20 hours to the process of learning to read drumset notation and understanding simple quarter note and eighth note rhythms (check out a book like Ted Reed’s “Syncopation”), you will be well on your way to a deeper understanding of time! Learning to read will give you a tremendous degree of intellectual agency and the ability to take the learning into your own hands. Lastly, if you spend 20 focused hours dissecting the drum parts to a few simple songs (Weezer’s “Undone (The Sweater Song)”, or Pink Floyd’s “Us And Them”, among many others), you will begin to get a feel for how songs are structured and how the drum role works in a band! Take advantage of this beautiful period in your development where 20 hours of focused work can completely transform your playing.
Bob Ross said that “talent is a pursued interest.” A friend of mine once told me that “talent is just whatever you already have figured out.” I can’t tell you precisely how long it will take you to learn the drums because we all have different stuff figured out, so we all have to walk our own path. I hope that if you’re curious, you’ll give it a try and lean into the discomfort of being completely unable to do something new. When we can get through that rub and work through that awkwardness, we blossom as we take advantage of the early stages of the diminishing returns curve, where small, focused efforts yield spectacular results.
Happy practicing,
~JVA
