Listening Skills for Drummers

At the moment, I’m having a BBQ, drinking an ice cold beverage and spending time with my family while casually listening to music. That’s what I call casual listening, or we can use the term passive listening. Tomorrow, I will be recording a drum track for a friend of mine, to a song I don’t know — so I will have to do some musical listening, we can use the term active listening.

If you’re in your early years of learning how to play the drums, then you will most likely be listening entirely to what YOU are playing on the drums rather than listening to the other instruments as well. You’ll be hearing what's going on but you won’t be listening. That’s normal because you’re concentrating on getting your part right. As you grow as a player you’ll soon learn how to listen closely to the other instruments in the band and learn how to respond to their parts. Listening closely to the bass player is hugely important for the drummer. Drums and bass need to lock in with each other in order to create a solid grooving rhythm section, a very important section that drives the band.

There’s usually a lot happening in music and you need to be able to listen to everything that’s going on in order to respond. When I say respond, I mean that if a change in the song occurs, then our job as a drummer is to accent that change with a cymbal crash or a drum fill or make a slight change in the drum beat. This can be big and in your face, or it can be subtle depending on what the song calls for.

Today we have YouTube, with an overwhelming amount of online drum covers and performances of popular songs to watch. Being able to watch someone and see how to play specific things on the drums is good. I’ve learned a lot by watching, but we also need to learn how to listen in order to become a great musician. Before the internet, we could only learn something by listening. The listening skills of the older players are astounding. There was never the opportunity to go to YouTube and watch how it was played.

I've had many beginner students tell me that they can't always hear what the drums are doing. They've said they can’t hear the hi hat part or the kick drum part or even the snare drum part. That’s because they haven’t developed their listening skills and sometimes can’t distinguish what part of the drum kit is being played during the songs.

There have been times when a band called and asked me to sit in for a gig they needed to cover. They would give me a list of songs from their set list and sometimes there would be a song that I remembered playing as a teenager in my room. I would put that song on to refresh my memory (and use my active listening skills) and discover that what I heard as a teenager was not entirely the correct drum part or even drum beat. That’s because my listening skills hadn’t been developed back then. Today I can figure out what the drummer is doing within seconds of listening ... even the ghost notes.

Here's an active listening exercise you can try Put on a song that you’ve never heard before, from a band you’ve never heard before and just listen to it. Are you able to figure out what the drummer is playing just by listening? Are you able to anticipate when the changes in the song are going to happen just by listening? You can learn so much by listening first and playing later. Before you go to YouTube and watch how a drum part is played, go listen to the song first, develop your listening skills and train yourself to hear each individual part in a song, especially the drum part. After you have listened carefully and you think you’ve figured out how to play the song, go watch it be played and see if you heard correctly.

Music is just another form of communication so great listening skills are integral to being a great musician.

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