How to Develop Coordination on the Drums

Some students may become overwhelmed when thinking about coordination.

I remember when I was first blown away by coordination on the drums when I heard The Mule by Deep Purple.

I had only been playing for a few weeks with a drum teacher at that point, and what I was hearing on the drums sounded impossible. The constant left foot “pulsing” on the hi-hat with the busy tom work made my jaw drop. It was inspiring and seemed unreachable. Listening to it now as I write this, I can comprehend each bar and would quite happily jam along to that song.

It’s a bit of a common cliché to talk about the drummer as an “octopus,” and not a suitable pursuit for the uncoordinated. I strongly disagree with this. If you can drive a car safely whilst having a conversation, enjoying the sights and having music in the background, then you probably have enough coordination to be a drummer. If you aren’t quite at driving age, then consider if you can walk down a street without falling over, sip on a drink, have a conversation and check your phone or watch all at the same time — then yes, you are coordinated enough.

When you are faced with limb coordination on the drums, you are usually thinking in terms of foreground and background. In musical terms, the word “ostinato” refers to the background elements, and “melody” to the foreground. This is the essential concept of the famous drum book New Breed by Gary Chester, which is a common book for highly technical drummers. Drum legend — and one of my heroes — Dave Weckl studied with Gary Chester.

To figure out challenging coordination, I have a general formula that is highly effective. It’s quite a common strategy in the drum world to rapidly learn coordination challenges. The formula is tailored to every drum student’s strengths and weaknesses but generally, it works something like this:

Learn how to play the ostinato.

The ostinato is likely going to be repetitive, so it will form the background elements as “muscle memory” begins to take over.

Learn basic melodies.

One limb will handle the “melody.” We design the most basic melodies — for example, one note per bar. As a very simple practical example, that could mean steady hi-hats with the right hand, a snare on beat 3, and then adding a single bass drum on beat 1. As the melody (the bass drum pattern) becomes more comfortable, the ostinato elements fall further into the background.

Progressively make the melodies more challenging.

We slowly add more complicated variations until melodies can be freely improvised by the student whilst the background elements run on autopilot.

This may seem a little difficult to imagine without hearing a specific example, but let’s go back to the analogy of driving. When you first start learning to drive, chances are you are so fixated on the pedals that you can’t spare a thought for anything else.

After some time, the muscle motions become more automatic, you become more relaxed and confident, and then perhaps you have the brain space to have a conversation with a passenger. By this point, you don’t even realise that you are performing a highly coordinated activity because you’ve slowly integrated the “ostinato” (driving) with the “melody” (talking).

This concept is key for learning coordination on the drums, and it’s exactly how I approach it in my drum lessons in Perth at Guildford Drum School. The practical application of the process shows clear benefits over time. If you’re looking for a Perth drum teacher, feel free to get in touch and we can start building it step by step.