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It has been nearly nine years since I first started playing the drum kit. Like all beginners I saved up, bought a cheap set of drums, struggled with co-ordination, time signatures, temperamental bass players over priced practice rooms, storage, angry neighbors and the inevitable drummer jokes and general lack of respect and understanding that goes with it all.

I hope to encourage any budding drummer with some advice that I have picked up along the way.
Firstly is not to be perturbed by any of the above, just do things your way and work at your own pace, feel' your way and most importantly, to enjoy it !

The cheap drum kit was a bad move, like any musical instrument, it is very difficult to play and even more of a challenge when first starting out. My advice is to save longer and buy a mid price drum kit [ a Premier, Pearl, Yamaha or a Mapax kit ] second hand, rather than a brand new cheap drum kit that would make any aspiring drum teacher weep!
If you buy second hand, replace all the drum heads, even if they look acceptable, learning to tune a drum kit and to successfully change heads is an important education in itself, invest in good drum heads [ remo ] and playing will be twice as easy and sound beautiful, do not worry too much about the bottom heads, as long as they are very thin and not too damaged. If you do find the bottom heads beyond repair save a fortune and just take them off for good, I play all my toms without bottom heads these days and no-one seems to mind.

Avoid buying mis-matched cymbals, as a full time student with a low paid part time job, I tried to cut costs by buying cymbals gradually as bargains cropped up, another mistake ! no matter what I bought there was never that unified sound that I wanted and always a cymbal I just never used as it had an alien' sound to it. In the end I realized that buying a fairly priced set' of cymbals was, in the long run much cheaper than trying to buy separates. Also cymbal manufacturers like Sabian, Paiste, Zildian, Istanbul etc do invest incredible amounts of time and money into making cymbals match each other and the first time I played a cymbal set it felt and sounded wonderful [ sets of cymbals always look better when set up onstage too ]

When I first starting playing, I was just starting to become fascinated by music, I dug around in my parents record collections found queen, Fleetwood Mac, Pink Floyd, all the usual 70's suspects. I bought three live queen videos and blew the dust off my fathers Fleetwood

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