I Learned To Play The Drums In 5 Days With No Experience

One of the best ways to learn something fast is to set stakes. Everybody, I want you to give it up for Mr. Tim Ferriss over there. So here goes. You can feel the power rising up in your loins. Five days. This is like the first time I've looked at Chinese characters. Zero experience. You're in trouble. Okay. And the world's best teachers. Yeah, baby! Is four or five days really enough time? I have my doubts. I'm Tim Ferriss. Best-selling author and human guinea pig. I'll show you how to make the impossible possible by bending the rules. I'll find the world's best teachers and push myself to the edge to deconstruct, decode, and demystify some of the world's toughest challenges in record time. If I can do it, so can you. This week's experiment is drumming. The challenge? To perform live in Los Angeles with an internationally renowned rock band. Growing up, my favorite Muppet was Animal, naturally. Despite that, I've always had a very contentious relationship with music, and I have not been able to crack the code. Over the next five days, I will break down drumming. I'll find the critical 20% of material that gives me 80% of what I need to reach my goal. I'll put the pieces I've selected in the most effective order, and the risk of embarrassing the hell out of myself on stage will keep me motivated. I have found an incredible teacher to help me with this. The Yoda of Yodas. Stuart Copeland, founding member of the police, widely considered one of the top ten drummers of all time. Tim, I presume. It is such a pleasure to finally meet you. Hey, how are you doing? Come on in. Welcome to the Sacred Grove. This is where I do my cool stuff, where my fancy friends come to play. Stuart Copeland is a bit like Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future. Very enthusiastic and gets you really fired up. I've got a secondary percussion unit here. Why is that? So I imagine I'll be spending a lot of the next week in front of something like this? Very close to this, yeah, this is pretty standard. Right away I notice a lot. This drum kit is extremely elaborate. This cymbal here plays a short note, while this one resonates more. I can see he's holding the sticks differently in each hand. Also, his feet are doing two things at once. Look how relaxed his grip is. The sticks look like they're going to fall out of his hands, but of course they don't. And one more thing. Not a single piece of written music in sight. I don't even know where to start. The rhythm is broken into three components. The kick, which is on the floor. That's what everyone dances to. To create interest, its contrasting rhythm is the snare drum. And it's this crosstalk that gives you your cool rhythm. Glued together. It's like connected to a ship. Exactly. That is all you need to know. Off to the races. Your turn. Come on. I'll try harder. That was very nice of you to start off real quiet like that. Very delicate. Take a deep breath. Let's get a starting point here. There you go. You're going to spend a lot of time doing that. Right now, you're doing it, but you're... Tense. Yeah, and that's just because your brain is telling and controlling consciously every action. And what you're going to do by just playing is to get outside of your body. Ah, you're getting power mad. You can feel the power rising up in your loins. You're a primate. An alpha male. The great silverback making a great noise. Because you've got your crash and your kick landing hard. Power Lorenz. Power Lorenz is going to be my stage name. Alright. So what is fill? You mentioned fill. Okay, once you're playing along and everybody's happy. The singer's singing a song. Now the drummer's getting bored. Crash. And he hopes the rest of the band didn't notice. My circuits are totally overloaded with just the basics. And I'm not sure I'll ever be able to figure out the drum fills. Hang on a second. Can't stop him now. Breaking me out of my shell and almost immediately throwing me into a jam session with him is very smart. Nothing's going to stop this man. He's taking me directly to the enjoyment of drumming alongside other people. That's fun. It's the dummy. Right now, I know the anatomy of a drum kit. The anatomy of a song is still very, very difficult to me. Would you suggest having some type of sheet music for drumming to follow along with? Do you understand what the dots mean? Okay, well that's kind of a hurdle. Okay. My weakness is, no big surprise, reading music, figuring out how to think of music in terms of vocabulary, like measures and notes, which is not a way that I typically deconstruct what I hear. I'm effectively having an anxiety attack. This is no joke, man. You're going to be playing a real gig with us and you don't have much time. Great first session. Stuart is amazing. He knows how to get you in the mood for music. I do, on the other hand, need to learn how to read sheet music or somehow practice the song that I'll be playing. In addition to that, I need to develop some type of protocol for practicing. Hey, what's up man? How are you? Good. Good to see you. I'm hoping Adam can help me deconstruct the learning process for drumming. This is the School of Rock. Today we're going to be in here. We're going to be behind these two kits. Oh, awesome. Okay, so we play side by side. I like this idea. That school is going to be awesome for you this week because we teach through music, which accelerates the learning process. I know you don't know how to read music. I don't. But I charted out drum parts for you. I mean, right now you're probably looking at its foreign language. Yeah, yeah. This is like the first time I ever looked at Chinese characters. Yeah, because this is on the floor, Tom. You're doing eighth notes, so one and two and three and four and. And then there's a fill. The biggest problem that I have is looking at music, hearing it, dissecting it as notes on a sheet of paper. I've never done that before. First four bars of the song. Okay. Oh, my God. I should learn the counting. I mean, I'm going to have to get there. So you're going one and two and three and four. Yeah. Right now I'm throwing a ton of stuff against the wall to see what sticks. Maybe it'll be reading music. Maybe it'll be counting the beats in my head. I don't know what'll work. It's so early in the process, it's very difficult to say I know exactly what my game plan is. I need to figure out the minimum effective dose for learning this song. That is, the smallest piece I can focus on to pull this off and nothing extra. Bravo, sir. I don't know which portions I'm going to have the most trouble with, which will then dictate how I schedule my training time and what I focus on. Which stresses me out a bit. Here we are. It's about three in the morning, and you can see I am not resting very well. I'm effectively having an anxiety attack. If you're trying to learn something very, very quickly in a compressed time frame, you will experience extreme frustration at predictable points and sometimes completely freaking out. The question remains, of course, is four or five days really enough time for me to adapt and learn what I need to learn? I have my doubts. Must be our guy. I'm here to meet these guys, members of the legendary band Foreigner. I'm Chris. Chris, we will be talking. Yes, of course. That was just warming up, right? Oh, yeah, yeah, that was just limbering up, my tendons and my ligaments. But that's probably not far from all I have at the moment. This is no joke, man. You're going to be playing a real gig with us. Yeah. Playing a real song. Yeah, I know. And you don't have much time. I've been struggling a bit, I'm not going to lie. It's my first time really tackling music, so I'm just trying to keep the timing in my head. It's been challenging to figure out what to practice because I'm not sure how much do I focus on fills versus, let's say, grooves for the verse and the intro. And then I don't know how to read music. This is the first time I've looked at anything like this. You're overthinking this just a little bit. Well, that's what I'm saying. So I need your help to avoid it. You're in trouble. Okay. You got your work cut out for you. But you also picked one of the hardest songs, too, because it has a rock feel in it, but it has a touch of R&B and a touch of swing to it. Would you practice this chronologically? Exactly. Linearly or you would? Okay. I just wouldn't worry too much. I just think play the song, don't play the drums. Okay. All right. That's good advice. Chris's advice to learn the song and not the drums might sound like a fortune cookie, but it's really important. It means, put simply, that I should learn the drums through Hot Blooded, not learn the drums, then try to play Hot Blooded. What we have to say to you is good luck. Thank you, sir. The goal is to learn Hot Blooded. Now I just have to figure out the minimum effective dose, the keys to unlock the song. I kind of actually today wanted to maybe put that aside. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Paper, notes, words, who needs it? Adam's right. Trying to learn to read music is not working for me. There has to be a more effective way. The question is, what is it? What I wanted to do is actually just break it up and just get the main grooves of the song. Finally, the light bulb is going on. Until now, I was getting totally overwhelmed trying to simultaneously learn to read music, count in my head, all while adding in the fills or embellishments. Now I realize that none of these elements are part of the critical 20% that I need to learn 80% or more of the song. There are three grooves that make up the song Hot Blooded. The verse, the chorus, and the pre-chorus. That is my 20%. And that's what I'm going to focus on to get me prepared for game day and the big show. Playing Hot Blooded ad nauseam over and over again, rinse and repeat, does wonders for your confidence. Holy ****, I have to play that tomorrow. I can omit the crash cymbals, I can omit the fancy bass drum work, I can omit any of the flourishes. And as long as I can keep the heartbeat going, I'm in great shape. Hey! Yeah, baby! Yeah! On one hand, I was seriously worried that I was going to screw up my muscle memory by playing on a fake drum kit, but I was actually smiling and having a good time, which wasn't the case earlier this week. That was awesome. This is what guitarists do, which is really annoying. Did you get it right in your face? Yeah, you're right. That is pretty annoying, yeah. Hey. Hey, man. Good to see you again. How are you doing? I'm doing well. This is where I've been spending my solitary confinement. Oh, cool. I think what I should do is just kind of see how far you've come and where you're at. As Chris was watching me for the very first time, I totally immediately flubbed it. And then settled in and played the rest of the song reasonably well before he timed out and made some very good suggestions. So, you did a fill where you played with your left hand, and the thing about it is since you're right-handed, I'm assuming you're right-handed, it's going to be easier for you to lead your fills with your right hand. The big decision is, do I go for the fills and try to get fancy and risk blowing the whole thing, or do I focus on doing that until my brains melt of boredom? We shall see. You got to get some of this going, man. You know, and just smile at the audience, you know, and point at the girls that you want backstage. I like this rockstar man already. Definitely starting to feel the electricity, the spider sense of a live performance. I've never felt it before. Just going straight through that way? All right. Well, I can see why this would become an addictive drug for people to play rock and roll. Absolutely. It's unlike anything else. Wild. Having a spinal tap moment. I was exhausted up until walking into this place and actually getting a feeling for the space. Are you ready for the pre-show foreign ritual that we all do? Toss the carrot. Yes! What's happening? It's getting settled. As ready as I'm going to be. If you can catch that break with us, though, that'd be really great. Yeah, you know, I wasn't sure exactly. I like doing things like this. As odd as it seems, getting this uncomfortable, because it just takes that sort of sphere of comfort within which you can act and get good results. And it just goes... Signer? I don't know what a signer is. I don't know what spiking it means either. And the more you do that, the more you inoculate yourself against making mistakes when you're afraid. You're still afraid. I'm not trying anything new today. Except for... Oh my God, I love it. Yeah, baby! What's up now, David Lee Roth? Hey, hey, hey, hey! That sounded like a drummer knock. Look at you in your snake skin. How are you, man? Good. Mark, how was yesterday? Yesterday was great. I had to make some decisions about what fills to cut and which ones to keep. I had all kinds of great advice. As soon as you walked out the door, all kinds of pearls of wisdom occurred to me. But I won't hit you with any of them now, because I'll just f*** you up. Yeah, I appreciate that. I can't stand it. One pearl of wisdom. And then that's it. Okay, all right. I knew it. I saw something eating at you. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's to keep plowing through. Whatever you do to drum fill is just play. Play, throw yourself off the clip, but keep your mind on the meter. Mind over meter. Yeah. We were approached by a young man named Tim Ferris. He said to himself, I want to play drums with a famous rock band. And we said, you're crazy. I want you to give it up for Mr. Tim Ferris over there. Came here with a blank slate and a fantasy. And was able to not get completely laughed off stage. And I've come away from this feeling like, if that was possible, what other impossibles do I have in my life that I should really question? Ferris, everybody on the drums. Hey guys, Tim Ferris here. One of the things that kills me about TV is that you have to take all of this amazing footage. In our case, we had five to six days of 12 to 16 hours typically per day. And you have to chop it down to 21 or 22 minutes. Which is a 30 minute show with the ads removed. It just makes me want to stab myself in the eyeballs with bicycle spokes. It's so agonizing. The good news is, we have all that footage. And so we've taken huge extended scenes. We've taken interviews. We've taken tutorials. Everything imaginable that we could get our hands on. That we thought was really world class that we wanted to put in. And you can find it at 4hourworkweek.com. Forward slash TV. All spelled out. F-O-U-R. Et cetera. And we really feel like we could have made the best two hour documentary imaginable on the subject that you just saw. Or had five different shows of equal quality all different with the footage that we captured. So please check it out. There's some amazing stuff. And you can also check out the podcast where I do very long, in some cases two to three hour interviews. With a lot of the experts in this show. And that's the Tim Ferris Show. Which was nominated one of the best of iTunes. Which I'm very, very happy about. And you can check out both. So find everything at 4hourworkweek.com. Forward slash TV. And if you think that's an oxymoron, by the way, you're right. If you own 4Hour Workweek, do not work in television. Thank you for watching.