Drum Lessons Online | Benefits, Disadvantages, Free vs Paid

Taking drum lessons online has become commonplace in the drumming community. In the digital age where people want things on demand, it is no surprise.

Why would you wait if you don’t have to?

But is it truly the best way to improve your drumming?

In this article, we are going to talk through the benefits and disadvantages of taking drum lessons online as well as the differences between free and paid lessons available online to you.

What are the benefits of using an online learning service?

So why are online lessons becoming so hugely popular. It surely must be for good reason. Lest start off with why you would want to take drum lessons online:

1. Instant access – Once you have started your subscription you will have instant access to all the lessons available. You just need to find what you would like to learn first.
2. Learning at a time that works for you – Unlike visiting a tutor you can access lessons at a time the suits you, not when a tutor can fit you in. Work odd hours in your job? Learn at a time that fits your needs.
3. Watch lessons on any device – To access your lessons you don’t need a fancy pc. All you need is any device with Internet access and away you go.
4. Learn from world-class tutors – Most of us have a drumming idol and it would have used to been impossible to learn from them. Now the majority of world-class drummers have lessons available online for you to access.
5. Discover technique and methods your local drum teach may not know – You might have an extremely good local drum teacher but even there knowledge will have boundaries. You may have seen a technique online you would like to learn more about but your tutor may not know it. What do you do? For example the heel toe technique is becoming extremely popular but a lot old school drum tutors won’t know of it due to it still being fairly new.
6. Cheaper than a local tutor – If you take lessons with a local tutor you could be paying between $25- $50 for a hour of tuition. That is more than the cost of you average online learning subscription.

You can see it is clear that there is plenty of reasons to take drum lessons online. Great content that you can access however you want at a time that fits your schedule for a small monthly fee. Where do I sign up?

So what are the disadvantages of taking drum lessons online?

So at this point you may be thinking that your local tutor isn’t needed and you should just drums learn online. For some people that may just be the case, for others not so. Here are some reasons you may still want to learn locally:

1. Someone to give you feedback – If you learn something new you may practice it until you think you have it master but in reality it might not be quite there yet. A tutor can correct you on something you may be playing wrong or an issue with your technique.
2. A logical learning path – Lessons online are often ordered or grouped in a particular why to make it easy for you to progress. If you have a tutor they may see how you are playing and see something logical you should work on next.
3. Regular learning schedule – If you take lessons with a tutor it is more than likely that you will see them on a set schedule. For example once a week on a Saturday morning. If you need more of a push to imprve your playing this can really help.
4. They can push you to try new things – A lot of drummers like to out themselves in a camp and stick to it. For example you may class yourselves as a metal drummer, you only want to play metal and that’s fine. Your tutor may push you to try something new from another genre that will add to your playing that you may have never even considered.

Even though we may be in the digital age there is still reason for having a tutor if you have the time and have enough money to be able to afford it.

Free vs Paid? Which drum lessons are better for you?

So you’ve done your research and you’ve decided you want to learn online. That’s great. It is now time to decided which route to go down. Free or paid?

If you are looking for free drum lessons there is one main source online for you to look at, YouTube. The main question is which channel on YouTube to learn from. This is where free lessons can become an issue. If something is free the majority of the time it is normally one of these 3 things:

1. Poor quality – Making lessons to a high standard to a lot of equipment. At least a camera and recording equipment. Buy all of this or paying someone to do this for you is expensive. This is why a lot of lessons on YouTube aren’t of great quality.
2. Not a great tutor – If you learn from a person on YouTube how do you know how good they are? Do they have experience? Are they producing regular content for you to learn from? It is often the case that if someone is releasing drum lessons for free they don’t want to take the risk in investing in a setting up a paid service, this would make me question their commitment to giving you lessons in the long run.
3. Part of the lesson – You have found a great tutor with high-quality videos. Sweet! Now you have the common issue of previews to full lessons or an introduction to something to learn that you need to pay to learn fully. That is fine and to be expected as YouTube is a great way of generating traffic to a website to gain customers.

Paid lessons don’t have these issues above. This is down to having dedicated students subscribed to the learning service paying a monthly fee allowing them to invest in higher quality more frequent content. The more students they have the more high-quality diverse content they can create.

So what’s our conclusion? Should you take drum lessons online?

From what we’ve seen it is clear that learning drums online has obvious advantages but there is still room for a traditional lessons with a tutor if you can afford it. Below are some recommendations for learning sources based on different monthly budgets.

• 0$ – YouTube
• $30 – Paid drum lessons online
• $45 – Paid drum lessons online + 1 lesson with a tutor
• $60 – Paid drum lessons online + 2 lessons with a tutor
• $100+ – Multiple paid drum lessons online + lessons with a tutor

Everyone who plays drums has different budgets to dedicate to education. Playing drums is expensive before you have even invested a penny in learning them properly so it is easy to understand why so many people fall into the YouTube bracket.

So where should you learn?

DRUMEO. If you are reading this article you have probably already heard of Drumeo in some shape or form. But that’s a good thing! Drumeo has the largest collection of drum lessons brought to you by a huge range of world class tutors.

MIKES LESSONS. Mike Johnston is one of those drummers that clearly loves to teach. You can see it in every lesson. He is very passionate and truly wants you to learn, it is very inspiring. If you want to learn how to groove and build up some new chops this is a great place to start.

DRUM AMBITION. If you are at the very start of your drumming journey this may be the place for you to start. Drum Ambition takes you from knowing nothing about drums to a solid foundation of playing with is clearly organised curriculum.

180 DRUMS. This platform takes a similar approach to Drumeo in its focus around a large selection of guest tutors. This is a good thing as 180 Drums brings you a great selection of drummers that aren’t currently available on Drumeo and is a fraction of the price.

SO MANY MORE. The available options for lessons online are increasing every year. As we come across more we will check them out and add them to this article.

We hope you have enjoyed this article and it has helped to give you some clarity around if you need to invest in some extra lessons. If this post has helped you share it with your friends, we really appreciate your help and support. If you sign up with your email below we’ll keep you up to date with all of our latest posts, lessons and reviews.