Best drum books for beginners

Almost every other instrument has one obvious first book. Drums has two, they look alike on a shelf, and nothing on either cover says plainly which instrument it teaches. A parent buying for a child in school band and a parent buying for a child with a kit in the garage need different books, and buying the other one wastes both the money and the first month.

Every pick below states its Starter Path band, and we have not worked through any of them cover to cover — the method is on how we pick. Authors, page counts and contents come from Alfred Music’s own catalog entries, cited at the bottom.

The decision nobody tells you about

A drum kit and a snare drum are, pedagogically, two different instruments. They share sticks and some notation and almost nothing else.

A snare drummer plays one drum with two hands. The skills are rudiments — named sticking patterns like the paradiddle and the flam — roll control, dynamics, and reading a part off a page in an ensemble. This is what school band and orchestra assess, and it is what Alfred’s Drum Method, Book 1 teaches across its 80 pages.

A drum set player coordinates four limbs across several instruments. The skills are independence, groove, and keeping time while the hands do different things. Alfred’s Beginning Drumset Method teaches that in 48 pages split into a rock section and a jazz section, and Alfred states its design goal plainly: the student plays a beat in the first lesson.

The practical test is simple. If a school sent a letter, the instrument is a snare drum (possibly inside a percussion kit with a bell set — our page on percussion kits for school band covers those). If the instrument arrived from a shop with cymbals attached, it is a kit. Buy accordingly.

Why Stick Control is on every drummer’s shelf

George Lawrence Stone’s Stick Control#ad is 48 pages, has no explanatory text, no audio and no tunes, and Modern Drummer named it the first of the 25 greatest drum books of all time in 1993. Stone’s own stated aim is control, speed, flexibility, touch, rhythm, lightness, delicacy, power, endurance, preciseness of execution and muscular coordination, “with extra attention given to the development of the weak hand.”

That last clause is the whole thing. The limiting factor for a right-handed drummer for the first several years is the left hand, and it is a limit most self-taught players never notice because they instinctively arrange everything to avoid it. Stick Control removes the option: the patterns are symmetrical and the weak hand gets exactly as much work as the strong one.

It works on a practice pad, a pillow or a kit, so it costs nothing to use. What it does need is a reason and a metronome, which is why it is a companion to a method rather than a replacement for one.

When Syncopation becomes the right purchase

Progressive Steps to Syncopation for the Modern Drummer#ad is 64 pages, the cheapest book here, and Modern Drummer put it second behind Stick Control on the same 1993 list. Alfred publishes its contents: accented eighths, dotted eighths and sixteenths, eighth-note triplets, sixteenth notes and extended solos.

It is the book teachers use as raw material. A single page of rhythms can generate dozens of exercises — play the line with the hands and quarter notes with the foot, then swap, then swap again — which is why lessons keep returning to it for years. On its own, without someone to assign those variations, it is 64 pages of rhythms with no instructions.

Buy it when reading is what is holding the player back, which is usually around the point they can play a beat comfortably but cannot learn a song from a chart.

What we did not list, and why

Drumming for Dummies and similar broad guides were left off because the drums situation is different from the guitar one. A guitarist genuinely benefits from a book that covers buying and setting up the instrument; a drummer’s equivalent questions — what size kit, acoustic or electronic, how loud is it really — are decisions made before any book is bought, and we answer them on how to buy your first drum set and how loud drums actually are.

Alfred’s Drum Method, Book 2 and the book-plus-video editions of both methods exist and are reasonable. They are not listed because the decision this page is for is the first purchase, and the first purchase should be Book 1 of whichever method matches the instrument.

Realistic Rock, Future Sounds and the other classic intermediate titles are excellent and assume a player who can already keep time around a kit. Naming them here would be the same error as recommending Stick Control as a first and only book.

Free online lesson material is a genuine competitor to all of these and we are not pretending otherwise. What a book does that a video does not is sit open on a stand in a fixed order so that a parent can see what week the student is on. For a child, that structure is most of the value.

What to own alongside the book

A metronome, before anything else. Everything in all four of these books is a timing exercise whether it says so or not, and a drummer practicing without a reference is practicing their own drift. Our metronome roundup covers the cheap ones that work.

A practice pad, if the instrument is a kit. Nothing in Stick Control needs a kit, and pad practice is the only drum practice that can happen while someone else is on the phone in the next room. The practice pad roundup covers those.

And sticks that fit the player — a 5A is the default for a reason, and a child with adult sticks will develop a grip that has to be undone later. Our page on choosing drum sticks works through the sizing.