Drumming In Retirement

If you were drummed out of the workforce, consider drumming in retirement!

Drums and Me

About 25 years ago, I made what might have been a mid-life crisis purchase. It wasn’t the standard fast sports car or motorcycle or boat, it was a set of Roland TD-10 electronic drums. While I’d never had any lessons or training on drums, I had taught myself to play a bit during high school on a friend’s drum set, and I have always really enjoyed playing. There is something primitively satisfying about bashing on things in rhythm that really appeals to my brain.

My TD-10 e-drums brought me great joy. Because they are e-drums, I could play them through headphones without disturbing my family or the neighbors. And owning a set e-drums means that you own a virtual room full of different drum sets, and you can select between them with a touch of a button. The TD-10 featured metal mesh drum heads (now standard on all modern e-drums) instead of just a hard plastic surface, which made it play more like traditional acoustic drums. The TD-10 was one of the first ‘serious’ e-drum kits, and it was marketed and received as a quality high-end musical instrument instead of as a toy or gadget. So it was strange for a guy who was basically a beginner drummer to buy high-end, state-of-the-art e-drums. I have to invoke mid-life crisis logic to justify it.

I played those e-drums a lot after work and on weekends for about 10 years. I spent even more money on upgrades for them over the years. I just played for the fun of it, without much focus on improving, but I got good enough to play drums at parties with friends. But about 15 years ago I started playing bass guitar in more serious bands, so when I found some time between work and family obligations to play music, I felt that I should practice bass. So I hardly played my e-drums at all anymore. I even considered trying to sell them.

But, the TD-10 remained in my home studio, and now during retirement, I found that I have renewed interest in them, and much more time to play them. The fact that my TD-10 e-drums remained usable after all these years is a testament to their quality.

And, I found I could give new life to the aging TD-10 by connecting it via MIDI to my home studio computer and running inexpensive software like E-Z Drummer that can produce an even greater variety of high-quality drum sounds in response to playing the TD-10. Instead of dialing up a drum kit on the TD-10 ‘brain’ module, I instead dial up a drum kit in the E-Z Drummer software and listen to my playing through my computer audio interface. I’m a technical guy, but I still marvel at how well this works: I hit a drum, the transducer near the drum head sends an analog signal down a cable to the TD-10 brain, which converts it to a digital MIDI message¹ and sends it over another cable to my computer audio interface, which delivers it via USB to my home studio computer, which bubbles it up through the operating system and routes it to the running E-Z Drummer software. The software deciphers the MIDI message and maps it to a pre-recorded drum sound sample that corresponds to the particular drum that I hit², applies some digital effects like reverb and compression, and sends the sample back through the computer audio interface, which then produces the sound in my headphones or speakers. All this happens in a span of time that is too short for me to perceive (about 10ms) - as far as I can tell, I hear the sound instantly upon striking the drum.

I was really enjoying playing my e-drums again, so much so that I decided to start taking drum lessons from a local instructor. This is working out very well for me - I enjoy learning new techniques and patterns that add variety to my playing. I was pleasantly surprised that I was not the only old retired guy taking drum lessons from my instructor.

But as I got some of my drumming chops back, I began to feel the limitations of my 25+ year old drum set, even when it was augmented by my computer. Some of the drums had annoying ‘hot spots’ probably caused by wear on the transducers, and the hi-hat pedal wasn’t functioning well with the E-Z Drummer software.

So I doubled down on my mid-life crisis and bought a set of new, modern Roland e-drums, the TD-516 kit. Those drums are glorious. E-drum technology has advanced considerably since the TD-10. As a bonus, I could reuse some of the pieces from my TD-10 kit to expand the new TD-516 kit, so I’m rocking a hybrid set of e-drums now.

I’d have to say that e-drums are probably one of the most extravagant things that I own. It probably raises eyebrows for an intermediate-level (at best) hobbyist drummer like myself to own e-drums like mine. But I don’t regret it, at least not yet. In fact, the last couple of months I have been almost totally consumed with playing drums. I imagine that a lot of this is fascination with my ’new toy’ plus the increased practice discipline that came with taking private lessons, and I will go back to a less lopsided balance between drumming and my other retirement pursuits eventually. But right now I’m running with drumming, as I feel I am making progress and I want to get as much mileage out of my current motivation as possible.

Consider Drumming

I want to make a pitch for taking up drums in retirement, even if you’ve never played before. I think that if you can feel the beat in music, you can eventually learn to play drums. And as mentioned, it can be a very engrossing hobby.

Learning anything new in retirement is good for your brain. I won’t even bother with citing references for this fact. And learning a musical instrument seems especially beneficial, as covered in this article, which has a good summary with lots of references cited.

I personally feel that drums may be a particularly good choice of musical instrument for retirees, for reasons that include:

• Playing a drum kit involves more of your body than e.g. playing piano, and so it is more of a whole brain / whole body workout. You burn more calories doing it. My Apple Watch is happy to count the time I spend drumming towards meeting my daily exercise goal.

• It takes only minimal skill to make an individual musical sound on drums - you just hit a drum or a cymbal, which is a fairly big target, with a stick. You just have to worry about hitting them in rhythm. Playing in rhythm is something that you also have to worry about with other instruments, but with other instruments it can be much more difficult to produce individual musical notes. E.g. with guitar you have to coordinate holding down a string and plucking it, and if you flub either task it makes a frustrating non-musical noise.

• If arthritis in your fingers is a concern, it will probably be less limiting on drums than on piano, guitar or other instruments.

In particular, modern e-drums make drumming even more appealing in my opinion. Frankly I just wouldn’t be interested in owning traditional acoustic drums because of how loud and how limited they are. As mentioned above, e-drums allow you to switch between the sounds of many different drum kits catered to different drumming styles - jazz kits, stadium rock kits, heavy metal kits, Latin kits, hip-hop kits, electronic music kits, etc. If you buy an acoustic kit, you own just that one drum kit. E-drums can apply audio effects to the drums to make them sound even more interesting. But if you want to bring your acoustic kit into the realm of electronics, you have to buy and arrange expensive microphones on your drums. Mic’ing acoustic drums is an artform / hobby all its own, but I’d rather just play e-drums. In short, unless you are truly an expert drummer, a drumming purist, or someone who dislikes modern technology, e-drums make more sense than traditional drums to me.

Also, the computerized brains of modern e-drums have useful features and abilities built into them, like streaming music from your phone via bluetooth to play along to, recording and playing back your drumming, metronomes, and even some learning tools to help you practice rudiments and improve your speed and timing. Most e-drums can interface to a home computer, which opens up even more possibilities, including interactive learning software that will teach you how to play.

There are numerous options to help you with learning to play drums, including paid and free software, paid and free online courses, and many thousands of YouTube videos. But I would still recommend finding a good local instructor and taking private lessons. This not only helps you avoid developing bad habits, it also provides structure to your learning journey. Otherwise the many learning options available tend to reduce focus, and without a lot of discipline, you can end up just flitting between different efforts without putting in the work to really improve. For me the desire to not look like an incompetent slacker in front of my instructor makes me focus on the weekly lesson material. It is quite satisfying to be handed a weekly lesson assignment that you cannot play at all at first, but then after hours of practice, you can (usually) play it quite well by the end of the week.

You may find that your instructor is eager to have older or retired students because they know older folks are there taking lessons because they really want to be there. And retired folks can fill up daytime lesson time slots while students are in school.

While I personally am not particularly interested in playing drums with other musicians at the moment, that is certainly a possibility once you reach a certain level. If you get in with the right folks, playing music you love in a band with other musicians is definitely a lot of fun. While I was in bands I’d have to say that my social life pretty much revolved around them. The School of Rock music schools seems to be expanding, and they specialize in teaching you to play rock music with other musicians by forming groups of students that practice and play together. (I have no experience with School of Rock, I don’t know how well this works in practice. I imagine the experience would be highly dependent on the other students that are placed with you into your group.)

Of course there are some downsides to drumming during retirement:

• Drums can be an expensive hobby. If you are just starting out, I’d probably recommend buying a budget e-drum kit (exactly like I didn’t) just to see if you take to it. If you do take to it, be prepared to upgrade at some point.

• Drumming is more physical than other musical instruments, which is generally a plus but is also a minus because it can produce some aches and pains in muscles that don’t otherwise get much use, e.g. forearms and shins for me. I combat this by taking frequent rest breaks in a nearby comfy chair, and taking care not to overdo it each day. It gets better eventually.

• Mastering a tricky exercise or lesson can be very frustrating when you just keep messing it up. It is easy to start thinking along the lines of “younger me wouldn’t have so much trouble learning this”. I counter this by realizing that younger me wouldn’t have had as much time to practice and may have given up already.

• E-drums are much quieter than traditional acoustic drums, but they are not silent, even when you are listening to yourself play with headphones. Hitting pads, cymbals, and the kick drum in particular produces thunk sounds that can potentially bother others nearby. The thunk sounds can even interfere with listening to yourself through headphones at low volumes unless you use isolation headphones.

• They take up some square footage in your home.

Personally, these downsides are outweighed by the benefits.

Finally, as mentioned in In Pursuit of Flow, musical instruments can be a great way to experience Flow, and I think drums are a near-perfect Flow inducer. When you enter Flow while playing, every beat you put down and every fill you attempt just lands perfectly, and you are on auto-pilot while it happens. The feeling is beyond words.

Enough typing. Time to go play drums!