Best Books for Drummers
With so many drumming books out there it’s hard to know where to start! But if you have an idea of what you want to work on, hopefully this list with short descriptions based on my experience with the material will help you make some choices. There are many more than this, but these are my personal favorites and the ones I recommend the most!
Stick Control: For the Snare Drummer
By George Lawrence Stone
This book is a must-have!
Stick Control has been around since the 30s and has never gone out of style with drummers of all genres. It’s a very fundamental approach to sticking exercises, and even if you never get past page one there are so many ways to use the exercises in this book. I find the method of playing it as instructed to be incredibly meditative and endlessly useful for developing consistent strokes.
Check out my Drumeo Stick Control Play-Along if you want help getting started and take it from there!
Accents and Rebounds: For the Snare Drummer
By George Lawrence Stone
This is the follow-up to Stick Control and one that many drummers haven’t explored, but it goes so much further in-depth to developing full strokes, up strokes, down strokes and taps as applied to numerous accent patterns. It’s the kind of book that will really refine your playing and get you thinking about efficiency of movement.
A thorough study of Accents and Rebounds will have you playing more fluidly and with greatly increased clarity and precision.
A Funky Primer for the Rock Drummer
By Charles Dowd
This is a great book for beginners as it includes tons of simple rock beats, methodically working through pretty much every possible placement for bass and snare while keeping a steady rock groove. It’s good for developing vocabulary in a rock setting or for practicing your reading skills.
Not every beat in the book is a “winner” but working through all the possible combinations will allow you to place the kick and snare anywhere in the beat without throwing off your groove!
There are many ways to use the exercises in this book but one of the more popular ways is described by Alan Dawson in John Ramsay’s book The Drummer’s Complete Vocabulary as Taught by Alan Dawson. The exercise focuses on page 38 and has drummers split the rhythms between hands and feet while keeping steady swing time on the ride.
It’s a great one to have on hand if reading and independence are areas you’re looking to improve.
This book is great for developing snare and bass independence within a swing feel and covers both simple exercises and more melodic soloing concepts.
It starts simple, (not that simple always means easy!) and gets very advanced, so it’s one of those books that can last you years and years as you progress.
I find that it’s always valuable to keep returning to even the simplest exercises as I gain more control and sensitivity on the drums.
Future Sounds: A Book of Contemporary Drumset Concepts
By David Garibaldi
If you want to get into funk drumming this is a great book to study from! Not only is it full of actually hip beats, David Garibaldi also takes the time to address how to practice without sacrificing a steady sense of time. He also goes in-depth about the volume levels of the different parts of a funk beat.
A lot of the grooves are based on inverted paradiddles so the book feels less like a basic rock approach and more like a linear rudimental method.
This is a classic. It begins with Alan Dawson’s “Rudimental Ritual” which is a great exercise for developing fluidity with rudiments in a musical setting, one that can stay with you your whole life if you take the time to really study it. He then goes on to show a number of different ways to utilize exercises from Syncopation for the Modern Drummer.
It starts simple, playing page 38 on just the snare or bass while keeping time on the ride, and gets more and more interesting (short notes on the snare, long on the bass, etc) until eventually you’re filling in all the in-between triplets as ghost notes and burning up the page with what starts to really sound like some killer playing. It’s great for learning to “comp” in a jazz style and an all around great practice for independence.
By Frank Briggs
This is an incredible resource as a reference for almost any style you’re likely to come across as a gigging drummer. I use it when I need to learn a specific kind of “world” groove or when I want to work on playing styles I’m comfortable with in new ways.
It also has some great sections on playing in odd times and offers tons of variations for most every style.
To whoever I let borrow this book: if you find it I want it back!
This book changed the way I play, the way I think about my body, the way I teach, heck, even the way I sit and stand. It is a compelling look at the way your body works in relation to drumming and has some absolutely mind-blowing information in it.
For example, did you know your wrists don’t rotate? Like, not at all. What! Turns out that any rotation you make in your hands is actually coming from the two bones in your forearm crossing over one another. Trippy! But incredibly helpful, because once you understand alignment and what your bones, muscles, tendons, etc are actually doing, you can suddenly (or gradually) correct age-old issues and become much more efficient and relaxed in your playing.
It can also significantly reduce the likelihood that you will injure yourself playing drums. I can’t recommend this book highly enough and I use information from this book in almost every drum lesson I’ve taught since reading it. There’s also one for guitar players too, so you can recommend that one to your guitar playing friends!
This one is a bit heavy, but if you’re ready to really develop your independence you can take a deep dive with The New Breed. Much of the method involves playing a repeated pattern with three of your limbs while reading pages worth of rhythms with the fourth.
It’s a bit of a brain game but will unlock new ways of using each voice on the drumset if you stick with it.
This is another of those books that can last for years and years as there are almost infinite combinations to explore.
By John Riley
This is a great resource for learning complex comping patterns in jazz playing.
It’ll stretch your brain and have you playing way more interesting patterns if you’re ready for that kind of thing!
The follow-up book Beyond Bop Drumming is great as well.
If you’re into hip hop drumming this is a super fun book. It’s got all the greatest drum breaks from all the best songs and it’s really fun to work out of.
This is a book for anyone who is ready to play real-live beats from the music you actually listen to, and it also includes practical exercises to work up the fundamentals needed to play them.
Mark Guiliana - Exploring Your Creativity on the Drumset
By Mark Guiliana
This one is a bit advanced but if you’re looking to really expand your approach to drumming and you (like many of us) idolize Mark Guiliana you’ll want to snag this book.
His methods are pretty unique and are very focused on generating your own rhythms in a solo or groove context. He works with a loop that goes from eighth notes to triplets to sixteenth notes back to triplets and gives you various prompts to flow in and out of those different subdivisions.
It’s really cool but it might take some serious practice to get it down, so come to this one ready to work!
Drumming is a lifelong journey and any of these books make great travel companions. If you ask me, it isn’t possible to read too much. Sometimes a good book will change the way you think and set you on a new path, and every one of these recommendations has the capacity to do that for you.
There’s tons of great books that didn’t make the list (which I’m sure I’ll keep adding to now that I’ve started it!), but even if you only pick up one of these it could unlock new worlds in your playing. I hope some of these seem exciting to you and that you add a few to your collection!
Feel free to reach out to me at management@heatherthomasmusic.com with other suggestions or if you have questions. If you’d like to book a drum lesson to work on anything related to drumming or music in general, you can schedule a lesson at www.heatherthomasmusic.as.me and use the discount code BOOKS for 10% off your first booking.
Thanks for reading!
Happy drumming!
-Heather Thomas
@heatherondrums