Conrad - Drumming tutor - New York
1st lesson free
Conrad - Drumming tutor - New York

Conrad's profile and their contact details have been verified by our team.

Conrad

  • Price $99
  • Answer 1h
Conrad - Drumming tutor - New York

$99/h

1st lesson free

Contact

1st lesson free

1st lesson free

  • Drumming
  • Percussion
  • Jazz Drumming
  • Tambourine

Learn Drums with Conrad, Whatever Your Level, Age or Goals, Start Your First Lesson Today

  • Drumming
  • Percussion
  • Jazz Drumming
  • Tambourine

Lesson location

About Conrad

About me

My lessons are built around comparison. When something on the kit feels wrong, I rarely start by telling you what to fix. I set up two versions of the same motion, have you play both, and ask which one you could repeat on purpose. Drumming is full of movements that look identical from the outside and feel completely different in the arm: a stroke that bounces off the head and one that is pressed into it, a hi-hat played from the wrist versus from the whole forearm, a kick that lands with the heel down versus one that is pushed off the toes. Once you can feel the difference, you start noticing which one you are using without being told. That ability to notice is what I most want you to leave with, more than any single groove or fill.

When I watch you play, I look at the sticks and the feet before I listen to the sound. The sticks tell me what happens after the hit. If the stick stays low and dead after it lands, the rebound is being wasted, and you are working harder than you need to. If a student tells me a fill keeps falling apart, I don't have them repeat the whole thing. You can usually play the fill slowly, but at tempo the third stroke after the crash turns into a smear. I find the exact moment it breaks, often the first crossing of the lead hand from snare to tom, and isolate only the two notes on either side of that crossing. We loop them until the move is boring. If the problem is rushing, I might take the hi-hat away for a few bars and have you play only kick and snare, or put the click on beats two and four only, so you have to hold the space yourself. When one explanation doesn't land, I change the thing being shown: a different stick height, a movement described as pushing a pencil across paper, or simply turning the groove into something you hear first and copy second. Sometimes the answer is to stop talking and let you play four bars while I count quietly.

The same principle looks very different depending on where you are. With someone learning their first notes, the comparison might be a loud stroke and a quiet one at the same height, played alternately on a practice pad while I count out loud, so the difference in sound is the only thing to pay attention to. A returning student often has more in their hands than they expect, so I begin with a groove they once knew and let the playing show me what still works and what has gone stiff. With an intermediate player I might reduce a song to its skeleton, just the kick and snare through the chorus, then add the hi-hat and ride back one piece at a time to see which addition makes the feel tighter and which one drags it. For an advanced student working through a difficult passage, I often change the rhythm on purpose, playing a sixteenth-note fill as triplets or moving the accents, because that exposes coordination gaps much faster than repeating the original over and over. With children, I make the same comparisons into a game of "heavy robot" and "floppy noodle," which is surprisingly effective at teaching the difference between tension and control. With teenagers, I like to start with a song they actually want to play and map it by its landmarks, the entrance of the chorus, the fill before the bridge, the place the cymbal crash comes back, so the form lives in their head and not only in the notation. Adults with busy weeks usually do best with a short routine of three or four items, each with one question attached, so the time they have goes exactly where it is needed.

A lesson with me usually starts with you playing something you already like, even if it is rough. I will stop you at the first place it goes wrong, ask you to play that spot once more without watching the sticks, and then we talk about what you felt. I'm comfortable with silence and I'll let you finish a bar before I say anything, because the most useful thing you can learn is how to hear your own mistake while it is happening. Over time I give you less and less. By the end of a few months, I want you to be able to run your own practice: find where a passage breaks, isolate it, change it, and check whether the fix holds at full tempo. My job is to make myself less necessary, and I take that as a sign the lessons are working.

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About the lesson

  • Beginner
  • Intermediate
  • Advanced
  • +6

    • levels :

    Beginner

    Intermediate

    Advanced

    Professional

    Kids

    1st Year

    2nd Year

    3rd Year

    4th year

  • English

All languages in which the lesson is available :

English

I start drum lessons by taking things away. When you learn a beat, I want to know which limb is doing the least work and which one is carrying the groove, because the one you rely on without noticing is usually the one that fails under pressure. For a complete beginner, the first lesson might be a basic rock beat with only the kick and the hi-hat. The snare comes in later, once the foot and hand already know where the pulse is. For someone who has played for years, I might strip a favorite song down to just the kick and snare and have you play along. Hearing what the rest of the kit does, with that part missing, makes it obvious what the drummer was really holding together. The method works the same way at both ends. Each piece is added back on purpose, so you always know which limb is responsible for which sound.

Physical efficiency is a big part of how I teach, and I like to make the difference concrete by comparing two ways of playing the same thing. Take a simple run of single strokes. In one version, you press the stick down from the wrist and muscle each note. In the other, you lift from the fingers, let the stick bounce back up after each stroke, and let the rebound do part of the work. I have you play the pattern both ways at a slow tempo, then at a faster one, and notice which version stays even and which one tires your forearm or your shoulder. Children with smaller hands often feel the difference within a few minutes. Adults who have been fighting a fast fill for months often find that the problem was never the speed. It was tension they had been carrying in the shoulders without realizing it. When a fill keeps falling apart, I don't ask you to play the whole thing again. We find the exact tempo where it starts to smear, usually at the handoff from one tom to the snare, and I isolate only that transition: two strokes, a reset, the transition itself, then back into the groove. Once that one move is clean, we put it straight back into the song it came from.

Rhythm and coordination get their own attention, separate from the notes themselves. Coordination problems often hide inside a fill that looks fine when played as written. To expose them, I change the rhythm on purpose. I might have you play the same fill as straight eighth notes, then as a triplet feel, then with the accents moved one step to the left. If the pattern holds in every version, the hands are solid. If it only holds in the original rhythm, we have found the weak point and can work on it directly. I also teach you to navigate songs by their landmarks rather than memorizing bar after bar. You learn to count where the crash lands, where the chorus starts, and where the drummer drops out for two beats before the bridge. That makes a song much easier to recover when you lose your place, which almost every drummer does, and it means you learn to listen to the arrangement rather than just reciting it. Teenagers and adults often bring in songs they actually love, and I'm happy to build the lesson around those. Returning students usually find that their hands remember more than they expected, so we start with what still comes easily and build outward from there rather than going back to the very beginning.

What I most want you to leave with is the ability to diagnose your own practice. Over time, you should be able to tell the difference between a passage that needs more repetitions and one that needs a different stick height, a different rhythm, or a break into smaller pieces. A simple habit helps a lot here: record thirty seconds of yourself on your phone, then listen back with the click track on and notice exactly where the groove drifts. Most drummers don't rush the whole song. They rush one specific spot, and once you can name that spot, you can fix it in a few minutes at home. I teach through real music, with enough structure that you always know why you are doing an exercise and what it is meant to solve, but without drilling for its own sake. Whether you are sitting behind a kit for the first time, coming back after a long break, working toward a difficult part, or trying to play with other people, the goal is the same: to understand your own playing well enough that you no longer need me to tell you what is going wrong.

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  • $99

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  • 5h: $495
  • 10h: $990

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The first lesson with Conrad will allow you to get to know each other and discuss your needs for future lessons.

  • 1hr

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  • $99/h

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levels

Beginner

Intermediate

Advanced

Professional

Kids

1st Year

2nd Year

3rd Year

4th year

All languages in which the lesson is available

English

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free lessons

The first lesson with Conrad will allow you to get to know each other and discuss your needs for future lessons.

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