What I try to achieve in a first lesson

Last week I had a new student, twelve years old. She sat down at the drum kit, hands in her lap, and looked at me the way you look at a dentist just before the drill comes out. She really wanted to play drums, her mother had said. But you could see she found it a bit daunting — or maybe she was afraid of not being enough.

I could have told her the names of all the drum kit parts. I could have asked about her favourite band. I could have done a warm-up exercise. But in that moment I knew that none of those things were the most necessary.

What I wanted was for her to walk out after forty-five minutes with the feeling: this is something for me.

That sounds sentimental, but I mean it very practically. If that feeling is there after the first lesson, you come back. If it isn’t, you might show up three or four more times. After that, it disappears into the large pit of hobby projects that never became anything. And that’s a shame — not for me, but for her.

So what I try to achieve in a first lesson isn’t something technical. It’s something else. I try to create one moment where she hears something she’s made herself and thinks: oh, so that’s what that sounds like.

With this student, I put her straight behind the kit. No explanation first. I played a simple pattern, she copied it. Messier, less confident, but it was there. And at the moment she made the bass drum, snare, and hi-hat sound together for the first time — even if it was rough and uneven — something changed in her face. That was the moment.

I’ve seen it often enough over the years, and I genuinely believe it: people don’t learn by understanding. They learn by feeling something. Understanding comes after that, once the motivation is already there. In a first lesson, the feeling is the only thing that matters.

That means I consciously leave things out. No explanation of notation if it’s not needed yet. No correction of the grip if the sound is good enough. No explanation of the lesson plan. All of that comes later. In a first lesson, every minute they’re not playing is a missed opportunity.

There’s something else I try to achieve too, and it’s harder to describe. I try to show something of what’s possible — not by showing off, but by being honest about the road ahead. I sometimes say something like: this pattern feels chaotic right now, and in four weeks it’ll come almost automatically. That’s not an empty promise. That’s something I’ve seen hundreds of times. I’m giving that student a time horizon. Something to work towards.

Because what I’ve also learned: people don’t drop out because it’s hard. They drop out because they don’t know whether the effort leads anywhere.

Afterwards, I asked that twelve-year-old what she thought. “Nice,” she said. Not enthusiastic, not effusive. Just nice. I noted down what we’d done, sent a short message to her mother about what we’d practised, and gave her one thing to work on for the week.

I don’t know if she’ll become a great drummer. But I do think she’ll come back. And that’s, in a first lesson, the only thing I can achieve.

Something I keep thinking about: how do you actually know afterwards whether a first lesson went well — in the moment itself, or only weeks later?