Drum Lessons in Georgia

Atlanta does not just have drummers, it has institutions that produce them.

For fifteen years the Honda Battle of the Bands brought the country's leading HBCU marching bands to the Georgia Dome, drawing crowds above 50,000 to what is routinely called the Super Bowl of Black college bands (Andscape). Two of those band programs are local: Clark Atlanta University's Mighty Marching Panthers, whose drumline appeared in the 2002 film Drumline (Clark Atlanta University), and the Morehouse College House of Funk.

That pipeline produces working professionals. Sonny Emory grew up in Atlanta, went through Frederick Douglass High School and took a degree in jazz and classical performance at Georgia State, then spent years drumming for Earth, Wind & Fire and later Bruce Hornsby's Noisemakers. He now teaches applied percussion at the same university that trained him (Wikipedia).

The practical version for a beginner: this is a city where rhythm is taught in structured programs, where a great many drummers came up through a band room or a church, and where a lot of them still teach.

Athens is a college town that turned into a music town, and two of the bands that did it were built around drummers.

R.E.M. formed in Athens in 1980 with Bill Berry behind the kit, and he stayed for seventeen years and eleven albums before leaving in 1997 to farm in nearby Farmington (Britannica). He is playing again, in another Athens band, The Bad Ends. The B-52s came out of the same scene, and Keith Strickland, born in Athens, was originally their drummer; he moved to guitar only after Ricky Wilson died in 1985 (Wikipedia).

What matters for someone learning here is less the famous names than what they left behind: decades of a town where small bands form constantly, where playing in one is normal rather than ambitious, and where the bar for a first gig is a room with a PA.

If you are learning drums in Athens, you are learning in a place where there is somewhere to go and play badly in public. That is worth more to a beginner than it sounds.