It's a lot of fun to learn to play the drum / percussion parts exactly like our favorite drummer or percussionist played them; anything from a solo to the entire drum / percussion track. Sometimes we are lucky enough to find these things already notated for us, appearing in a drum periodical, a drum method book or website. Although it's a lot easier to have someone else figure it out all of this for us in advance, I believe that transcribing ... whether it be solos, grooves and/or entire drum tracks ... is a great way to develop your own ears, reading, notation skills, creativity and overall drumming vocabulary. You have nothing to lose and everything to gain by doing it!

When transcribing the drum part for an entire piece of music, here are the order of steps that I typically go through:

• Figure out the time signature and tempo marking.
  
  
• Get the form of the tune; Intro, Verse, Chorus, Bridge, etc. During this time, I may not know what to call each section, but that comes after I've listened to the entire tune.
  
  
• Notate how many measures are in each section, such as: Intro (4 bars), Verse (8 bars), etc.
  
  
• Figure out the skeleton for the tune; perhaps the Verse is very different from the Chorus, so figure out each one of those if they are different.
  
  
• Next transcribe the variations of the groove or light fills that occur with the groove; ghost strokes, etc.
  
  
• Lastly, transcribe all the fills and any nuances that I may have missed.

When laying out this type of frame-work on a tune, it makes it very easy to jump around and fine tune the transcription.

Obviously, if you are only transcribing a drum solo or drum fill ... you would vary the procedure accordingly.

When my students work on published drum solos or transcriptions I make sure that they figure out the form of the solo. Knowing the form of the solo ... such as ABA ... really helps to not only learn and understand each section of the piece, but is an incredible tool for memorization. At this point, the solo can start becoming a piece of music and not just a bunch of notes on a page or muscle memory movements.

So get out there and start transcribing your favorite drum solo, drum track or whatever you like or want to learn to play. You'll be doing yourself a huge favor by doing the transcription yourself, and you'll grow in the process.