I sincerely and strongly recommend lessons. I'm 100% self-taught and I've been playing for 20 years, but when I watch people who have had good lessons from a good teacher who have only been playing for 5-10 years, they make me feel as though I haven't made any real progress. Although, I haven't tried that hard either - but I believe my lack of effort is due to not going out and finding a good teacher.
The only way I would recommend being self-taught is if you are very good at keeping yourself motivated and keeping yourself disciplined. As Mike Mangini said in his recent interview in the latest Musician's Friend catalog, you have to ask yourself the following question when you go to play your drums: am I going to play them right now in order to get better, or just to have fun? After reading that, I realized that I have never played my drums in order to get better. At least, not that I can remember. I think I was always just hoping that I'd get better simply by playing and trying to apply the things that I thought that I learned from instructional videos and other things I picked up from watching the professionals. Now I realize that practicing by myself was just a release and so now I know why I'm not very good.
Take
Cobus for example. He's only been playing for about 10 years, yet he sounds to me like he's been playing for well over 20 years. I learned how long he has been playing about 3 or 4 days ago, and I was honestly kind of depressed after that. It really highlighted just how true it is that you can only reap what you sow. Or, it has to taste bitter before it can taste sweet. I would bet that he went through a ton of bitter-tasting moments in order to get to all of these sweet-tasting moments that he seems to constantly be having.
I know that it's never too late, but I'm 34 years old. I could literally be like 10 times better than I am if I had taken lots of good lesson and if I had really pushed myself. Try to find a good teacher, meaning, try to find one who is a lot like you want to be, someone who plays with just about no effort.
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