Stewart Copeland names the best song to learn drums: “Trickier than it looks”
When picking up an instrument, learning that first song is a major milestone. You might feel scared and uncoordinated at first, but the moment what you’re playing starts to sound like the actual record, there’s rarely a high quite like it. Despite Stewart Copeland crafting some of the most complicated drum fills in rock history with The Police, he admitted that everything you need to know about the basics of rock and roll comes from The Rolling Stones’ Satisfaction’.
Because if you try to start with The Police songs as a drummer, you’ll get fatigued pretty quickly. It might seem easy trying to play along to a pop song like ‘Roxanne’, but Copeland is flying all over the place behind the kit, almost like he was trying to inject some kind of progressive percussion into the band.
Even when listening to something that sounds incredibly simple, like ‘Every Breath You Take’, it’s a lot harder than it looks. Leaving out the massive snare sound on the record, being able to lock into that tempo and play airtight like Copeland does is incredibly difficult, especially when you’re trying to make a song have a groove with only a few hits.
The Stones are a bit of a different animal, though. When Keith Richards first came up with the riff for ‘Satisfaction,’ he meant to simulate a horn line, but the rest of the band had different ideas. Once Charlie Watts got ahold of the song, the incessant beat behind it was a lot simpler than people were used to, hitting on the hi-hat and snare on every beat.
While most came to the song for the riff, Copeland recommended The Stones classic as a perfect beginner song for drummers to get under their fingers, saying, “The Rolling Stones’ ‘Satisfaction’. See if you can master this rhythm? *plays drum beat* It’s trickier than it looks, but that’s a good place to start”.
Compared to other odd-time signature-style drum beats, Watts’s groove is a great way to get the blood flowing on every limb. Outside of keeping a beat with your hands, getting the kick drum to sync up with your hands requires some additional brain power to master. Watts also has a gradual way of improving drummers’ skills, too, practically using the same drumbeat but a little bit faster on ‘Paint It Black’.
Does that mean that everything Watts played was simple? Hell no. Before Watts even considered joining The Stones, most of his contemporaries were jazz players, which meant that he needed to be an absolute monster if he was going to survive any of his first gigs. But it was all about understanding the song, and Watts knew that playing the basic rhythm on ‘Satisfaction’ would give the perfect backing for Richards to come storming in.
While Copeland often found similar ways to work around Sting’s complex melodies, ‘Satisfaction’ teaches the one lesson every drummer should learn first. It’s one thing to play a million notes at a time, but in any band, learn to play the song first and not the instrument.
