These books are a great way to develop skills in playing music accurately along to a band. Drummers nearly always perform alongside other musicians, so keeping in time and knowing where you are in a song are vital abilities to develop. At the outset, we use these books purely as learning materials – they are a nicely progressive syllabus with songs of increasing complexity and length as we move from Initial Grade towards Grade 8. There is the option to get some of the songs up to a really excellent standard of accuracy and performance, then take a grade exam, but there is no obligation to do so.

The books contain the printed music for drum kit to play, as well as downloadable backing music. So you can play along as if with a band.  To help out further, each song also has a Demo track so you can hear how band plus drums should sound. Instructions for downloading the backing music are in the back of the book.

Most of my students are interested in rock and pop music, so it’s appropriate to start with the Trinity Rock&Pop books, which look like this:

They have similar cover designs, with just the Grade title and colour varying. Students usually begin with the Initial Grade book, which has a Red cover (pictured on the left of the row), reference ISBN ‎ 978-0857366382 .

These books are available from real live music shops. You can also get them from various online sources if you choose.

Students who are interested in a very wide range of music genres, including Latin, Show Style, Funk, Jazz, etc, may find the Trinity “Classical & Jazz” more interesting. Most drummers agree that the Classical & Jazz exams are more technically demanding than the Rock & Pop ones. The first Classical&Jazz book covers Grades Initial, 1 and 2. And it looks like this…