We caught up with the brilliant and insightful Victor Olavarria a few weeks ago and have shared our conversation below.

Alright, Victor thanks for taking the time to share your stories and insights with us today. It’s always helpful to hear about times when someone’s had to take a risk – how did they think through the decision, why did they take the risk, and what ended up happening. We’d love to hear about a risk you’ve taken.

This topic applies in a lot of ways to what I do. I decided pretty early on that I was going to pursue music (everyone let me know how big of a risk that was) and I did so without ever having a plan B. I only applied to one college (Berklee College of Music) and after graduating with my Bachelor’s degree I started teaching private lessons so that I could be my own boss, which allowed me to take time off to tour with my band. At that point in time my goal was to make a living drumming in a band, which ultimately did not work out. However, my teaching business started gaining momentum and I turned out to be pretty good at it.

Eventually I started making more money staying home and giving lessons than I did playing with bands (I didn’t love living out of a suitcase anyways, haha). As my focus shifted to building my business I gained more and more students, and it has since grown past anything I ever thought it could be back when I started.

I often wonder if I’d have found success doing this if I had a plan B to fall back on. I’m not sure I would have, so I’m very grateful to have taken the risk to go all in on music.

Now that I’m about a decade and a half into being a drum teacher, I also have a very sincere appreciation and respect for the risk that every single person that has ever reached out to me to start lessons has taken. It can be a vulnerable thing to go into a one-on-one lesson with a stranger and learn a new skill from scratch. I remember what it was like to start at the beginning, and I remember what it’s like to fear “being bad” at something. It’s a very human trait and one that I am so proud of my students for embracing and moving past so that they can learn to play such a fun instrument!

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

As I mentioned, I got into teaching so that I could be my own boss and have time to tour while trying to “make it big” with my band at the time. As my business has grown I’ve had time to develop my curriculum, which is based off of the things that I struggled with as a drummer growing up, so that my students can hopefully bypass those struggles.

I started teaching while still living in Kirkland, WA and that period allowed me to see what lessons are like from the teacher’s perspective. It gave me insight into how people learn in different ways and how I need to be able to explain things in different ways in order to reach everyone. It gave me experience, both in teaching and in running my own business. In 2017 I moved to San Diego, and that move forced me to explore teaching lessons online so that I could continue teaching my WA students while laying down roots in CA and building up my lesson roster down there. I developed a pretty clean system for doing that, which wound up putting me in a very good position when COVID hit. I already had online lessons up and running, so I was able to transition all of my CA in-person lessons to that while also gaining new students from all over the country who wanted to learn something new while we were all stuck inside social distancing.

During that time I thought it would be fun to give my students a way to apply what I was teaching them in a musical situation, so I started doing what I call Song Of The Month. I hired my friend and former bandmate to write me drumless songs in all kinds of different styles and then I gave those songs to my students so that they could write their own drum parts to the songs. This was a success in so many different ways:

– It made every student’s lessons unique because it showed me exactly where they were at. This allowed me to help them musically by suggesting things to play that they weren’t thinking of themselves, as well as letting me know what technical things they needed to focus on in lessons.

– It allowed me to show people that there are an infinite amount of ways to play a song. Once a student completed their part, I encouraged them to record it and share it on YouTube so that all of my other students could see and hear what they did. This allowed everyone to gain inspiration from each other’s ideas.

– People start drum lessons because they want to be able to play the drums, and what better way to gauge their improvement then getting them to a place where they can write their own drum part and perform it?!

After a few years of online lessons people started wanting to get back out into the real world, so I transitioned back to in-person lessons. My schedule has now gotten to the point where I struggle to fit new people in right away, but I wasn’t okay with being confined by my schedule’s limitations. I started filming online courses that take people step-by-step through what I teach so that they can learn on their own at their own speed, and I also started hosting drum clinics with friends of mine so that my students could learn from other professional drummers. So far I’ve hosted clinics for Daniel Matson from The Home Team and Kristen Gleeson-Prata from BØRNS.

Currently I’m in the process of writing a book that explores the issues and insecurities I struggled with learning the drums, how I overcame those struggles and insecurities, and how they helped me develop my curriculum. The book will teach you how to think about drums so that you’re able to create an infinite amount of ideas based off of a small number of concepts, and it will also show you how to use those ideas and concepts to play two original songs. You can then use what you’ve learned to play any of the Song Of The Month songs, as well as any other song you might want to learn how to play, either with a band or on your own.

I truly love what I do and I have realized that while I am a drum teacher, what I’m really doing is teaching people how to build confidence, and that’s what I’m most proud of. Not everyone wants to be a professional drummer, some people just want a fun hobby to do on their lunch break or a new creative outlet to explore with friends on the weekend. Whatever my student’s aspirations are, my job is to show them that they absolutely, 100% CAN do this, and seeing the progression from timidness to confidence is probably the most rewarding part of being a teacher.

I have a lot of free resources on my website that anyone can check out:

– “Your First Drum Lesson” is a free, five-part course that teaches you everything that I take students through in their first lesson. You’ll learn beats and fills made up of quarter notes, 8th notes, and 16th notes while simultaneously learning how to read music.

– The “Song Of The Month” songs are free and available to anyone that would like to check them out. In addition to the drumless tracks, I film mini lessons that break down aspects of my parts and provide insight into real world applications of the things I teach in lessons, the courses, and my upcoming book.

– Over my years of teaching I have transcribed A LOT of drum parts to songs that students have wanted to learn, and you can download them all for free on the Transcriptions page of my site. There are currently over 100 songs available.

– “Why’d They Do That?” is a YouTube series that I started to help students understand why drummers played what they played on recordings, and it also references A LOT of the concepts that I teach.

What’s a lesson you had to unlearn and what’s the backstory?

This will be completely fleshed out in my book, but the idea that the only way to play a song correctly is to play it exactly the way it’s played on the recording. I don’t know why I originally approached music and drums that way, but it made things much harder for me than they needed to be. It has, however, helped me effectively guide my students that struggle with that same mindset into a different, more productive way of thinking because I know exactly what they’re going through.

Can you tell us about a time you’ve had to pivot?

I briefly touched on this earlier, but pivoting from in-person lessons to online lessons because of my move might have saved my career. After moving to San Diego there was a point where I almost had to get “a real job,” because despite my online students from WA, I just didn’t have enough students in CA to make a living. I was finally able to get a few, which bought me time before looking for that “real job,” but then COVID happened. COVID was a terrible thing, but the circumstances it drove society into lined up perfectly with the online lessons that I had to offer, and I became the busiest I had ever been at that point in my career. A few years later, when the online fatigue started catching up with everyone, I pivoted again back into in-person lessons, which continues to be going strong.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.victorthedrummerguy.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/victorthedrummerguy
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/victorthedrummerguy
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/victorthedrummerguy
• Other: https://share.google/zqG2APdouerjoYC4m