Myrtle Beach, SC

Dorothea Taylor is one of my favorite instructors at Drumeo, my favorite online drum education program and drumming community. She’s relatively new to Drumeo, having joined the instructor team about 2 years ago. However, she’s not new to drumming, nor music education – she’s been playing for 56 years and working with students for almost as long! Dorothea preaches the benefits of using rudiments (think marching bands – yup, she started out in a drumline) on the drum kit – and rudiments are what I most need to learn to take my drumming to the next level. Her no-nonsense, disciplined teaching style resonates with my learning style.

Dorothea is a rock star in the drumming community. She’s likely done more to push the envelope on gender and age issues in music than anyone else on the planet. And she does it with just plain, old-fashioned awesome drumming – no gimmicks required – and humor. In the spirit of never judging a book by its cover… check out Dorothea’s cover (with 13M views!) of Down with the Sickness by heavy metal band, Disturbed. Turn it up!

I was aware that Dorothea lived in Myrtle Beach, and we were visiting family nearby. I reached out and we made arrangements to meet up for lunch not far from her home. Dorothea also travels extensively in an RV, so we found no shortage of things to talk about – music, travel, social media, RV-sized drum kits, living in tourist towns, a new granddaughter (Dorothea’s, not mine!).

We chatted a bit about my current challenge with rudiments. She graciously offered to watch me play and had conveniently brought a drum practice pad and sticks along. We moved our conversation to our RV where she got the 20 second tour (it’s pretty small). Dorothea watched me play and in 30 seconds observed and corrected a hand position that got me past the challenge and gave me two finger exercises to work with. Problem solved! Yes – she’s that good.