He Started Out Singing – Atharv’s Grade 2 Drum Distinction

Atharv Venkatesh started out singing. His first music lessons were in Carnatic vocals, and it did not take him long to notice that the thing holding his attention was not the melody but whatever was sitting underneath it. He wanted the rhythm. So he moved across to the drums, enjoyed them immediately, and a year and a half later - at twelve - he has passed his RSL Grade 2 drum exam with a Distinction, scoring 93%.

He is not short of things he is good at. Away from the kit he plays chess at state and national level, and turns out for cricket and football as well. Chess is the one that rhymes with what a graded music exam actually asks of a player: a set of patterns learned properly, recalled exactly, and carried out while somebody is watching and keeping score.

What a Rockschool grade asks for

What Atharv likes about drums is the room they leave him. On drums, he says, you can improvise on any piece and any song in a way you cannot on some other instruments - which is a good reason to love the instrument and precisely the wrong instinct for a grade exam. RSL hands you the parts written out and asks for them as written. For a long stretch of his preparation, the timing and the exact notes were where he kept coming unstuck.

He describes solving it in a single sentence: he kept practising until he got it right. His drum teacher at Trill Route, Abhimanyu, was the other half of it - catching the parts he played wrong, working with him on tightening the pieces, and building up the confidence he carried into the exam. It is that last one Atharv puts the most weight on.

The take that gets marked

He sat the exam as a recorded submission rather than playing in front of an examiner, and that turns out to be its own kind of pressure - no examiner to read, no room to settle into, just the recording and whatever ended up on it. He came out of it with 93% and a Distinction. He says he felt happy and proud of the result, but the part he singles out is not the mark. It is that he played well with all the pressure that came with the recording.

What comes next

He went into the exam wanting to find out what level he was actually playing at, and to do well once he got there. He has both answers now. What he says he wants next is to tighten the pieces further for the grades ahead - still working on the same thing that gave him the most trouble, which is usually a sign a player has found the part worth working on.

Congratulations, Atharv.

Drum lessons at Trill Route in Indiranagar, Bangalore run one-on-one and in small groups, for complete beginners through to students preparing RSL and Trinity grade exams - you can see how they work on our drum lessons page.