Making Room for the Drums - Myra’s Trinity Grade 2 Merit

Myra Nigam is thirteen. She swims, plays basketball, reads and does karate, and on Saturdays she plays the drums. Asked what was hardest about preparing for her Trinity exam, she did not name a rudiment or a piece - it was making time to practise. She passed Trinity Grade 2 on drum kit with a Merit, at Trill Route in Indiranagar, Bangalore.

Myra at the kit at Trill Route - Trinity Grade 2 drum kit, passed with Merit.

She came in for a trial in April 2023, aged ten, with some drumming already behind her. The note from that first class calls her patient and smart. It also records what they spent it on: how to sit at the kit, how to hold a stick, how to get a free rebound out of every stroke. Three years of Saturdays have followed.

A pause, and then a proper start

The drums did not start here. Her music teacher at pre-school put her behind a kit, and that, in her own words, is when her love for drumming started. Then Covid hit and she had to pause. What she says about coming back is careful about the order things happened in: she rebuilt an interest in music as a whole first, and started classes at Trill Route after that.

Making room for the drums

Between school work, swimming, basketball and karate, practice was hard to fit in at first. Her answer was to put drums ahead of some of the other things and build the habit up slowly until she was practising every day. Some days that was twenty minutes and some days more, and what she credits in the end is not the length of any one session but the constant revision. The class notes bear her out. One from the summer she was learning Back in Black says only that she practised and came prepared.

What she has been trained on

The technique came early and kept coming: single and double strokes, paradiddles, flams and four-stroke ruffs, accents, dynamics, and a great deal of work against a metronome. Music theory and notation went in during her first month. All of it was taught alongside real songs rather than instead of them. So the three years also hold Yellow and Clocks by Coldplay, Summer of ’69, and Back in Black by AC/DC, taken as far as the guitar solo. More recently there has been a Taylor Swift medley, and Happier Than Ever by Billie Eilish.

The exam pieces, and the result

Her Grade 2 programme, on Trinity’s Classical & Jazz syllabus, came out of the Initial-to-Grade-2 drum kit book: two pieces by Burgess, Lava Lamp and NY Nights, and Gently Does It by Tracey. She started on Lava Lamp about nine months before she sat the exam, and played two mock exams in the studio before the real one. It came back as a Pass with Merit. “I was really proud when I received my results for my grade 2 exam because I was able to see that all my hard work paid off,” she says.

Grade 3, and waiting

She has already sat Grade 3, this time on Trinity’s Rock & Pop syllabus rather than Classical & Jazz, and is waiting on the result. That programme is Are You Gonna Go My Way by Lenny Kravitz, London Calling by The Clash, and Sweet Child O’ Mine by Guns N’ Roses as her technical focus song. What she wants from it is specific: a higher score, and more levels after that.

Achieving the Trinity grades has always been her goal, she says, and it is what keeps her going. Her teachers, she adds, were instrumental - in the exams, and in her drive as a drummer. Josiah is the one she works with now.

Congratulations, Myra.

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