The Drummer's Digital Library - Pt 1

How many of you have acquired a wealth of learning materials during your years of playing drums? How many of you have an effective method for storing, organising and ultimately surfacing those materials?

These days, material can come from a variety of sources, whether it’s good old-fashioned instructional books, lessons with your teacher(s), online courses or YouTube videos.

As you start to build your own personal drumming knowledge base, you start to face the issue of how you organise that material.

As part of my day job at a computer software company, I had decided to use a tool called Obsidian, a note-taking application designed to help you create a personal knowledge base (or “second brain”).

The general idea is just to capture as much as you can as you go about your life, and then have that information available to you when you need it.

Yes, essentially digital note-taking, but with images, documents etc.

However, the real power of Obsidian is in organising and surfacing that content back to you, as well as making connections between ideas and concepts.

After starting with using Obsidian at work, this then branched out into my personal life, when I realised I could make use of this tool more generally.

The Digital Drum Library

In the last year or so, I started to digitise my drum lessons, my reference materials and thought and learnings so that I could organise them in an efficient manner, remember and revisit what I was learning and generally get the most out of the time I invest in my study.

As well as capturing text, Obsidian lets you embed media in your notes, so you can capture things like images (for example, whiteboard or sheet music photos from your phone), videos, music, pdfs etc.

As you can imagine, this is very handy for study notes!

For my drumming, creating a digital knowledge base has been a tremendous accelerator and immensely motivating.

• “I’ll work on polyrhythms today - let’s search obsidian for some ideas”

• “I need some exercises for my hands - obsidian, show me all lessons that I’ve tagged as being useful for hands”

• “I feel like I’ve done this before…let me check my supplementary notes for the lesson that covered this topic in order to give me a head start…”

In fact, it even helped my teacher out recently when he didn’t have his notes handy and sent me a WhatsApp message to see if I had a copy! Within seconds, I’d searched my knowledge base and found the image he wanted and sent it over to him.

As well as capturing lesson notes, I also capture notes around study materials, general observations, my band set-lists, gear notes (tunings etc.)

An Example Lesson Note

Let’s take a little look at the type of thing I am talking about.

In the note above, you can see

• The title I gave the note

• Some “metadata” - don’t worry too much about this for now, but essentially, my metadata contains

  • The “type” of note, in this case a drum lesson

  • The date of the lesson. This is populated automatically, but can be edited.

  • A summary of the lesson. This is useful for finding notes later, or when the notes are displayed in lesson lists. We’ll cover this in future.

• A section detailing attendees. Dave is my drum teacher - it’s assumed I’m at the lesson 😀 (Interesting to observe that Dave’s name is a link - to a note about him where I can see all of our lessons together etc.)

• A tag (in this case #polyrhythms), which can be useful for finding notes

• The topic of the lesson containing some content from the lesson

• A photo that I took on my phone to capture some of Dave’s notation that we used in the lesson

• A space for my notes

I use this same “template” above for all of the lessons. Keep this in mind, as having an established structure in the form of a template becomes useful in a subsequent article.

The Plan for this Series

Over a series of articles, I’ll be going into more detail about what I’ve done and how I’ve done it.

I’ll detail how I set up my vault so that you can replicate my process and build your own personal drumming library.

A word of warning, some of this may be a little technical, but I’d encourage any non-techy folk to try to follow as much as possible. I’ll do my best to explain in non-technical ways!

If you actually want to get hands on and try this out, you’ll need to get Obsidian installed - instructions on their site or in Nicole’s video in the next “Overview…” section, below.

One more thing: other note-taking tools are available (in abundance!), but I don’t use them. So please don’t message me with “well I prefer…” messages. I use Obsidian, and think it’s great, so that’s what you’re getting here 😂 

OK, with that said, let’s start with an overview of Obsidian.

An Overview of Obsidian

I have to give huge credit to Nicole van der Hoeven for her Obsidian YouTube videos. I learnt a huge amount from watching these!

If you want to get started, I’d highly recommend her instructional videos. She’s a regular content creator, so subscribing to her channel is a good idea if you find her videos useful.

To start with, here’s her “Obsidian for Beginners” video, which I’d highly recommend watching at this point.

I know the video says “…in 2022”, but the content should be just as relevant.

OK, what is Obsidian?

Obsidian is a note-taking tool that uses a language called Markdown. Conceptually, you create your own “vault” as a container for your notes, and then set about filling it with notes.

Once you start to accumulate notes, there are various ways to organise them, for example in folders or using tags.

If you spend some time with Obsidian, you’ll start to find that it is very good at making connections between your content, too.

Remember when I talked about accelerated learning in the intro? Obsidian has helped me to realise connections between concepts, exercises etc. that I hadn’t thought about before, which is one aspect of that.

At the centre of note-taking with Obsidian is “Markdown”, which is a language used to format the text of the notes. Don’t worry, it’s not too difficult to grasp enough of the basics to be effective.

If you want to use Obsidian and get the most out of it, there is no getting away from learning about Markdown.

What is markdown?

We can only really give a basic overview here, but luckily the basics are quite easy to pick up if you’re prepared to experiment and will get you a long way.

Markdown is a language that is used for formatting text to make it look pretty, add links to resources such as web pages, media, other notes etc.

For example, in a document I can use markdown to add headings, lists, links to other notes or external webpages, making text bold or italic etc. etc.

Essentially, markdown notes are just normal text, but within the text you use special characters or combinations of characters to signify headings, lists, links etc.

When you finish editing, and you are simply viewing the notes, you do not see these special characters, only the affect they have on the page - when viewed, your notes then end up looking a lot like web pages.

As always, this is probably easier with an example.

Let’s say I was writing a note about paradiddles, which contained two sections, each with their own headings :

• Introduction to paradiddles

• Tips for playing paradiddles

When typing my note, I’d use the “#” character at the start of a line to indicate that the following text should be a heading, and then start writing my body text underneath.

In the above, example, the ‘#’ character indicates that the rest of the line is a heading.

Then, I could go ahead and do the same thing for the second section inside of the same note.

Observe that the ‘#’ is only visible when we’re actively editing that text, and disappears once we move the cursor elsewhere.

Now let’s say I want to make the word “paradiddles” bold in the first paragraph. No problem, I just surround that word with “**” at the front and end, and it will be displayed in bold.

Markdown can be used for all sorts of formatting - italics, underline, strikethrough - etc. etc. in a similar way.

Remember, formatting and the markdown language is a huge topic, but one where you can get to grips with the basics fairly quickly in order to produce effective results. So persevere!

We’ll continue with this in a future article, but I think that’s probably enough for now.

To start with, you really do only need to grasp a few basic aspects of the syntax.

The most important thing here is to get hands on and play - there’s nothing that can be broken by experimenting. Create a few notes and follow some of the great videos on YouTube.

A good place to start is with YouTube videos to observe examples, but the Obsidian documentation is a good reference once you’ve experimented.

Importantly - again, don’t be scared to go ahead and experiment!

Next time, we’ll continue with some more markdown examples and some ways you might use it as we start to build your drumming library!