Nathan Hammer started playing drums at age 8 and has been playing in bands since middle school. He was also involved in playing music for church where he started giving private and group lessons throughout high school. He went to Barbara Ingram School for the Arts where he graduated focusing on percussion and was offered a scholarship to attend University of the Arts where he pursued Jazz Performance as a Drum major before switching majors to Music Technology. While in Philadelphia he pursued music by interning at studios, doing home recording work, and engineering for friends’ projects, while playing in multiple bands and putting out music and leading under his own project. He has been lucky to do some live sound work with friends, has been on two international tours, once playing and once driving, and has spent the last year and a half working as an Usher/Ticket-taker for Livenation. He is passionate about making music accessible for everyone and keeping students engaged and challenged.
As a multi-instrumentalist his goal in providing lessons is to make well rounded, confident, and tasteful musicians. He wants to give you the tools to understand, analyze, rehearse, play, and eventually compose or record music. There’s no such thing as bad music, just different tastes. As a student you can expect to be thrown into as many different genres as there are artists to choose from. As a beginner this exposes you to music outside of your comfort zone and as an advanced player it will inject some new material or style into your playing. When starting an instrument, how can you know what your strengths and interests are if you don’t know what’s out there? As an advanced player, genre specificity can bring tropes and staleness when not injected with outside influence. While here you can expect to learn a lot about world and American music genres while tailoring lessons to specific interests and concepts as often as possible. Nathan wants to give a broad foundation but is comfortable doing deep dives as well and understands that interests will vary as much as the way each student learns. He wants to help you develop your style of playing and give you the tools to be a versatile workhorse regardless of your background or previous knowledge.
