Shaun McGonegal Drum Lessons

Shaun is excellent at gauging your level and bring you to the next. My son and I are taking lessons with him and we are really happy with our progress !

If you wanna learn drums, Shaun is the man.
He’s a patient teacher who’s great at gauging progress so you learn new stuff each week without getting too flustered. The other reviewers are right. It’s his personality that makes him awesome. My kid loves going to lessons.
His studio has a parking lot and is 1 block from I-​280 Geneva exit. Bring your own sticks, he provides everything else.

Shaun is an awesome drum teacher. I have been taking weekly lessons for the last year and a half and have learned a tremendous amount. He is a stickler for good technique and knows just how to keep me motivated. He has a great way of balancing high expectations with encouragement and patience.
Whenever I hit a wall, he is able to explain what to do in a variety of ways until I get it. Shaun will definitely throw as much at you as you can handle. He is well versed in many genres of music and has a large collection at his studio. Each lesson is a combination of drills and song work. His studio is conveniently located and has on site parking. Besides being easygoing, friendly and an overall nice guy, Shaun is an excellent teacher who will take you as far as you want to go!

I came to Shaun with absolutely no drum experience at all. I had never even held drumsticks before my lessons with him. I’m no prodigy, I’m actually kind of a slow learner and I can’t believe how patient Shaun is with me. There are sometimes when my hands just wont do what mind is telling them to and he can just look over at me diagnose what’s going wrong and correct it, without any annoyance. I never feel intimidated, rushed or talked down to. He’s great. I am only taking lessons for fun, just as a way to do something totally new and musical and out of my comfort zone and he totally gets that. I look forward to coming here each week and chatting w shaun and making noise (even if it’s not pretty all the time). I highly recommend Shaun if you’re thinking about expanding drum knowledge or just starting from scratch. Plus its just fun to hit things and not be arrested for it.

I am very impressed with the skill, knowledge, creativity and patience of my drum teacher Shaun McGonegal. He quickly pinpoints what I need to improve and has an arsenal of exercises for the task. Shaun’s agile, creative teaching style has helped me to improve my drumming skills quickly. Here is an example. We were working on a beat that I just was not getting and Shaun said let’s look at this a different way. He wrote the same beat in a different time signature and I got it. Shaun has practical applications for the variety of exercises that we work on from standard practice books. He will take a written syncopation exercise and show me how it can be used in a solo or a fill for different styles of music.
I always know where I stand during the lessons. I get enthusiastic encouragement when I’m getting it and direct advice when I am not with a clearly articulated explanation of what is not quite right and what I need to do to correct my execution. Shaun seems to have infinite patience when I struggle with certain skills, exercises or songs, and he will not let me off the hook. We work though it till I get it.
Shaun has an encyclopedic knowledge of historic and contemporary drum lore which is always a source of interesting and entertaining stories. The studio is equipped with multiple drum kits, a kick-​ass sound system and a huge collection of recorded music. Conveniently located steps from the Balboa Park BART station Shaun’s studio is easy to get to. Shaun’s rates are very reasonable and he is a pleasure to study with. He teaches all levels and all styles. I highly recommend Shaun McGonegal for anyone who wants to improve their drumming skills quickly and effectively.

My son has been taking lessons with Shaun for over a year. Shaun has been very supportive in the learning process, changing methods as needed to help make drumming a fun challenge. I feel my son has learned and accomplished a lot under Shaun’s mentoring– both specifically about the drums and about music in general. Shaun’s easy and personable manner has contributed to my son’s sticking with drumming, something I haven’t seen in other activities we have tried.

I’ve been studying with Shaun for about eight months now, and I couldn’t be happier with my lessons. Shaun listens to and watches what I do very carefully, and he’s great at figuring out the most minute problems with my technique (finger position, wrist movement, etc.) that are limiting sound quality, speed, consistency, etc.
If you’re a near-​beginner, like I was, he’ll take you step by step through the process of becoming a drummer, teaching you both the fundamental skills and the role of the drummer in a band.
Shaun always seems to know what I should be working on next. I get the sense that he has a whole multi-​year lesson plan in his head for me, and as soon as I master one exercise, he’s ready with the next one that builds on it to consistently improve my playing.
But it’s not just exercises. I bring in songs I’d like to learn to play, show him what I think I’m hearing, and he helps me figure out what the drummer is actually doing (underneath all that reverb) and replicate it.
And despite being a longtime professional drummer, he completely empathizes with the challenges of learning, especially for folks like me with day jobs, and is consummately patient and encouraging.
After I decided to pick them back up (I’d played a bit in high school), I spent several months studying drums on my own before I started taking lessons with Shaun. It was certainly fun to get back into playing those first few months, but it was shocking how much faster my drumming improved once I started taking lessons. After a few months with Shaun, I built muscles I didn’t know I had in my wrists and arms that enabled me to do things on the drums I couldn’t do before (and in many cases didn’t even know existed!).
Shaun is that rare combination of an expert in his subject matter who is also a great teacher of it. I cannot recommend him more highly!

Bravo Maestro!
It is a pleasure to sing the praises of Shaun. He has worked with my 11 year old child for about 6 months now and I am so impressed with with his expertise and patience. We originally started taking lessons with him to prep for a show with a school friend’s band but even after the event passed my son wanted to continue.
Shaun really has a gift of making music understandable, incorporating the building of technique, laying down the fundamentals, and all while having fun. He really makes an effort to find the approach that will make things work for his student.
The cost is reasonable for private lessons and he has all the equipment at his studio so we just show up with sticks.
Highly recommended.