There is much to be said for both these approaches to drums and to other instruments. Some of the best guys in the business say they can't read a note! Phil Collins is one I heard very recently say he used symbols that he invented himself to convey his musical ideas to a bunch of top session people he had hired to make an album.
     Other top guys famously said they couldn't read a note - Buddy Rich, Tony Williams, and musicians like Paul McCartney, Jimi Hendrix and Eric Clapton.
     I have reservations about these comments. There is no way a musician like Paul McCartney knew nothing about music. It's like saying you're working class when you grew up in a perfectly respectable Semi detached in the suburbs. It's a way of adding to your legend. I came up poor! I couldn't read a note - it all came naturally!  It isn't exactly true.
     As a boy I learned to play guitar chords. We didn't learn to read notes. We learned chords and sang songs. But I learned that a D7 chord leads very nicely to a G chord. And I knew that notes went from A to G and there was no H. And I knew that a piano had black notes which were between the others - called sharps and flats. I picked up all this from playing songs and listening to musical dialogue. I'm sure McCartney went through a lot of the same stuff. You might not get formal instruction in a musical Stave (the lines it's written on) but you pick up a hell of a lot of musical knowledge and structure from the songs you learn and that enables you to write music of your own.
     Self-taught musicians learn the structure of music from the songs that they teach themselves. 
     With drummers you pretty quickly get the idea that most music is in a count of 4, or 3 sometimes or multiples or combinations of these.
     I had no drums teacher but I had a torn old Snare Drum Rudiments book. From that I was able to learn the names and duration of notes and how they fit together mathematically. When you figure out the maths and realise that there is a steady rhythm to the notes it begins to make sense. It was invaluable to me to be able to read because there was no YouTube so you had to get ideas from the TV or records or best of all from books - because in the books you could see how the difficult bits fit together. 
      On the other hand, I taught myself a great deal just by practising; playing until I got something to sound right. I think it gave me an insight into the right and wrong way of doing things. A teacher would probably have said "Do it this way!" But I tried some things 10 different ways until I decided I had found the best one. It was time consuming though. And I made a lot of mistakes. I am not sure if that's a bad thing or not! If you're not in a hurry, it is a great way to learn.
     Another argument for being self - taught is that you might find an original way of doing something. Surely this is the best argument there is. 
       Phill Collins is a great example for both arguments - dots and no dots. He's had an amazing career without ever learning to read notes, but then again, he could have told his musicians exactly what he wanted and in half the time if he had had the knowledge, some paper and a pencil.
       I'm in the dots camp. My background on guitar has been invaluable. I backed up my home study with music in school. I ditched German A-Level to do music O-Level and it was a fabulous musical grounding. We looked at harmony and we learned to listen to try and identify intervals in a piece of music. We were shown chord sequences that worked well and learned to write simple pieces. 
      The music teacher asked me to play Tympani in the orchestra. I had to learn to tune 2 Tymps to an interval just using a A tuning fork. Then I had to read and play simple Tymp parts. I really enjoyed seeing the smile on the teachers face when he conducted me through a tymp roll crescendo in school concerts; a marvellous feeling!
      I was never great at the technicalities of music but I got a grade C pass in a year. Then over the years I worked at improving my ear and my sense of chords and wrote some fairly acceptable songs. I'm still weak at melody writing but maybe one day I'll write a good one. The thing is, everything I learned helped me to progress as a musician.
     I went on the road with a Covers band and I had to arrange songs. I was really good at writing medleys of songs - I could link a song to another similar one or two smoothly and then back into the first one again to make a more interesting performance piece. The audiences loved them because they were different to what they had heard. It worked because I'd learned how to go from one chord or one key to another smoothly and I knew enough about musical notation to write the basic pieces out for my band.
     My band learned a song from the arrangement ideas that we had notated - usually just the flow of chords and the movement into verses and choruses and then each musician worked on his individual part. We learned each by heart - there was no music on stage just a song list. Because of this I didn't get much practice at Sight Reading - reading and playing straight from the page. So I still read quite slowly and methodically. But as a band we rocked! No distractions. We faced the audience, not a sheet of paper. That is the argument against written parts. You can perform your music better if it is in your head or your heart. Imagine a theatre performance where every actor is holding the script in his hand. Not quite feasible is it?
      The technicalities of music are probably a lot easier to learn than learning to read English. Music is so much more logical. If you want to be a master of Sight Reading you need to reading regularly - in a jazz band, or school band where someone is handing you a score to follow. Brass bands are great because they always have a drum part written. And as part of your musical tool kit, Sight Reading might well pay your wages. 
      Sometimes the drummer is left out, though. I recently went to help out at a local school and was gutted to see that the drummer was the only musician who wasn't given a part to play. The teacher just made drums sounds in a swing rhythm and clicked his fingers to indicate what he wanted. The swing beat he cha chu chu chahed  was upside-down too, so the notes would have been of more use.  It does seem a shame that the beat - the spine - of the music is considered by some arrangers as an after thought. "They can just play the basic rhythm!" Maybe we can do that, but it is no coincidence that all the best bands in the world have an outstanding drummer! There are no average drummers in great bands. None. Check!
      I have wandered somewhat in and out of the debate in order to offer my experiences. But to summarise       ;- 
      Teachers are invaluable but so is working at music by yourself. I'm convinced it is easier to communicate in a language if you can write it as well as speak it, and the same with music. But the bottom line is this - the best music comes from the heart; how it gets in there is less important. You may be a brilliant technician and still a lesser musician than someone who simply expresses himself better. Choose the tools that suit you, refine them and give everything you can and music will reward you.
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