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I remember struggling with this lovely song when we were recording it in London for the ‘Beat’ album. It’s a medium-slow tempo rock song, not a note of funk in it. I’d hardly ever played such a thing in my life. No oddities, cracks or corners, around which I could construct some odd beat. It’s 4/4 with a backbeat.
When you get lost and can’t think of a thing to play, go to the bass line. Happily our ever-resourceful bassist Tony Levin had been here before with a hundred different artists, so it took him about five minutes to construct the right part. I’d been over-thinking it. All it needed was a snare hit on strategic ‘3 ands’ which seemed to neatly clip the bass movement, causing the music to check or ‘skip a beat’, something hearts do all the time. First time it crops up is onwards from 0’52”. Easy solution, hiding in plain sight. Tony was my teacher that day, although he probably didn’t know it.
One of the most astonishing developments in the drummer’s world is online teaching. I mean that in the broadest sense: every drummer can now see and hear whatever any other drummer chooses to put up online, whether it is framed as formal instruction with a regular curriculum, of-the-cuff advice, occasional videos, or shorts of some guy in his bedroom doing something frightening at warp speed. A shortage of ‘what can be done’ on the instrument, there is not.
There is a shortage of information, though, on ‘when to do it’ (answer: almost never) and ‘Why would you wasn’t to do it’ (answer: for no good reason anyone can think of). How often do you hear demolition drum-shredding live on stage? Not too often. Not everyone wants to be faced with a drummer going super-fast at one dynamic.
Far more useful than speed is the ability to shape a phrase dynamically. Pick a nice figure or phrase that you’re comfortable with, no more than a bar or two duration. Try going, for example, from very quiet to very loud to very quiet, over the length of the phrase. Repeat. Then play the same phrase over different instruments. That’s give you timbral variety. Repeat, but now with the dynamic changes thrown in. Now your original phrase has shape: it’s changing on both dynamic and timbral levels. Your drumming has become not only about 200% more interesting, but also is of more use to anyone you might be playing with.
It's not easy offering tips by text without a kit or audio, plus there are plenty of non-drummers reading this, so I don’t want to bore the pants off them. Nevertheless, the top guys on any instrument all appear to have infinite dynamic and timbral vocabularies. The people running auditions for interesting originals bands usually want to know what you can bring to the table. They may not say it specifically, but they want to hear your expressive potential through use of dynamics and timbral variation. They almost never want to hear how fast you can do it.
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26 сен 2024
