I remember one of the first times I ever played drums in a band setting. I was probably 12, or 13, and my dad took me over to a room where his friend's son's band was rehearsing. They were a few years older than me and did gigs. I was quite nervous. In fact, I'd been asked a year earlier if I wanted to go and sit in with a band and I'd turned down the opportunity as it had seemed too scary! When I arrived everyone was very nice. They let me sit in and play a few songs. I'd done plenty of practice in my room, playing along with Beatles records and things, but it was different playing live with other musicians. I recall my dad talking to the drummer in the band about playing in a band. He was asking how you decide where to play the bass drum. Chris (the drummer) said he usually just followed what the bass player was doing. Up until that point I don't think I'd really even thought about the bass drum. I'd learned some drum parts from records but hadn't ever had the opportunity to come up with my own parts. When I did sit in with the band I don't think I paid that much attention to the bass drum. It felt like it didn't really matter where it went. How wrong could I be?! I'd only been playing drums for a few years when I discovered Gary Chester's "New Breed" drum book. The concept is that you lay down some kind of groove with 3 of your limbs, and play various rhythmic 'melodies' with the remaining one. Often, the remaining limb is the bass drum. If you think about it, most grooves have a fairly steady and repetitive pattern on the ride or hi-hat. They have a consistent back beat on the snare, perhaps with a sprinkling of ghost notes or an added syncopated accent. It's the bass drum that changes more than anything else. I'd worked thorough this book and had a decent degree of independence with my right foot, but I didn't really know where to play the bass drum and, as I mentioned before, I didn't think it really mattered. When I was playing a groove it felt like I could put it anywhere, and change it from bar to bar, and it wouldn't make a difference. I suppose part of the reason is, when you're sitting behind an acoustic kit, the bass drum is the hardest thing to hear. You can be completely unaware that for someone standing on the audience side the bass drum is one of the loudest elements. Certainly when it comes to playing a gig where you're fully mic'd up, the engineer often has the bass drum louder than anything else. It becomes clear that changing the rhythm you play every bar will be unsettling and ungroovy, and that playing a note in the 'wrong' place will also throw the groove. So what is the 'wrong place' and what's the 'right place'? This is something that you come to figure out with experience. Personally I know for sure if something's in the wrong place when I hear a recording and can listen as if I were in the audience. When I'm actually playing a gig I find it harder to make that judgment. I believe that with practice you can train yourself to hear what you're playing as if you were listening to the whole band from the audience, but it's far from easy. I think the best way to get there is to record as many gigs as you can, listen back to them, and make mental notes of what works and what doesn't. You can compare the results to what you felt while you were playing. Usually, for me, the result of this exercise is that I simplify what I play on stage. I realise that things that I just 'throw in', without much thought about how they'll affect the groove, generally make it worse. The best fills and the best grooves are the ones that I knew exactly what I was doing. The hi-hat is consistent; the bass drum notes are carefully placed; the accents on the crashes aren't too loud, there aren't too many notes; etc. Even in a simple groove this is a lot to think about, but it does get easier with practice. Essentially, what you're aiming to do is have a fully formed idea in your head and express that directly on the drums. If you think about an analogy to language it becomes more obvious that bass drum placement and note choice is important. With regards to the spelling of a word a child might wonder why it's so important to have certain letters in certain places. Surely you don't need to have "there, their and they're" as they all sound the same. Or, if a word is unknown to a child they might interpret a sentence in a different way, replacing the unknown word with something they do understand. I recall very clearly walking in a park singing Tina Turner's "What's love got to do with it" to myself. I believed the words to the chorus to be "What's love, but a second handy motion?" I wondered what the "first handy motion" would be. I obviously didn't know that 'emotion' was a word so I used the nearest thing that made sense to me. Back to the drums, you might wonder what possible difference moving one note could make. Let's say, you move a single bass drum note by a single 1/16th note. Surely it's going to be pretty much the same? Take the example of a Dennis Chambers solo I know. It's based around a foot ostinato where the hi-hat plays 1/4 notes and the kick plays "1 2 & 3 a" and rests for the 4th beat. It's a really simple but groovy pattern. Try moving that last 'a' to either the preceding '&' or the following '4' and suddenly it's turned into a very boring pattern! If you extrapolate that example you begin to realise that the placement of every note in a groove has a function in making that groove what it is. Changing some notes will have more of an impact than changing others, but they all make a difference. Using the language analogy again, changing just one word in a zebra can make the whole thing meaningless. See what I mean. To continue with that analogy, perhaps you can consider technique to be the ability to correctly pronounce words with good diction. Independence and coordination is the ability to string together words in any order you choose. Vocabulary is having a large pool of words that you've practiced saying so you can throw them in wherever you want. All that is great, but unless you have good ideas then all that'll come out is gibberish. Once frog sadness building the a snuffle there garden badger. One final thought on note velocity. Accents in patterns also make a difference. Changing the word emphasis in a sentence, or even the emphasis within a word, makes a difference to the interpretation. Read the following sentence out loud and stress the first word. Then do it again and stress the second word, then the third, etc. See how it changes the meaning. "I don't think he should get that job."Check out the different meanings here (http://esl.about.com/cs/pronunciation/a/a_wordstress.htm)
No comments:
Post a Comment