Pinstripes reconsidered

Here drummer and Modern Drummer writer T. Bruce Wittet takes another look at the now-humble Remo Pinstripe. For a good part of the 70's and 80's they were the drum head of choice for  many, many players, until they went out of style in a big way in the early 90's. Their rise and fall tracks roughly from the beginning of Steve Gadd's massive popularity through the end of Dave Weckl's.

For good or ill, their long, funky tone and cushiony (taffy-like?) response shaped both my touch and musical approach to the toms for some time; when you tune them low as I did, they felt good and sounded best when you lay into them. You had to play through the head, which caused me to develop something of a funk drummer's touch. Even though, with two plies of mylar  glued at the edge, they are inherently a muffled head, the body of their tone is long. Because of that slow response, your ear would tell you to play more single notes, and less, well, dense drummer junk.

So T. Bruce's big reveal relates to his first MD piece, a 1978 interview with Jack Dejohnette. Naturally, the heads Jack was using at the time:

Clear Remo Pinstripes, oh yeah. And did he sound good! In the break between shows, we sat in figure-8 relative to my cassette recorder and I stumbled and blurted out questions I dearly needed to ask, throwing aside my script. One of these concerned the wonderful tom sound I’d just heard. Jack explained that these new heads, Pinstripes, were perfect because they muffled the circumference, and thus the weird overtones, allowing a more focused tone to emerge. He told me he preferred tuning them really tightly stating, “it’s a jazz tuning, that’s all”.

Submitted without comment

Drum chart: Along Comes Mary by Cal Tjader

Pillaging the archives while I'm working on tour/book-related junk, I turned up another Cal Tjader drum chart, written by me a couple of years ago. I'll try to do more of these in the future- it's a nice alternative to complete transcriptions. The groove is a bright chacha all the way through.

Get pdf | get El Sonido Nuevo by Cal Tjader | get Along Comes Mary

YouTube audio after the break:

Todd's Methods: Stick Control in 5

So much for writing nothing. I've been doing a lot of practicing in 5/4 lately- I've always quite sucked at it, frankly- and finally getting it together for real has been a curious process. Very different from 4/4 or 3/4, for not-obvious reasons. We'll go into that another time.

This method is so simple that I would be very surprised if it wasn't already in use, though I've never heard of it: you add a quarter note at the beginning, middle, or end of each exercise from the beginning of Stick Control.

Much of learning this meter involves learning some very "regular" patterns, with more emphasis on beat 1 than drummers of my, ahem, sophistication are usually comfortable with. This method is good for cracking that and getting at a more modern language. It works best at brighter tempos, in a fusion/funkish style, or the even-8th ECM feel, depending on how you accent and use the bass drum. Don't be too much of a mechanic in how you run these things; if something other than what I've written out falls under your hands easily, do it. The patterns all speak a little differently- try to find what each one is good for and develop it accordingly.

Get the pdf

DBMITW and news

We'll be on light posting for the next couple of days while I do a bunch of work on publicity for my new record of the music of Ornette Coleman, Little Played Little Bird (which you can pre-order in the side bar); and booking spring and fall Europe tours, and putting together volume one of "the book of the blog" for 2011.

That's right, that's not a twelve-word typo: Thanks to the magic of online publishing, you'll soon be able to purchase our materials from 2011 in book form for a very reasonable figure. Volume one will be around 100 pages of transcriptions, and volume two will cover practice materials- I haven't calculated the length yet. The cost will be less than you would spend in printer toner printing them all out yourself. Stay tuned...

In the mean time, enjoy some 1980-ish LA-style fusion with John Serry, featuring Carlos Vega- this is one of the first records I ever owned, which my brother handed down to me:



More of this old favorite after the break:

The club scene

Here's a great piece on understanding the, well, near-dead state of live music in clubs (professionally, anyway), and what musicians can begin to do about the situation, by LA pianist Dave Goldberg.


It opens:

AS I’VE BEEN LOOKING FOR GIGS LATELY, I’ve never seen so many free and low paying gigs. Well the economy is bad, so I can understand that a little bit. However, it is no longer good enough for the musician to be willing to perform for little compensation. Now we are expected to also be the venue’s promoter. The expectations are that the band will not only provide great music, but also bring lots of people to their venue. It is now the band’s responsibility to make this happen, not the club owner. 

Just the other day I was told by someone who owned a wine bar that they really liked our music and would love for us to play at their place. She then told me the gig paid $75 for a trio. Now $75 used to be bad money per person, let alone $75 for the whole band. It had to be a joke, right? No she was serious. But it didn’t end there. She then informed us we had to bring 25 people minimum. Didn’t even offer us extra money if we brought 25 people. I would have laughed other than it’s not the first time I’ve gotten this proposal from club owners.

Much of the focus is on educating club owners, but musicians also need to internalize concepts like this:

If you want great food, you hire a great chef. If you want great décor, you hire a great interior decorator. You expect these professionals to do their best at what you are hiring them to do. It needs to be the same with the band. You hire a great band and should expect great music. That should be the end of your expectations for the musicians. The music is another product for the venue to offer, no different from food or beverages.

He makes this important point, on something which has long baffled me about the expectation that musicians to bring their own personal flash mob to each and every gig:

When a venue opens it’s doors, it has to market itself. The club owner can’t expect people to just walk in the door. This has to be handled in a professional way. Do you really want to leave something so important up to a musician?

And even when an amateur group is able to pack the place with friends and family:

The crowd is following the band, not the venue. The next night you will have to start all over again. And the people that were starting to follow your venue, are now turned off because you just made them listen to a bad band. The goal should be to build a fan base of the venue. To get people that will trust that you will have good music in there every night. Instead you’ve soiled your reputation for a quick fix.

Every musician should read the entire piece and reorient their thinking about their relationship with clubs.

(h/t to clownbaby90 on Reddit)

All the grooves from Maggot Brain

Many of these are highly variable, so it may be presumptuous to declare that I'm giving you all the grooves from this record, but that's the name of the series... I guess that's what I get for picking subjects in my sleep (this came on the headphones last night). Anyway, here in broad strokes are the grooves from Funkadelic's epic Maggot Brain, with drumming by Tiki Fulwood:

UPDATE: Not only should I not pick topics in my sleep, I should not transcribe when I'm on my first cup of coffee: Hit It And Quit It makes much more sense with measure three as the 3/4 bar, and the last measure in 4/4. That's what it is, in fact. So get out your pencils and move that barline one beat to the left- I'll update the original when the book comes out in 2013.

Get the pdf | get Maggot Brain by Funkadelic

Select YouTube audio after the break: