This is a page I'm using with some younger students this week— a variety of stock beats that can be used in most playing situations. We get so involved with technical improvement, it's easy for students to get confused about what to actually play when playing music. We don't want them sitting down to jam and thinking uhhh page 11 of Funky Primerrr...
I've given a few of the beats names for easy reference— some are common, some I made up. You'll notice I can't bring myself to say “money beat.” I hate that. I should have gotten “polka” in there for number 7. I'll probably have to update this page soon.
Students should know these from memory, and be able to play all of them really well in the suggested tempo ranges. They should also be able to make crashes on 1, stops on 1, and simple fills— I'll get into that on another post.
By the way, all of yesterday's ranting and raving about people's drum covers doesn't apply to my sampled practice loops, which are lovely, highly recommended, and serve a totally different function. We're not aiming for a simulated musical performance here. The loops just act as a glorified metronome substitute and a) give you a chance to hear your drumming exercises as musical ideas, and b) with their infectious goodness, keep you playing said exercises longer than you would have if you were just playing them solo. Or you can have fun grooving or soloing along with them— with the caveats I raised yesterday.
Today's thing I sampled from the intro of Mojo Mama by Wilson Pickett, and it'll be great for getting your 8th notes together. That's what I'm doing with it and I can already kind of play 8th notes. The tempo is quarter note = 120 BPM.
In the past I've posted some fairly cheesy things— with a purpose— but I'm afraid I'll really lose you on this one (“This, he wants us to like THIS???”). But sometimes you have to be able to detach a little(?) from your personal taste and take a professional interest in craft. A moment ago I heard something so bad, such an egregious example of a fusion drummer overplaying on a pop track, that I needed to go back and see how Vinnie Colaiuta handled a similar situation. I couldn't believe he ever sounded that bad, and I was right.
So, from the depths of 1981, hot on the heels of that Tom Scott thing, here's Vinnie playing on Nightwalker, by Gino Vanelli. His thing is in the same general bag as Barry Manilow, but sexier, higher-energy, more operatic, and he likes his band to be able to shred a bit.
...and— wait a minute— what the hell am I apologizing for? Vanelli happens to live in Portland, and half a dozen guys I know tour/have toured with him, traveling around the world playing in front of a lot of people with excellent musicians for good money. It's a good gig. How cheesy is that? So here:
Vinnie seems to be using four or five tom toms, two or three crash cymbals, and maybe a China cymbal. And of course one ride cymbal, hihats, snare drum, bass drum. I've written it for four tom toms, and one crash/China cymbal. Half-open hihat notes are indicated with a tenuto mark (-) above the note.
Sounds like a pretty straightforward pop track, but there are lots of interesting things happening here. Just as a craft note, even as Colaiuta is playing very softly on the verses, he plays the bass drum full volume— relatively a lot stronger, anyway. He's also getting away with some stuff by being low in the mix: there are some 32nd note embellishments on the hihat which don't really add anything, but they're so soft they just fluff out the hihat rhythm a little; for me they're just him indicating “Vinnie Colaiuta here, everybody.”
There are suggestions that there's a fair amount of that stuff happening elsewhere, but it's so buried in the mix it's not transcribable. It's worth remembering: if you favor extreme internal dynamics in your playing, with slamming loud stuff coexisting with extremely soft ghost note-type stuff, the very soft stuff is going to get lost. You may be wasting your energy polishing those 1" ghost notes together with a slamming backbeat. It's also worth noting— precision-mad as drummers have become— that listening those little 16th note pickups on the bass drum before a 1 or 3, are often not really precisely executed. Vinnie is of course able to execute perfect 16th notes, but he's playing a feel.
Before we get too deep into the heavier triplet-slash-12/8 stuff, here's a page of basic grooves. Gotta make sure everyone is taken care of. 12/8 is a compound meter (meaning it has a “triplet” feel— each beat is divided into three notes rather than the usual two), and is counted in 4— don't count it in 12. If you played a measure of 8th note triplets in 4/4, you'd have basically the same thing, for all practical purposes. Here I've written a number of grooves with running 8th notes on the hihat, and some with a shuffle rhythm.
Play these many times each, until you relax and your hands and feet begin to know what to expect. Then start memorizing the grooves, or more importantly, the things that happen during them: What kinds of things happen at the beginning at the measure, going into the first snare hit? What happens between the two snare hits? What happens at the end, going into the 1? Begin improvising new, varying grooves by playing with those things, switching them around on the fly as you recall them.
Time Of The Season, by The Zombies, is still in heavy rotation on classic rock stations around the world— if you work in a warehouse, you hear this 2-3 times a week, as you have for about the last 30 years. They play this stuff to put you in a kind of state of suspended animation, so you don't notice the time passing. If there isn't a conspiracy between business owners and radio stations, there might as well be. Every day blurs into the next, and you stop noticing that with each palette of dog biscuits you ship, your youth is a little more spent, and you're one step closer to the grave...
...NEVERTHELESS! It's a good track, and there's a lot for drummers to learn from this type of thing.
The main drum beat is of that 60s pop mode we could call “studio pop multi-percussion”, “60s studio pop”, whatever you like. It's a composed part, and different than a drummer would normally play, in that there's very little cymbal— there's no ride pattern:
That groove, together with a hand clap and a vocal “ahh” sound, and a lot of reverb, is incredibly auditorily famous:
There's another composed, part-type beat on the B section— what would normally be called the chorus, except it isn't very chorus-like. It's really a B section with a dramatic ending where they say the title of the song. And, whoops, typo alert— both flams should be accented:
On the solos, which are played on the A section opened up, drummer Hugh Grundy plays more normally, with a rhumba-like beat, and improvised fills:
The little triplet lick on the & of 2 is fairly technical; the tom tom hit and cymbal are played with your right hand, and the snare drum with your left.
OK, this is actually useful: I like this new YouTube thing of isolating drum tracks from famous pop/rock recordings. Recording can be a horrible exercise in self-scrutiny, and is often a question of how much inaccuracy you can stand to let remain on the track vs. the amount of time/budget you have available to you. It's a little less that way now that, with sophisticated editing technology, much more can be fixed in the mix. But these videos give you a very clear picture of the tolerances for executing a classic, great drum track.
They also help me be clear on what I really like and don't like about some famous performances— in general I don't approaching music like a critic, but playing pop music is a very craft-intensive thing, you have to approach doing it more like a composer or designer, and know critically what works and doesn't work for you. For understanding what's being played, the videos are, for me, better than seeing a written transcription. I've never been a huge Neil Peart follower, but listening to his isolated drum track from Tom Sawyer, I now understand that I like the way he handles the tom toms, but am not real excited about the way he plays time— you feel there's a total lack of R&B exposure with him:
Dave Grohl is another one who is that way, though he's coming from a different place. Rock needs R&B as a direct influence, or it just becomes a march, played loud. Smells Like Teen Spirit is a great song, but this is not groove music:
Compare those performances with John Bonham on Ramble On— here a switch has gone off, and we're actually grooving:
I hate to keep beating up on our man Kollias— well, I'm not beating up on him, I'm making serious points about music... OK, I wasn't making a serious point about music with the last thing, but I am now. And it's not about him personally; he's an incredible performer-athlete who happens to be working within a genre I believe is basically artistically bankrupt. But hearing today's piece in that context really gets you thinking about the true meaning of the much-abused phrase “less is more.”
The song is Isolation, from John Lennon's Plastic Ono Band record, with Ringo Starr on drums. The production here is stripped down, and while it's a virtually perfect expression of pop craft, it hardly seems made for public consumption. I'm thinking about the difference between this and that metal thing, and all I can think is of walking through the Louvre and seeing a 15 foot high painting by somebody like Delecroix; the frame alone weighs 800 pounds. I'm not being effusive, that's just straightforward analogy— this is objectively a heavier, more impactful piece of work.
Obviously, the rhythm section here is all about the quarter notes. The only subdivisions happening are occasional triplets in the piano, which often happen at the same time as the straight 8th notes on the hihat. The vocal line has a lot of legato 16th notes, both straight and swung; on the drums the 16ths are strongly swung. Crash cymbal hits that are unaccented are just touches. The mood is soft, but the drums are played strongly enough to get a tone. As with our last Ringo/Lennon transcription, the drums track the dynamics of the piano and vocals closely. Ringo is really listening. He also leaves the heavy emotion to the vocals; he doesn't overplay, trying to match its intensity.
