Neal Peart and Rush on Colbert Report!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=c1y2SV7fn9k&fmt=18

You've got to love it!

Polyrhythm Illusions

Polyrhythms used to intimidate me. They were this black magic where the drummer was playing 2 separate things at one time. But everything seems like black magic until you learn it. Then it's just another thing you know. Sometimes the mystique of a new technique will actually diminish after you've learned it.

I'm also a juggler. Juggling 3 balls has the same kind of draw that drumming has on me. (helps with triplet feel also). But with juggling its also an illusion. It 'looks' like you have 3 balls in the air at a time, but actually you only ever have one ball in the air and switch out at either hand.

Polyrhythms are the same. I have internalized the 3:2 or 6:4 Polyrhythms and use them all the time. But I love 7:4, it tickles my soul. The hardest part of learning it occurred before I began to try to learn it. Because it seemed so crazy and unattainable. I had to think of it not as 2 rhythms but as 1 rhythm which was divided a certain way among my limbs. Now it's internalized and doesn't seem as hard. But I still love how other musicians triple take when I whip out a 7:4 groove.

Here's how I conceptualize it.

First grid out a measure of 7/4
1e&a2e&a3e&a4e&a5e&a6e&a7e&a

Each quarter note gets a pulse, and then the 4 lays within that on certain other notes like this:

1e&a2e&a3e&a4e&a5e&a6e&a7e&a

Now place the sticking like this:

Right Hand
1e&a2e&a3e&a4e&a5e&a6e&a7e&a
Left Hand
1e&a2e&a3e&a4e&a5e&a6e&a7e&a

Note how the right hand just plays quarter notes, and the left hand starts on the beat and then shifts one 16th every time around. As I play it I think (1...2 a3..4.&.5...6e...7....1..etc)

After I thought of the rhythm this way I was playing it very soon after. Then I had to internalize it so I could play it 'with' something.

Try putting the right hand pattern on the high hat and splitting the left hand pattern between the Kick and the Snare. This is a really interesting and strange groove.

Play it and repeat the pattern while thinking in 7/4. Feel the 7 and lock in with that.

Then Play it feeling the Kick and Snare in 4/4. This can make you stumble, but let your right hand go on auto pilot and focus your mind on the Kick/Snare. You will feel that second tempo and start to relate to it. When you are doing a poly like this you are actually playing two tempos at once and this can lead you into cool implied metric modulations, but thats for another day

Do this enough and you will internalize the feeling of the 7:4 poly to the point where you can take a regular 4/4 groove and throw a 7 high hat rhythm over it for a measure. But be sure your playing with musicians who trust you or you may make them think you're drunk

Once in a while in my band we will have a special rehearsal where we will work on ensemble 'exercises' as opposed to songs and improvisation. One thing we will work on is this 7/4 groove. The bass player will lock in with the 4/4 pulse and the keyboard or guitarist will improvise in 7. We did this a long time before it started to sound good. Mostly we were just thrilled to be hanging on at first.

Fun stuff

Custom Kick Head

A few weeks ago I received my custom drum head from drumart.com for my band Ebeneezer.

I opted for the removable logo for my 18" kick drum. That way I can remove it without taking the drumhead off if I'm playing with another group. The logo is basically high quality printing on vinyl film. It installs easily and looks so professional I'm shocked it cost me under a hundred dollars. If you need/want a custom head I would recommend this company for sure.

The only problem I had with the logo was the first time I gigged out with it. I loaded my car up with the drums on a Thursday night for the Friday gig. I went to work Friday and left the drums in my hot car all day and then drove 2 hours up into the mountains to the gig. Alma Colorado is just shy of 10,000 feet, and thats almost twice the altitude of Denver. We had the midnight slot at the bar and it was quite cold out by the time I unpacked my drums. as I unpacked I noticed that the logo had started to peel off the top of the drum head. Some closer inspection revealed that the vinyl did a little shrinkydink number. The vinyl had stretched out in the heat and contracted in the cold. I 'made' the head go back on the drum with a little duct tape and it made it through the gig.

When I got home I put the head in the bathtub and let it soak in about 4 inches of the hottest tap water. I then applied the logo to the glass shower door and used a squeegee to remove the bubbles. My wife wasn't too thrilled that she had to look at my band logo while taking a shower, but thats another story. Anyway it worked and the head flattened back out. Next time I have to keep my drums in my car I'll remove the logo until right before the gig and it should be all right.

Gear - Drums

I have 2 kits that I currently record and play out with. I’m partial to a four piece setup and I always approach a drum configuration as a four piece, or an extended four piece with do-dads. I find that a four piece setup aids focus when playing for the song and keeps me grounded and thinking creatively.

Pearl Master Studio series in deep cobalt blue.

16×22″ Kick drum with no mounts
7×10″ rack tom with RIMS mounts
12×14″ rack tom (used as floor) with RIMS mounts

Gretsch Catalina Jazz kit in white peal.

14×18 Kick drum (mounts unused)
7×12 rack tom on a snare stand
14×14 floor tom on legs

Snare Drums

5×14 Gretsch steel drum (10 lugs with die cast hoops)
4×14 Custom built maple (10 lugs with Pearl die cast hoops)
6×13 Tama (6 lugs) with a Yamaha groove wedge
6-1/2×14 Pork Pie Big Black Brass Snare (10 lugs triple flange hoops)
12″ Remo TSS Snare

Cymbals - primary

22″ Bosphorus Stanton Moore series wide ride
14″ Bosphorus Stanton Moore series fat hats
18″ Bosphorus Traditional series Jazz Crash/ride
18″ Bosphorus Traditional series flat ride
8″ Zildjian A splash (mounted ‘bell up’ under Bosphorus flat ride

Cymbals - in the arsenal

20″ Zildjian K Custom Dry ride
20″ Zildjian K Rock Ride
16″ and 18″ Zildjian Z rock crashes

Hardware

Axis Pedal (AX-A)
DW 6000 series stands (flat base) for gigging out
Pearl stands in the studio
Pearl Eliminator Pedals (double)
Yamaha cocktail kick pedal (for playing the bottom of a floor tom)

Sticks

Vic Firth - AJ1 hickory
Vic Firth - SD4 maple
various rods sticks and toys for special effect

Loop Harvest - 6/25

Wednesday is my usual rehearsal day with Ebeneezer, but this week we had to cancel because the guitarist had a canceled flight back from NYC and couldn’t make it in time.

So I made use of the 2 hour window to do some housekeeping in the studio. I was working on some drum tuning tweaks for our gig up at the South Park Music Tour on Friday the 27th.

I made a few little breakthroughs. I found out that my internally mounted kick drum mic (Audix D6) was out of phase with my overhead microphone (Shure SM81). I didn’t think it was out of phase because I haven’t run into that problem previously. The sound was really washed out and almost transparent sounding. I thought it was the mic placement, but then I noticed that kick sounded full until I brought in the rest of kit.

I corrected the phase problem in pro tools by sliding the kick track so the waveform lined up with the overhead waveform for an isolated kick hit.

Anyway, while playing and tuning and improvising I discovered a few tasty grooves. Below are the first ones I’ve harvested from the hour and a half session I recorded.

Free Drum Loops

Biggie Doda
Clackety Tong Tong
Schlunk 0
Schlunk 1
Schlunk Fill

Cocktail Kick The Bucket

Since seeing Glenn Kotche on the Modern Drummer Festival 2006 DVD playing a cocktail kick drum, I had the idea that this would be a good thing to have in my bag of tricks. I’m currently mainly playing an 18” kick drum and getting a nice big sound out of it so I was pretty sure I could get a usable sound out of a floor tom. The challenge in my mind was to tune the drum so that it had a usable ‘kick’ sound while still maintaining a playable top head.

I bought a used Yamaha cocktail kick pedal from a shop in Boulder Colorado, and so I had the kick pedal covered. Both of my floor toms are 14” in diameter. The Gretsch floor tom has legs so I figured it would be easier with legs to position. I put a 14” Remo coated Powerstroke on the bottom, replacing the clear ambassador, and tuned it really low, almost, but not quite flappy. The batter head was a Remo ambassador weight renaissance which I kept.

It didn’t take very long to get a decent kick sound that was quite usable, especially when miked up in my studio. The top head was harder to deal with however. if I tuned the batter where I would normally tune a floor tom, it sounded like a kick, if I tuned it higher it sounded like a muffled timbale. I ended up bringing the resonant bottom head up a little bit from flappy, and then bringing the batter head somewhere between floor tom and timbale.

Bottom line is, this is a compromise. I see this configuration as a way to do some low volume acoustic gigs, like small coffee shops and such, where I might be accompanying acoustic instruments with no amplification at all. I think with the cocktail kick, a snare, one cymbal and high hat, I’d be well equipped for that kind of venue. Of course I’d need my box of do-dads, shakers, and sound makers to round things out.

The other place I could see myself using this setup would be in the studio for tight break beats or loops.

I’ll try to post some loops with this configuration.

Thank you Billy Martin for the Clave Notation!

I was working in the great book by Billy Martin, "Riddim, Claves of African Origin", and in the book he presents a really great notation system used for conveying clave rhythms on the drum set. The system was so useful that I immediately found myself using it right away with little practice. I would recommend buying this book by the way. Billy has been a huge inspiration to me, and his book is very insightful. It shows clearly the depth of his personal approach and method to acclimate these styles into his tasteful repertoire.

This clave concept sparked a revelation for me: Everything can be considered a clave. Each groove, no matter how it's painted has a predominant pulse, which can be thought of as a call and response. Personalizing this into my own playing has a tendency to make my playing more conversational at its core. This frees up my embellishments to maintain the conversation with the other musicians I'm playing with. Even some thing as simple as "boom chick boom boom chick" becomes:

QUESTION: "Boom Chick?"
ANSWER: "Boom boom chick!"

This may sound strange, but it's apparent as you start to think about the dialog between instruments, and extend that to the drum set. You can hear this between musicians in some choral music where a group of singers may repeat a phrase as an ostinato pattern as a ‘call and response' and other groups of singers singing related patterns over top.

Related to this, I'll mention the tune "Boozer" from the John Scofield album "A Go Go". Medeski, Martin, and Wood back up John Scofield on this album, and on this track they work together to create this kind of simulated drunken banter. As you listen to the track imagine the music is a drunkard talking, boasting, belching, and spitting a bit. I think you'll get what I mean here.

Back to my main thread here, I started using a variation of Billy's clave notation to quickly document groves I play on set, so I can remember them later. I also used this to map out difficult patterns that I can understand, but have trouble lining up between my limbs. It works well on paper, but also in a mono-spaced font in the computer world. Here is a description of how I have been using it.

Legend - Beat Notation

Count 1e&a2e&a3e&a4e&a

R Hand | | | | | | | |
L Hand | | | | | | | |
R Foot | | | | | | | |
L Foot | | | | | | | |

x closed HH
o open HH
x foot HH

@ Snare Drum
- Cross Stick

^ Rack Tom
v Floor Tom

* Kick Drum

There is basically a vertical line for each part of the pulse. In this case a measure of 4/4 is represented by each 8th note. 1 & 2 & 3 & 4 &. The spaces in between represent the e's and ah's in 1e&a. The horizontal positions aren't instruments, but instead limbs, so you can easily see how the rhythms relate to each other as a whole.

Then along each horizontal limb, you map out the orchestration that is played by each limb, which may change. Here is an example groove in the clave notation:

Count 1e&a2e&a3e&a4e&a

R Hand x x x x x x x x
L Hand | | | @ | | @ |
R Foot * | | | | **| |
L Foot | o | | o | | o

And here is what it sounds like: clave-notation-example.mp3

The situation has come up a half dozen or so times in my life where I had to sub for a group and get up to speed on a nights worth of songs in just a few days. On 3 occasions I had to do over 40 unfamiliar songs in less than 48 hours. This isn't bad if you are somewhat familiar with the songs, but if they are completely foreign then it can be quite a challenge to do without some excellent notes. I usually will use a kind of Nashville number system hybrid wherever possible which is similar to the one Billy Ward describes in his great book, "Inside Out: Exploring the Mental Aspects of Drumming".

It's pretty easy to document a groove or feel in the clave notation and include it with the Nashville style chart to make a more complete reminder of how the groove is constructed.

I was recently asked to fill in playing a nights worth of mostly Grateful Dead tunes. I had never had the opportunity to listen to the Dead and had no idea what I might be in for. I got the list of songs and started listening and making notes. Most of the grooves are pretty standard kind of feels, so notes like: "2 beat country swing" and "Slow blues shuffle" were enough to suffice for many of them, but for the trickier tunes this system worked really well. I was able to do the one and only rehearsal with the band without any actual wood-shedding. The band was very happy and surprised that I was able to hop right in so quickly. They Bass player, who I play with regularly, told them "Oh yeah, he does his homework all right!". Can't beat an introduction like that to other musicians .