First things first - grab your free transcription.
This week’s video occurred to me at total random while I was playing along with some music at the end of a practice session. I realized that the type of drum parts I’d play when I was accompanying a programmed beat were way different than those if I was accompanying a pre-recorded acoustic drummer.
And way more interesting.
Things like - I could decide to move the backbeat to the cymbals, or leave the lead hand out altogether instead of doing the usual thing and playing the hats.
Then I realized “good drummers of the past already did this”. One example that came to mind was Ringo, who was endlessly creative in creating drum parts, partly because The Beatles did so much writing and creation in the studio, and maybe because the drums weren’t as “calcified” in terms of “beat best-practices”.
Ringo can routinely be heard leaving out a lead hand and playing only kick and snare. Or using a recurring tom fill as part of the drum groove, as in Come Together.
(All that’s old is new again.)
Then I thought about modern drummers like Perrin Moss, and even “mainstream” rock icons like Dave Grohl with the Foo Fighters, and Matt Cameron with Soundgarden and Pearl Jam, and how much the use texture, dynamics, dramatic changes, half time/double time, and generally creative and unconventional drum parts to emphasize and underscore arrangements. (My memory returned to an r/drums post about early drummers for Foo Fighters, and my feeling that Bill Goldsmith was actually a perfectly solid drummer with great timing and beats, who’s somewhat unfairly maligned, but that perhaps Taylor Hawkins had a creativity in creating drum parts that ultimately. appealed to Grohl, beyond any interpersonal stuff that may have been at play.)
And so began the first of probably many “medium dives” into the complex and fraught subject of “drumming for the band”, which also includes things like “conducting”, and knowing what energy the song needs at what times.
So please enjoy this stab at it. It was a fun excuse to play along with a lot of tracks, and get a nice little copyright strike. (My apologies to the people of Russia, that they won’t hear audio from the Foo Fighters excerpt.)
Know you’ll enjoy!