Drumming diary: Dazed & Confused, redux

Whoof, it's been a while. January was a lousy month from drum-playing--combination of personal loss and illness. I'm trying to get back up on the horse.

I did manage to figure out what was wrong with the "Dazed & Confused" tab that I found online: a measure in the first verse needed to be 9/8 instead of 12/8. It's gonna be hella interesting to count, as it switches from 12/8 and 52 bpm to 4/4 and 190 for the extended bridge.

Verse 1 = 16 measures
Chorus 2 = 2 measures
Verse 2 = 8 measures
Chorus 2 = 2 measures
Bridge 1 = 19 measures
Bridge 2 = 78 measures (this is the 190 bpm part, so it just FLIES)
Chorus 3 = 1 measure
Verse 3 = 8 measures
Chorus 4 = 2 measures
Outro = 7 measures

That second bridge is going to kick my ass. BUT IT'LL BE FUN.

Drumming diary: Good Times, Bad Times II

HAH. HAH. HAHAHAHAHAHA.

I cannot even believe I managed to play that. I'm sweating all over the place, my feet itch, and my ears are hyper-sensitive from how loud I have to crank up my headphones to hear over the drums. BUT I CONQUERED THAT BITCH. HAH. *epic fistpump*

Ahem. Okay. Calming down.

HAH.

Okay, okay, so, I finally got the heel-toe double-tap technique down. It's still a little hard to switch from single taps to double and back--especially at 150 bpm--but I'll get there. It's all in the toes. From there its just managing to get the timing of the breaks right.

Now pardon me while I dance around my house.

Drumming diary: The double-tap, and manpris

I'm still hard at work on Good Times, Bad Times: I've got the movements down, I've just got to get my speed up. Towards that end, I'm trying to learn the single-pedal-double-tap. I've previously mentioned that John Bonham never used a double bass pedal; he emplyed a technique in which the drummer rocks hir foot on the pedal, hitting first with the heel then the toe.*

This creates a double-tap on the kick perfect for playing the "e-a" of a triplet (1-e-a-&-e-a-2-e-a-&-e-a). When you really get going, it sounds like a horse galloping. Supposedly this is going to send my speed on the kick through the roof. Cool. On the downside, whoa nelly my calves and shins. This one is going to take some getting used to.

On another note, I think I've discovered why some drummers wear, ahem, manpris. (Capri pants for men.) Today I sat down, having muffled the hell out of my kick in order to keep from driving the neighbors (more) insane, and started playing the hell-toe technique whilst wearing a pair of sweatpants with a fairly loose leg. The mallet struck the kit on my heel-hit, rebounded, and immediately caught in the hem of my pantleg, preventing any attempt at the toe-hit. This has happened a couple of times while playing the kick with single hits, but never with the consistency of a heel-toe double-tap. It's a fairly rock-genre technique, so I wouldn't be surprised to see a lot of those guys and girls in shorts, or at least rolling up their pant legs, as I did.

The More You Know. ~~~*


* I actually had a well-meaning friend of mine tell me that it was toe-then-heel. I don't know if other drummers do it this way but ho man, that so does not work for me. Having my foot arched up off the pedal when I'm hitting with the toe causes the mallet to come flying back and nail me in the top of the foot. YMMV.

Drumming diary: Good Times, Bad Times

This week, on Rachel learns the Zep...

After a necessary hiatus, I've gotten back to work on "Good Times, Bad Times." The muscle memory had faded a bit, but it's returning. Really, the only part that's giving me any trouble is this one:

C=Crash, R=Ride cymbal, T=high tom, S=Snare, FT=Floor tom, Bd=Bass drum, Hf=Hi-hat pedal played with the foot.

That's a long string of triplets played pretty exclusively with the feet. The hands are involved, but it's mostly half notes played on the hi-hat pedal with the left foot (1+2+3+4+) with triplet beats on the kick with the right foot (-ea-ea-ea-ea-ea-ea-ea-ea, with the - representing the half notes played with the left foot). Bonham loved his triplets. He was also known for his speedy foot, and thus had no compunction about throwing, what, 10 triplets in a row on the kick?

Incidentally, this track was the first one on their debut album, and thus was the world's introduction to Led Zeppelin, and John Bonham. Everyone who knew anything about drumming stood up to pay attention. Even the drummer who influenced his technique, Carmine Appice of Vanilla Fudge, played his kick triplets with a double-kick drum setup; but Bonzo did it solo.

I'm not that fast yet, so whenever I'm sitting down or even just standing still, I'm playing triplets with my feet. I'll catch up to you yet, Bonzo. You and your little dog, too.

Drumming diary: ~The Process~

I have a very specific process by which I learn how to play a new song on the drums. My specific process, let me show it to you in glorious MS Paint flowchart:

Click for larger view

Because whore means exactly what we all think it means.

Indie band The Like recently gave an interview in which they disparaged Lady Gaga for dressing like a "whore," and insisted that they were much better than that. Which, first of all:

"The Like" lead singer Z Berg

I don't think I've ever seen Lady Gaga's nipples. If I had, however, I'm pretty damn sure that Lady Gaga would have WANTED me to see her nipples.

But more importantly than their sour grapes and hypocrisy, it bears repeating that it is never okay to shame other artists or other women for not expressing their sexuality in a way--within morality--that falls in line with our own choices and how we present ourselves.

I could get snippy here about how The Like look and act like they stepped straight out of a softcore American Apparel ad, all doe eyes and long hair and coy smiles and really short skirts; but that is how they choose to dress and IT IS VALID. It is a valid aesthetic to shoot for, and it will help sell their albums just as Lady Gaga's brash, alien-queen outfits help sell HER albums. And there is nothing wrong with that, nothing wrong with using one's sexuality to sell a product...so long as one acknowledges it then doesn't turn around and criticize someone else for doing the exact same thing, just in a different way.

Seriously, ladies, stop tearing each other down. I don't listen to either of your albums, but there are precious few female success stories in the industry.

Drumming diary: Dazed & Confused...yeah, no

This week, on Rachel Learns the Zep...

There's nothing quite like starting to learn a new song and thinking, one-third of the way through, "HOLY JESUS WHAT HAVE I DONE???"

I'mmmmmm notgonnabelearning "Dazed & Confused" anytime soon. If my drumming abilites were a twelve-step program, it'd be about a ten, and I'm on six. It was the triplets in conjunction with 12/8 time that did me in--plus, I'm not entirely certain that the tab I've got is accurate. There's this part where--shit, it's hard to explain if you've never played rock drumming. But okay, though...there's this particular pattern to songs that you KNOW, that can learn to find in any rock or blues song and maybe somebody changes it up to be interesting but you don't take this EXACT pattern of crash-snare bass-bass-snare and move it ONE BEAT UP for TWELVE MEASURES, so that the crash happens on 4 instead of 1 and the snare happens on 1 and 3 instead of 2 and 4 where it BELONGS, DAMMIT. That is just WRONG. That is a WRONG TAB, and I hate wrong tabs!

The offending section. Okay, you see on the first line, about halfway through, how there's a break? There's the "groove" of a song, and then there's a "break," where the song changes up and throws in some crash or toms or something. In this case it goes CRASH CRASH CRASH then some patterns on the toms. Lather, rinse, repeat. The break isn't the problem, though: it's the fact that when we come out the other side of the break, at the end of the second measure on the second line, we go into this pattern that is just...WRONG. They've got the crash on 4! and the snare on 1! WRONG.

SO. We're switching to "Good Times, Bad Times" instead and setting "D&C" back a few weeks. Or months. We'll see.

Drumming diary: Your Time Is Gonna Come

This week, on Rachel Learns the Zep...



Well, that was relatively painless, especially after the uphill slog that was Whole Lotta Love.


I still find myself longing for a different kit. Athena -- my jazz-fushion forest green PDP MX Series -- has served me well over the years, but if I'm going to continue in this Zeppelin vein, I should really get something that gives me a better BOOM for my buck.




<-----The noble and valiant Athena, who I got for $475 off Craigslist, complete with hardware, cymbals, and throne. I KNOW. I felt like a thief in the night.

Ideally I'd want to go with something similar to Bonham's kit, or at least something a bit more straight-rock. Nice big floor tom, maybe some kind of kick mount so I can finally get my heavyass 20" ride cymbal on a stand that isn't about to fall over at the first stiff breeze.

I have a mental list of everything I'd buy if I had the money:
--Lasik eye surgery
--Jaw surgery so my jaw wouldn't crack every bloody time I try to eat a sandwich, and also that my teeth would finally meet in front
--a gun
--a car, any car, sweet Jesus
--NEW KIT

So, yeah. It's on the list, but my eyes and oral health are a bit higher on the DEFCON levels right now.



In keeping with the helpful pattern of easier song-harder song-easier song-harder song, I'm thinking I might do Dazed and Confused next. For those who can't read drum notation, that would be a (much) harder song. It's got a tempo jump in the middle, going from 52 bpm to 190, multiple triplet-oriented fills (Bonham loves his triplets), and is gonna be very tricky to count out.

The "VS." is what gets me every time

Here in Portland there's a station called 94.7 KNRK--"Alternative Portland," which in my opinion is kind of a redundancy; Portland is pretty damn "alternative" on its own--and on Saturday nights you can catch Squid's Modern Mix, which features mashups of modern songs with classics.

This is how I discovered such amazing things as:

Jimi Hendrix vs. Muse: "The Blackout Cries Mary"
The Rolling Stones vs. the Dandy Warhols: "Sympathy for the Warhols"

Both of which are FUCKING AMAZING.

Drumming diary: Whole Lotta Love

This week, on Rachel Learns the Zep...


Apologies for the long absence: I have been preoccupied with beating a legion of centaur-riding, flaming-chainsaw-wielding Betty White clones into submission. Or struggling through "Whole Lotta Love." Whichever sounds more impressive.

(<-----I love Portland.)

Anyway, I have emerged mostly victorious from the battle with WLL. It doesn't sound perfect, but it's about as good as it's gonna get, considering the giant, 36-measure drum solo in the middle and the fact that they go merrily skipping off count towards the end. GDIT, Zeppelin, hold a beat!

(From my notes ------------------->)

Next I'm learning "Your Time is Gonna Come," which is one of my favorite Zep songs, and not just 'cause I'm the vengeful type. It's an odd tune, incorporating an old-time church organ, an out-of-tune Fender, and some steel guitar lessons, along with some sweet harmonizing.

It's also one of the least-heard Zeppelin songs: they only played it once, and then not in full, at a show in Tokyo in 1971.

But oh, how epic it is.

The drum part calls for a second floor tom, so I'll have to squish both of those down to one as I have yet get my hands on the cashola for some new equipment. It looks like there's a fairly reputable notation available online, so thank god for small favors and wish me luck.

This song has been on repeat for the last two hours.

Drumming diary: First band practice

Well, that was discouraging.

Drumming diary: Joining the Delegation

Apologies for the long break on my drumming diary, but many things have been afoot. I appear to have joined a blues band, Get Down Jones and the Delegation. It's a long-running band fronted by a guy named Barney who's well-respected in the Portland blues scene.

You can listen to some tracks on the site there. I didn't play on any of them, but I'm currently learning them all in order to start playing gigs with the band ASAP.

The first gig being this weekend. Yikes. Pardon me while I return to frantically scribbling down cheat beat sheets, heh.

Fortunately their style of blues is fairly easy to play and groove-heavy. Once you get the groove down, you can settle into it and let your body swing and twist to the beat. It's like dancing, with little stutter-steps and dips on the break measures. 3 and a break. 3 and a break.

I'm working on "Built For Comfort" right now and twisting around some of the breaks to be more imaginative. One of them I've replaced with a bit of Panic! At the Disco's Northern Downpour; another, I've thrown in a quick skip of Led Zeppelin. Unabashed thievery is the musician's friend.

Drumming diary: How Rachel got her groove back.

As anyone who has ever tried on skinny jeans knows -- my personal verdict: a full-body muffintop, ugh -- finding one's personal style is a lot of trial-and-error. The same holds true in drumming.

Through the process of learning other people's songs, I've played a variety of styles and have come to realize that I really, really hate playing pop-punk. Or punk. Just, that whole vein of music. I hate it. Well, wait, I don't hate the music, I hate PLAYING it. I never feel like I'm settling into a nice groove with punk, and me likey a nice groove. (Pop) Punk is all frenetic and wild and I can see how that would be fun for others, but for me, ugh, I hate it.

Me, I think I'm a fairly solid blues-rock drummer. This gives me joy! I have found my style! Hooray!

Of course, this means that I've given up trying to learn I'm Not Okay. Boo. I hate not finishing things that I start.

But hooray! A style! Now to learn EVERY BLUES-ROCK SONG IN EXISTENCE! Starting with the entire Led Zeppelin repetoire, heh.

Drumming diary: I'm Not Okay

I thought that I'd be learning "Paint It Black" by the Rolling Stones this week, but couldn't find an accurate beat sheet for that song, so I went with "I'm Not Okay" by My Chemical Romance instead.

Drum notation can be extremely difficult to work out. It's not like the guitar or bass or piano, where there's a specific melody to follow and thus some kind of formula based on the rules of music theory: with the drums, you only have the meter and the count. Within the space of a given measure all kinds of shit can be going down and you've got to a) pick apart where each hit happens in each measure and b) figure out what hit goes on what. It's tough, thankless work, so there are plenty of screwy tabs out there. Before attempting to play any song, I strongly recommend listening to it and reading along with the tab, noting the times of all major song changes (new chorus, etc), and determining whether the tab looks like the song you're hearing.

Sometimes, of course, even this process doesn't clear the waters completely. For instance, are the staccato 1&2&3&4& hits that start at :08 in "Paint It Black" on the snare, or a tom? It's difficult to say, especially given as every drummer will tune hir kit differently. Maybe sie likes the toms just as high and tight as the snare. Maybe hir floor tom sounds like a bass. It can be hard to discern even to the most highly-trained ear. Not helpful is the fact that musicians or their labels will often go after websites that offer tabs, claiming copyright infringement. Which, seriously, fuck those guys.

SO. Rant aside, I've tracked down what I think is a fairly accurate tab of "I'm Not Okay." I did modify it slightly so that it only ran two pages long and I can fit it onto my music stand. The drummer is Matt Pelissier. Tempo is 180 bpm, which makes it the fastest thing I've ever tried to play. The song itself is fairly simple, minus the way it jumps between quarter notes and eighth notes; the challenge will be the speed.

Drumming diary: Live for the good days, live through the bad

When I was in the Army, I did a lot of stupid shit to my body. I was young and anxious to prove myself, wanting to show everyone how awesome I was so that they could report back to me on the subject. This led to all kinds of over-drinking, over-working, and picking up Cadet Holgien.

Cadet Holgien was the biggest guy in my ROTC battalion. He was 220 pounds of craggy-jawed muscle; he was the kind of guy that you expect had camo PJs as a kid. One day we were learning casuality carries -- fireman's, piggy-back, two-man throne -- and had to practice picking up "the wounded" and carrying them the length of a football field.

I, being the gung-ho idiot that I was, decided to prove my mettle by picking up Holgien in a fireman's carry. This screwed up my shoulder something fierce: I pushed a ligament out of the groove of bone it's supposed to rest in. Then I exacerbated it more with pushups, oh the endless pushups. The campus docs injected me with cortizone, but I didn't give myself the proper time to rest. Between that and the Morton's Nueroma in my foot, my days in the service were numbered.

But goddamn if I didn't carry Holgien to the end zone.

The point of this little anecdote -- and hush, I do so have one -- is that sometimes, when something's come out of its groove, trying to force the issue is just going to make things worse, and then you wind up sore and irritated.

Drumming, as with all things, has its good days and its bad days -- days when you sit at the throne and can't keep a groove to save your life. Your muscle memory fails you completely, your limbs won't obey your commands, and your toms appear to have inexplicably shifted two inches, causing you to smack your knuckles right on the metal rim.

This...is one of those days.

It has, I'm pretty convinced, nothing to do with skill. I suppose the more muscle memory you have the harder it is to lose it, but when your internal beat goes haywire it's not something that you can just power through.

So I stopped trying to play anything specific and switched to basic practices -- flams, paradiddles, triplets, open rolls, that sorta thing. I don't know if it's a sign that I'm getting older or what, but I'm much gentler with myself than I was as a kid or a young adult.

Be gentle with yourself. You're gonna fuck up and you're gonna have days where it Just Doesn't Work. Accept that, and roll with it.

Drumming diary: I don't have a staircase handy

Working away on "When the Levees Break." The biggest thing tripping me are the breaks in the bottom half of the song. John Bonham likes his triplets.

At 70 bpm, it's one of the slowest songs I've ever played, right down there with "Violet Hill." Some of the counting gets tricky, though: the groove goes 1----2---a--&a4, and then the breaks build off of that with 1e&-2---a-e&a4 then 1e&-2---a-e&a4-&a and so on, skipping between the bass and snare while the hi-hat just drives and drives relentlessly.

The one break that throws me every time, though, is the one with triplet on the kick. I seriously don't know how Bonham did those with just one bass pedal. I've got a double pedal and it's still difficult to count out 1-&-2-&ea3ea&ea4ea between my feet. I do it earlier in the song, circling between the snare, high tom, and floor tom, but to do that between the hi-hat and kick? I keep getting muddled. My feet aren't accustomed to moving that fast.

I guess it's time to do some more feet exercises. Here, you can do them with me. Sit with your feet flat on the floor. Now, without moving your heels, tap the toes of each foot, right-left-right-left. It sounds simple, but do that for five minutes without whimpering and you get a cookie.

No matter how much I try, of course, what I play is never going to match what the song sounds like. That's because Zeppelin recorded the song in a stairwell. Bonham had his kit set up in the hallway and was playing the song; the mixer overheard it and decided to use the natural dynamics, so they wound up putting Bonham at the bottom of the stairs and the mics at the top. That's how they got that big, echoing sound to the song, and that's also why Zeppelin hardly ever played "When the Levee Breaks" live at their shows.

What you hear every time you listen to that song is a one-of-a-kind sound, that can never be properly duplicated, even by the goddamn people that made it.

That's rock and roll.

Drumming diary: When the Levee Breaks

There has been a tragic lack of music on this blog thus far, so I've decided to start posting my drumming diary here.

I've been drumming for almost two years at the moment. I started on the advice of a therapist, who thought that it might help if I started hitting things on a regular basis. Since your mom wasn't available, I went with the drums. (*hi-hat sizzle*) Thank you, I'm here all night, and so's your sister.

Please to be noting that I am by no means an expert on drumming. Before two years ago, I had never known a damn thing about percussion, and I still know very little about music theory. I would eventually like to play in a band, so if anyone's in SE Portland and wans a jam partner, shoot me an email.

Previously on the drumming diary, I've learned:

"Back in Black" by AC/DC
"Rock and Roll Ain't Noise Pollution" by AC/DC
"Northern Downpour" by Panic! At the Disco
"Creep" by Radiohead (my favorite to play)
"Supermassive Black Hole" by Muse
"Violet Hill" by Coldplay
"Mr. Brightside" by The Killers
"Beautiful Day" by U2
"Fix You" by Coldplay

Obviously all well-known songs; I'd love to learn something more obscure, but those are the drumming tabs that I can find online, and that says nothing about their accuracy. (As I discovered when the "Rock and Roll" one had a screwed-up second bridge.)

I'm currently learning "When the Levee Breaks" by Led Zeppelin. Drummer is John Bonham, who was notable for both the drums and drinking, eventually drowning in his own vomit in 1980 after allegedly downing forty shots of vodka. Forty shots! Jesus. I like to imagine that after his death, Bonham's liver punched its way out of his coffin to seek bloody revenge on the Smirnoff company.

At the time that "WtLB" was recorded, Bonham's kit consisted of a 14x10 high tom, two floor toms (16x16 and 18x16), a 26x14 bass drum, a 14x6.5 snare, a couple of timpani's for good measure, and a single bass pedal. Bonham is notable for the speed of his right foot: using that one pedal, Bonham played fills and breaks that would take almost anyone else (myself included) a double-pedal to play. "WtLB" has a number of those moments, including a five-triplet fill on the kick in the back half of the song.

The song has one of the most distinctive grooves I've ever heard, for the all the fact that it's extremely simple. But therein lies the appeal: anyone who says they've never rocked the fuck out to AC/DC is a filthy liar, and that's about as simple as drums gets. It's also a LONG groove, with one measure being repeated up to 19 times. All drumming has trance-like qualities, but this song especially so. It's almost a shock when it's time for a break, like the snare's pop is my alarm clock.


Reading: "The Walking Dead" by Robert Kirkman
Listening to: This
Playing: This