Working with young drummers in a big band jazz context can be frustrating. Even the most skilled wind instrument players with fairly extensive big band experience can find it difficult to give any meaningful guidance to the young drummer - and when you consider the critical nature of that instrument (along with the lead trumpet player) in defining the style, phrasing and dynamic level of the group, the drummer is often the player most in need of help.
With that in mind, here are few checklist items which might help to give a general sense of what to do:
1. Instrumentation - In today’s high-school or middle-school level big band, the focus is a little different from the professional big band or dance band from “back in the day.” For one thing, most young jazz bands start out playing charts that are more straight-8th oriented, like simple rock or funk styles. The drum sounds which are optimal for these styles are different from those typically used by swing drummers, yet in the school context, the drummer must often shift gears between the rock and funk styles common in beginning charts to the swing or be-bop style. To be sure, this is a dilemma faced by modern professional big band drummers as well, but with a little care and attention, a compromise can be reached which will serve to cover pretty much all of the styles involved. Some of these require attention to tuning, but we’ll get to that later. The most critical elements of a big-band drum kit are:
-
A good ride cymbal - optimally, 2 different ride cymbals so that the sound can change on different choruses and the one sound doesn’t get so monotonous.
- A good
quality, well-maintained hi hat stand, with a set of medium-weight
cymbals (typically 14” diameter) that are not too “dry.”
- A quality
snare drum with a good, solid stand
- A bass drum (I
wouldn’t use one larger than a 22”, and tend to prefer a
20” or even an 18,” though the latter is rarer and usually
somewhat expensive by comparison due to its special-order nature),
with a good quality pedal, usually employing a felt beater as opposed
to a hard wood or plastic beater.
- At least one
crash cymbal (these are thinner than ride cymbals, and are designed
to react quickly and die away quickly).
- A small
tom-tom, usually mounted on the bass drum - typically this is an
8”x12”, or 9”x13” the smaller of which is more
commonly used on “jazz” kits.
- A floor tom, typically either 14”x14” or 16”x16.” Given the choice, most “jazz” drummers would opt for the smaller.
The idea here is to provide those elements which are necessary to the vast majority of charts. Though many young drummers are wild about a wrap-around artillery of 4-? tom shells and sometimes even double bass drums (or double pedals), these extra items are unnecessary (in a big band, anyway) and often cause difficulties for the young player because the more drums he has to deal with, the more he has to swivel from side-to-side while playing, and the easier it is to lose his balance. In addition, having all these items in front of you makes you feel obligated to use them at least once during a performance (hey, you carried it there and set it up, so you should at least hit it once, don’t you think?) and the massive walls of toms and other low sounds, while they have a purpose in certain kinds of show-biz settings, often serve more as a distraction from the task at hand, and can hamper the young drummer’s ability to learn the more important functional skills necessary to big band performance.
Probably the best thing to do, where financially feasible (and if you’re going to fund a big band program in the school, this is probably one of the first purchases you should make) is to have a quality set of drums on hand, keep it well maintained, and insist that the drummer(s) use this kit. You may get some squawking about that, but much of that can be quelled by making sure the drums are in good working order, have appropriate and well-tuned heads, and can be adjusted to fit the differences in physiology and playing styles of different youngsters.
As much as possible, these instruments should be arranged so that all surfaces are easily reached from one position (without swiveling in the seat) and with the drums as close together as possible, so that reaching from the snare to the mounted tom to the floor tom is not a big strain.
Though most drum sets are displayed to feature the front bass drum head directly facing the viewer (because it looks good in photographs), I find this to be a less-than-optimal way to orient the body in relation to the drums. My preference is for the snare drum to be directly in front of me, centered between the knees. The idea here is to arrange the hi hat pedal and the bass drum pedal so that when the drummer sits naturally in the seat, the pedals are lined up with where the feet would naturally fall (while allowing enough space for the snare to fit in between, and for the hi hat cymbals to avoid collision with any other drum or stand). This means that from the drummer’s perspective, the bass drum points outward at about a 20-30 degree angle, rather than straight to the front. The drum itself can still directly face the audience in this configuration; it’s just that the drummer will be facing at a slight angle. The reasoning behind this is that it puts the pedals in a more natural location for the legs to remain as relaxed as possible, which helps execution of parts between the feet.
The hi hat cymbals should not sit too far above the snare drum, or it will be a struggle to move quickly between those two surfaces. Too little height difference, and it will be difficult to cross over the snare drum hand to play ride figures on the hi hat (which is typical to the rock style, though many modern drummers such as Carter Beauford of the Dave Matthews band and Kenny Aronoff , formerly with John Mellencamp, have learned to ride on the hi hat with the left hand in order to eliminate the necessity of crossing over).
I prefer the snare drum to be flat, or tilting directly toward me a few degrees, rather than angled from side to side. The idea is to make it the center of the drum kit. Too little downward angle, and I’ll get unwanted rim shots, but too much and I’ll have to drop my wrist too much (and sometimes collide with my knee!) to get the rim shots I do want.
I find that ride cymbal placement is critical, particularly in a jazz context where I’m going to need a wide dynamic range on the instrument, and a good deal of cymbal “wash.” There’s a common misconception that a jazz ride should have a sort of “dry martini” sound, with very little buildup. That’s not really true, but I’ll save the rest of that discussion for the tuning section. Suffice it to say that the cymbal should be relatively flat, more horizontal than vertical. Part of this has to do with technique, but easily as much has to do with the fact that tilting the cymbal too much causes some of the “wash” that constitutes the body of the cymbal sound to be lost because the cymbal (which wants to lay flat) is unnecessarily squeezed between the cymbal sleeve (the threaded plastic cover over the stand piece that goes through the hole) and the felt washer underneath. You generally strike the cymbal with the bead of the stick about halfway up the bow, so that position should be at a comfortable arm’s (+ the stick’s) length. Don’t forget, though, that sometimes you’ll want to play the bell of the cymbal, and often with the shank of the stick, so if it’s too far away, you’ll have to lean into it, and that will throw you off balance (and being off-balance is BAD when drumming - keeping the center of gravity stable is critical for smooth performance).
Oh, yes, please USE CYMBAL SLEEVES!! These are available at any good music store, either as a straight plastic tube (which fits under a metal wing nut and insulates the cymbal from metal-to-metal contact) or as a one-piece (usually black) threaded “wing nut + tube” shaped object that replaces the metal wing nut on top. I’ve seen lots of damage done to cymbals (cracks, etc) because sleeves weren’t used, but also they prevent the annoying metal-to-metal scraping that occurs when the cymbal starts to sway while being played.
Crash cymbals can be angled more than the ride, but one should still keep in mind the more you angle a cymbal, the less sustain the instrument will have and the more its initial sound will be dampened. Since a crash cymbal is supposed to go from “zero to sixty” immediately (that is, respond with all its color as soon as it’s struck, rather than building up gradually) you’ll generally want to be hitting it with the shank of the stick across its edge, rather than the tip on the bow of the cymbal. It’s easier to do that consistently if the crash cymbal is mounted higher than the ride, and more flat than tilted.
2. Tuning - Okay, now we get down to the nitty-gritty. The drums sounds a young student is probably most used to hearing are not possible in nature - if she goes to a rock concert in a big theater or arena, what she’s hearing isn’t the drums, but rather the vibrating cones of the big speaker stacks on either side of the stage. The same is true of the drum sounds she hears on CDs. It’s the speaker cone vibrating (and producing a heavily processed, meticulously mixed version of the actual sound) rather than the drums themselves. There are several reasons why this gives and inaccurate picture of the way drums really sound, and why attempting to get that “pristine, studio quality” sound is not only impossible in real life, but undesirable.
First of all, in both those instances, there is a microphone placed mere inches away from each drum head, so what we hear on records and in amplified rock concerts isn’t the natural drum sound as mixed together in the air, but the sound of an electro-mechanical “ear” being placed right next to the drum, and picking up the sound (as much as possible) of that drum and that drum alone. You’d never put your ear right up against a snare drum - first of all you’d go deaf in about 3 minutes, but secondly the sound right there isn’t very pretty. Often times a noise gate is employed so that the microphone only sends a signal to the mix when the drum is struck. This effectively makes each drum’s output a separate recording, and when combined these can be manipulated into something that sounds very cleanly separated and crisp. For years young drummers have resorted to all sorts of crazy schemes trying to emulate this electronically manufactured sound in an acoustic environment: tape on the heads, cloth pads taped to heads, removing the bottom head from toms, removing the front head of the kick drum, etc, but the fact is that all these techniques serve to do in the end is to remove any of the warmth, the tone, the drums were built to provide, and causes the output from the listener’s perspective to be something resembling a set of oatmeal boxes.
In real life, drums RING. They’re supposed to ring, they’re designed to ring, and you are sucking the life out of a drum if you try to keep it from doing what it was born to do. Here we’ll use an analogy akin to the silly paternalistic terms the health-care journalists use for cholesterol - there is good ring, and there is bad ring. Get it?
Bad ring is an overtone-heavy noise resulting from the beats caused by a head that is vibrating at several frequencies at once. When your drum is poorly tuned, hitting it causes several pitches to sound at once, and these waveforms, being out-of-sync with each other, cause beats. Most of us are familiar with the sound of two piccolos that are just slightly out-of tune with each other - OUCH! Well, it’s the same deal. It’s not a very pleasant sound, but there’s a cure for it. Unfortunately, most drummers resort to the semantic equivalent of stopping a mosquito bite from itching by cutting off the arm it’s on. Out come the tape, the pads, the pillows... anything to get rid of that ugly “ring.”
Good ring should probably be called by its proper name - resonance.You want a drum to resonate, because that resonance is the tone of the drum. Without the tone, you might as well be hitting a counter top or a table. All you’ll get is the attack sound, and such a small amount of sustain that you’d be hard pressed to tell which drum was being struck. In order to get a drum to resonate properly, as opposed to producing what we’ve commonly come to call “ring,” both heads on the drum need to be in tune.
Getting a drum to resonate comes down to tuning the top & bottom heads to a single pitch. This varies from drum to drum, but the procedure is pretty straightforward. First you make sure that all dirt, grit, or other foreign matter is removed from edge of the drum (and from under the metal hoop. Then you place the head on top of the shell, checking to see that it’s centered and that an even amount of edge is showing outside the shell. Then you place the counterhoop over the aluminum hoop (on calfskin heads this used to be called the “flesh hoop”) and screw the tension rods into the casings, only finger tight all the way around. You then proceed to tighten the head in quarter-turns or so, moving from one lug to the one directly across from it, keeping track that you’ve used the same approximate number of turns for each tension rod, until you’ve got a little tension on the head. As you’re tightening the head, periodically stop, place the heel of your hand in the center of the drum head, and push gently until you feel it stretch a little bit (careful while it’s still loose on the drum - you don’t want to pull the head from the aluminum hoop). Continue tightening until your head is at the approximate flex level you prefer to play on (this is the batter side we’re talking about) and continue “seating” it using the heel-of-the hand method. Then you’re ready to tune. Placing a finger lightly in the center of the head to dampen the sympathetic vibrations a little, tap on the edge of the head opposite each lug and see where there are pitch differences. Where there are lower pitches, try tweaking that lug and the one directly across from it, working both as a team. You will find as you’re working that the fundamental pitch of the drum head will change slightly. That’s okay, it’s much more important that the lugs are in tune with each other than that the head retains any particular pitch. You can always move it up or down, anyway. he idea is to get the lugs to “sing.” You’ll recognize that sound when you hear it - the pitch at the lug resonates and sustains for a longer time. You keep working with the head, raising the tension on some lugs and lowering others. As you progress, you’ll need to keep “seating” the head with your hand to stretch the head and make it snap to the level you’ve just dialed up on the lugs. When you’ve got all the lugs “singing” back to you at the same pitch, you have a head that is in tune with itself, which is the first requisite for good tone. The bottom head procedure is similar, except that since it’s a resonating surface only, you’ll want to tune it a little higher than the top head (if you’re going for a deeper sound) or perhaps slightly lower than the top head (if you plan to use a high, tight tone). The reason for the difference is that you want the resonant head to be tuned to a pitch where it vibrates freely, and sustains for a long time. Too low a pitch and the head won’t vibrate very much - too high and some of the sustain will be lost. Since it is a resonant surface only, what you want is for it to resonate. There are some people who advocate tuning both heads to the same pitch, but that’s probably a good choice only when you are pretty close to the drum shell’s natural resonant frequency, and are not concerning yourself with how much (or little) rebound you desire when the stick strikes the top head.
All drum tuning is trial and error. It takes a little while to get the hang of it, and it really helps a lot if you can watch somebody more experienced do it first. Assuming you’ve got good heads, round drums with good bearing edges, and a little patience, you should be able to get a nice, deep resonant sound out of most drums after a while. For more info on tuning, click on this link to the educational pages at www.Remo.com
Now, once the drums are resonating properly, we come down to the aesthetic choices. What pitches should we tune to, and how much sustain do we want?
That’s where a lot of the dilemma comes in. First, there are stylistic differences to consider. In the swing or be-bop styles, the drums are much more legato, lyrical devices. You don’t want a lot of “punch,” because it takes away from the fleet-footed “lightness” of the styles. For the same reason, most drummers who specialize in be-bop tune their toms and bass drums much higher in pitch than those who specialize in rock. By getting the toms up into the high-baritone tenor registers, the “air” is left clear underneath for the string bass, and it’s easier for the ensemble to “skip” rather than “stomp.” This is a particularly important consideration as it relates to the bass drum. When striking a bass drum in a swing or be bop context, one should get a tone (like a string bass sound, sort of) rather than a “thud.” Since the traditional bop and swing styles use “foor on the floor” bass drum parts, you need that sound to be more of a “boing” than a “thunk,” or your swing feel will feel less like Fred Astaire floating and more like G.I. Jane stomping down a footbridge.
(We’ll get to the “four-on-the-floor” concept a little further on).
The snare drum sound MUST have a “tail” to it, or the smoothness of any swing groove is going to be punctuated by something that sounds more like an AK-47 in an anechoic chamber. This means that the best sound is going to be achieved without any muffling on the drum at all, not even the little internal tone controls built into most snare drums. In fact, I had all my drums built without those little suckers, because not only didn’t I ever intend to use them, but I didn’t want them interfering with wave propagation inside the shell. If you’ve got tone controls on your drums, they’re easy to take out (just take off the batter head and you’ll find the nuts and bolts that fasten it on—it just takes a minute to remove the whole assembly).
Most kids freak out when they hear a drum that has a high-pitched “ring,” and struggle madly to get rid of it. What they don’t understand is that in an acoustic environment, the ring (so long as it’s “good” ring) is what projects the tone of the drum into the audience and gives it body. In other words, what the drums sound like to the performer who is sitting right in front of them isn’t what the audience hears. I once had a drum I’d “tweaked” until I thought I had it sounding perfect, just like the recording studio. Then I invited a friend to sit in at a gig, and strolled out about 20 or 30 feet into the audience. It sounded like a cardboard box out there! I was appalled when I thought how many gigs I’d played with the drum tuned like that.
Anyway... well, since the 70’s are over (along with the bone-dry studio drum sounds made popular [out of pragmatic acoustic-isolation necessity] that went along with the period), so a drum that’s tuned well for a be bop setting has gradually become an acceptable sound for rock as well. Drummers like Stewart Copland of The Police made a high-pitched crack something that young drummers strove for, so our ears have come to accept the tone in either context. One thing to keep in mind, though, is that pitch affects resonance as well - if you tighten the batter head to “table top” consistency, it’s easier to play fast notes but you also sacrifice a lot of sustain. The key to getting the “crack” is to play a rim shot when you want that sound. I keep my snare drum tuned to a level where there’s still a little flex left in it when pressed with the fingers. That’s lower than a lot of drummers prefer, but I find it gets me good sustain, and the drum sounds fat without sounding dark. I tune the snare side head a bit higher, and leave the snares fairly loose so that I get quite a lot of snare response, and a nice “tail.” Tightening the snares too much makes the drum sound staccato all the time, and takes the phrasing choice out of my hands. A softer “ghost” stroke results in a much shorter tone, but a full stroke lets the snares rattle in all their glory.
The same applies to the toms. In the 80’s, the accepted studio sound migrated from the “box” tone on the 70’s recording to a full-blown, dark, sustained “doom.” You know the sound—the tom dips in pitch after it’s struck, and the sound is as big as a house. That’s a cool sound—I tuned my toms that way for a long time, even in a jazz setting, using Remo Pinstripe heads on the top and thinner, one-ply heads on the bottom (as the resonant head, a bottom tom head only needs to vibrate sympathetically, so using a heavy head on the bottom makes little sense). The problem I ran into was that in the be bop context, I couldn’t play anything intricate on the toms - they wouldn’t really speak properly unless I smacked them hard, so I found myself losing out on a lot of expressive possibilities. Now I use Remo Ambassadors on the top and bottom, and find that unless I really have to smack them (such as in full-blown, fully amplified rock band) that they don’t dent or pit very much, and they still last a while.
In the school jazz band context, even though the rock style is sometimes played, it’s in a non-amplified context with a wind section that’s also un-amplified. This makes the thinner heads applicable (I use them in big band, and we do some rock and funk playing) but makes switching to the be bop style easier.
If I were going to play in a band that only played swing and be bop, I’d probably raise the pitches of the toms a little to provide more articulative possibilities, but I still think it’s possible to find the happy medium where it all works - the trick is to make sure your toms are carefully tuned, and that the drums are high quality drums. This is most critical when it comes to toms without any muffling -the shells must be perfectly round, the bearing edges (the place where the head contacts the shell underneath) must be flat, consistent in width all around the drum, and the head must be seated properly so that it’s not overhanging one side of the drum more than another.
The bass drum is the most difficult animal to deal with in the jazz band context - in a bop setting you want it to boing, but in a rock tune you want it to boom. I’d still recommend against muffling it much, because even though a thud (provided it’s a “Lexus trunk-closing” thud and not a “driveway sealant bucket” thud) works in the rock context, it’s definitely NOT the optimum swing sound. This poses a problem, because getting a sound that works for both styles is difficult. I’ve tried several options and I’m still searching, but the best approach is to get a sound with a “tail” on it, just not a very long one. If you tune the drum fairly low (not contra-bass, but maybe “bass-baritone?”) you can still get enough punch for the rock context and then just play the drum a little more delicately for the swing feels.
As far as cymbals are concerned, not much tuning is possible, but once again it’s important that they can ring freely, which generally means tilting them as little as possible while still providing a good playing angle.
The ride cymbal is a source of concern for some players because on records (where what you’re hearing is an overhead condenser microphone’s interpretation of the cymbal sound, where much of it is filtered out and the “ping” is more pronounced) it sounds very dry and “ticky,” without a lot of “wash.” Once again, in my youth I tried putting duct-tape under the cymbal bell (and boy, was that ever hard to get OFF once I stopped using it) to kill the “wash.” But once I walked out into the audience and heard what that really cool “clean” cymbal sounded like in context, that was the last time I ever tried muffling a cymbal. It sounded AWFUL! There was no sustain, no body, just a click that couldn’t even make it past a semi-amplified (partly acoustic, partly electric) band in a very small club.
The ride cymbal is such a crucial element in the swing and be bop context because it’s the main timekeeping flow-element of the drum set. It must have some life, a tone quality of its own, and the ability to sustain for a second or two when you leave it to play another drum. If it’s really dry, like flat ride or a mini-cup ride, it becomes very obviously missing-in-action when you stop playing it to go for a fill. If it’s got some wash to it, the sustain tends to carry you through and the listener doesn’t notice its absence as much. In addition, the wash contributes to the legato flow of the music. There’s a big difference between ting, ting, ting, and tink,tink, tink. Particularly in swing, you need the sustain between the notes, or perhaps more accurately the body of one note sustaining all the way into the next attack. Some drummers even put rivets in their ride cymbals to enhance the sustain because they’re not satisfied with the sustain present in the unadulterated cymbal. Once you get 10-20 feet away from the cymbal (in other words, out from behind the kit) you hear mostly the ping, and not much of the wash, so that thing you were worried about doesn’t really exist. Out in the audience you only notice it when it’s not there.
The same rationale applies to choosing hi hat cymbals. Everybody’s looking for that bright, crisp studio sound. I’m not saying cymbal selection doesn’t have something to do with that, nor that there aren’t certain contexts in which a very dry, crisp set of hi hat cymbals is appropriate, but in the jazz band context you need something you can sizzle on when the hi hat is half open - so if you use a set of hi hat cymbals that’s too heavy (in order to get higher pitch and crispness) your sizzle effects start sounding clangy, and it’s hard to get the cymbals to sizzle against each other at all.
3. Basic Chops - In general, the best way I know to describe good technique is that nothing on the drummer’s body gets in the way of the drumsticks on their way to their appointed tasks. Any tension, anywhere in the arms or legs, is to be avoided as much as humanly possible, because it puts “kinks” in the grooves, and this is especially true of the ride cymbal pattern in the swing context.
A drumstick is a pretty heavy piece of wood. If you don’t believe me, try throwing a skinny little 7A at somebody’s head and see how they react! (On second thought, don’t do that&ldots;in most states you could go to jail on felony assault charges). It’s got quite a lot of mass, particularly in the shank area a couple of inches behind the bead.
That’s the “club head” area of the stick. Think of it as a golf club, say a 3-wood. You swing a golf club. That means it acts like a pendulum, with the human engine holding it lightly toward one end (and acting as the fulcrum), and letting the weight of the club head generate the astonishing centrifugal force that propels the golf ball hundreds of yards farther than you could throw it.
If you think of the drum stick the way you’d think of a golf club or a baseball bat, you realize that the most efficient way to strike the drum head is to swing the stick into it - to just get it started on its journey, then let its own weight provide the striking force. The drum stroke is sort of complicated, though, because we’re talking about several different components. The thumb and forefinger provide the fulcrum around which the shank of the stick rotates, the back three fingers control the bounce (and re-initiate it in the case of double strokes), the wrist is primarily a hinge which transmits wave motion initiated in the forearm, and sometimes even the upper arm, down the pike to that little bead that strikes the head, sort of like the crack of a bullwhip. The elbow, the wrist, the shoulder, the fingers, EVERTHING has to be loose and fluid or the stick won’t swing, but rather it’ll push or even jab into the head or the cymbal.
Much of the problem that young drummers have getting the swing ride rhythm to actually “swing,” is based in the above paragraphs. To get the music to swing, you must first get the stick to swing, to bounce, and to rebound again before initiating the next beat. If you think of the swing rhythm in one-beat chunks, there are three parts to it. Jimmy Grist, the late drummer from Ft. Wayne, Indiana (who was a fine be-bop player during his life) called it “ding-sting-ee-ding...” If you think about that for a second, that puts the sting on beats 2 & 4, which coincidentally happen to be the backbeats that make a swing tune a swing tune instead of a gavotte. So the “ding” (downbeat), the sting (beat 2 or beat 4) and the “ee” are the three parts. What makes it complicated is that the natural tendency we all have as musicians is to orient ourselves toward downbeat thinking, and drummers are no exception to this rule. We think of a phrase initiating on the downbeat.
But if you think
about the physical motion you’d need to produce sting-ee-ding,
you will realize that the principal stroke in this motion
occurs just before the backbeat, the sting, not
the initial “ding.”
So the single motion, which consists of a Stroke (sting), a bounce (ee), and a rebound (ding) starts on the backbeat rather than the downbeat, and crosses the barline. If your drummer’s swing time sounds stiff, watch his hand on the ride cymbal. There’s a good chance he’s inverting the motion, or worse yet, trying to initiate each of the 3 component parts with a separate stroke. It also helps if the drummer thinks of skipping the bead of the stick across the cymbal’s surface, like skipping a stone across a pond. If your arm is properly loose and relaxed, this will cause what Jim Rupp (a very fine jazz drummer from Columbus, Ohio, and formerly the drummer with the Woody Herman band and the Maynard Ferguson band, among others) calls the “chicken wing effect.” When you’re skipping the stick across the surface, dragging it back up and skipping it again, your elbow tends to dance back and forth a little. This is fine, and though you probably don’t want to consciously force the elbow to do this but rather just let it happen naturally, it helps to keep your arm loose and reduce muscle fatigue over time.
The ideas of swinging the stick with a completely loose arm and only enough pressure on the stick to keep it from flying out of the drummer’s hand applies across the board—every musical phrase a drummer plays, regardless of style, will sound more logical and smooth if that technique is used.
Getting a good private teacher will help tremendously, provided that the teacher has some drum set or orchestral background, and not just marching band or drum corps. Not that all drum corps style teachers are bad influences (some do approach it with the idea of producing drummers instead of drum lines, and in fact some of the greatest drum teachers in history [Bobby Thompson, Dennis DeLucia, Frank Arsenault, William Moeller, etc] were drum corps instructors), but many teach students to hold the drumsticks with too much pressure, and to keep the forearms stiff (because this makes it easier for a drum line to look more uniform). Even a teacher who’s produced championship drum lines can often come from this school of thought, which stresses visual uniformity over individual mastery, and has caused thousands of young drummers to play the drum set like machines instead of like musicians. Make sure you interview any instructor carefully, and find out how he feels about individual technique based on relaxation, and remember that the stiff-arm approach may achieve higher scores and larger trophies in the short run, but the bottom line is that this method is used for the benefit of the teacher, not the student. It’s easier for the teacher to make the stiff-arm, stiff-fingers, all-from- the-wrist style appear uniform, but it is also possible to teach students good individual techniques and still achieve maximum performance results. It just takes longer, sometimes more than one or even two seasons, to make that work with a whole section together. Many of our school band programs have become like college football teams - “if the team is not doing well right now, fire the coach.” Patience is in short supply, and the quick fix becomes the rule. This attitude shortchanges the students’ education for the benefit of the adult teacher’s résumé, and it’s just plain morally bankrupt policy. (And yes, I know this because I used to be one of those guilty instructors, but since then “ah have seen the light!”).
As a non-percussionist music teacher, it’s never a bad idea to take a few lessons on any of the instruments you teach - why not study with a good drum set teacher yourself, so that you have first-hand knowledge of the obstacles your young students must surmount? You might even like it and find you have a knack for it...
4. Time-keeping Considerations - The basic technique described (briefly) above can take care of a lot of time problems, because once a student begins to be able to cycle her limbs in concert with gravity instead of fighting against gravity, the earth’s natural pull takes care of a lot of time problems. Why? Because gravity is constant, and the acceleration of a drumstick relative to gravity is a constant. If the lift in between is completely relaxed and takes on the characteristics of one very long, smooth motion, gravity will take control and the time-distance between beats should remain pretty constant as well.
Some other things to think about when the time isn’t feeling all that splendid:
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Is the drum part too complex? By that I mean, is the drummer trying to construct a beat he isn’t technically equipped to handle? This can make the time go all over the place—faster because the student tries to over-compensate for lack of control, or slower because the drummer is trying to cram more notes into the space than his chops can accomplish in the available time. If it’s a rock beat, try breaking it down to this:
in other words, bass drum on 1 & 3, snare drum on 2& 4. When the drummer gripes (and he will), say, “okay, I see, so that must be really easy to do—let’s see how long you can keep that going with the band playing along.” He’ll probably break down before 16 measures have gone by. This is because many drummers don’t fully master the “easy” stuff before moving on to things that are more interesting, but it’s also because the above beat isn’t easy! It’s just simple. Another reason might be that the rhythms the drummer hears coming from the rest of the band are too confusing for him to relate to the beat - in other words, he can’t tell where “1” is in the band’s rhythm. In many cases the drummer will find this physically easy to do, but controlling it over time is another matter--there’s a 99% probability that at least one, and usually more of the beats won’t come down in the right place in time. This is because it takes solid, confident chops to execute a beat that simple in perfect time. Often, too, the drummer begins to rely on the 8th note or 16th note ride pattern on the hi hat as a crutch, and when that’s taken away the pulse crumbles like a 1000-year-old parchment. Either way, you’ll be closer to diagnosing the problem than you were before. If the drummer needs help hearing and understanding rhythms that are being played in the rest of the band, that gives you the opportunity to show him the rhythms in the score (like a colleague, perhaps, so he doesn’t feel so stupid?) and explain how they’re counted, then have the rest of the band play them so he can see and hear them together (assuming the rest of the band can do it correctly!!). Check the other rhythm section parts in this regard, as well. Is the bass player trying to do Jaco Pastorius licks in the middle of a Glenn Miller tune? Is the pianist pretending he’s Oscar Peterson or Keith Emerson when you’re playing “Basie, Straight Ahead?” Often over-busy-ness in the rhythm section is contagious. Is the drummer trying to play “can-you-top-this” with the bass player? Are they “getting down with their bad selves” to such an extent that pandemonium has broken out? Do they think they’re the Grateful Dead or Phish? Sometimes less is more, and your rhythm section players need to know it. Just as importantly, sometimes a simple change in the part can solve a time problem. Experiment with different densities, and encourage your rhythm section to be sensitive to that issue as well. You never know, they might come up with a great (and simple!) groove you hadn’t thought of... -
Is there a volume balance problem? Sometimes the rhythm section isn’t well balanced volume-wise, and that can cause a groove to feel funny. Too much piano can make it feel like you’re walking in wooden shoes, clunking along; too much bass can make it feel like you’re wading through a swamp; too little bass can make everybody in the rhythm section feel like they’re running down the street naked, afraid to play out (& thus making chops & rhythm errors, sort of like a dancer trying to leap in time when the tempo is too slow); too much drum and you get that dreaded, transient-saturated “garage band” sound.
And that’s only part of it. A drummer can be executing a beat perfectly in time with an otherwise well-balanced rhythm section and still sound awful because the instruments in his kit aren’t well balanced. In fact, this is the single thing most responsible for “feel,” that thing we all talk about but nobody seems to be able to define. Well, all other things being equal (that is, on the same drums, the same pitches, etc) there are only 3 things that can affect the feel - the method of attack, the placement of notes in time, and the volume balance note-to-note.
The method of attack refers to the way in which a drum or cymbal is struck. Is it a rim shot or a note struck in the center of the drum? Is it played out near the rim (thinner tone)? Is the tom being struck dead center, or with a glancing blow on the way to somewhere else? Is the cymbal being played with the tip or the shank of the stick? Across the edge or in the middle of the bow, or on the bell? Etc, etc. Each of these tonal considerations, when adjusted, will change the “feel.
Placement of the notes in time usually refers to the “shuffle factor.” In many music sequencing programs, you can adjust the level of “swing” in the playback. What you’re doing in that case is moving the “ands” either closer to or farther away from the following downbeat, varying between straight 8th, 8th note triplet, or even dotted 8th-16th . In a lot of funk/rock patterns, there’s a barely perceptible “shuffle factor” that turns an otherwise blasé beat into something that “cooks.” Sensitivity to these slight variations in off-beat 8th-note spacing can make all the difference. Of course that’s a “subtlety.” It could well be that your drummer’s simply messing up the rhythm and playing notes at the wrong time, or arhythmically. This will make a groove “feel” terrible as well.
NOW, the VOLUME BALANCE between the parts of the drum set is critical to the feel, too - often times if you simply ask the drummer to play more softly on the hi hat and bring out the snare drum and bass drum, you’ll feel the beat “come to life.” Young drummers tend to lean on the ride rhythm like a crutch, regardless of its style, but especially in the rock or funk context, and most especially when it’s just one hand playing 8th notes on the hi hat. Often you’ll see them banging out 8th notes on the edge of the cymbal with the shank of the stick, and getting an ugly, overbalanced hi hat sound. This isn’t always their fault - they see their drum “heros” on MTV do that kind of junk all the time. It’s a “punk” or “grunge” style “thing.” Tell the drummer to save it for the local garage band, unless of course your band is playing in the “grunge” style and that’s what you’re going for. Usually, though, it’s just un-coordinated playing on the part of the student. Sometimes the snare drum back beats are too loud, and need to be pulled back relative to the rest of the groove. Sometimes the kid is just stomping the stuffings out of the bass drum. The point is, poor drum-to-drum balance (even when the notes are placed perfectly in time) can make an otherwise “happenin’” groove sound awful. Also, the LINEAR balance can make a big difference. By that I mean certain places in the pattern where the notes either need to fade away to almost nothing for a brief period (especially common in hi hat-oriented funk, or beats with “ghosted” snare drum notes in the pattern) or where certain notes need to be accentuated more. If you’ve ever played with a drum machine like the old Roland TR707 or 808, you’ve probably seen the evidence of this—each instrument sound (kick, snare, hh, cym, etc) had its own little volume slider, sort of like a graphic EQ. By moving those little suckers up and down, you could make a good beat sound great, or a great beat sound terrible, all by doing nothing but changing the relative volume of the instruments. Inserting an accent into a drum machine pattern could also enhance the feel. You get the idea...
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What about the drummer’s physical balance? This may sound silly, but imagine playing the piano, or a pipe organ (where you have to use your feet) while perched on the end of a walking stick. Can you imagine being able to move all your limbs without falling down? How consistent do you think your time would be? Of course this is an exaggeration, but often the drummer’s posture is a big problem, and the fact that she has to use all four limbs (sometimes lifting her feet off the floor) can cause the torso to go off-balance, shifting the hands out of position and causing timing errors. Sometimes the problem is something as simple as a bad stool! Trying to play the drums while sitting on something that’s not solid is risky business. Even if you’re not in danger of falling down, you’ve got very little hope of playing solid time. If the stool isn’t the problem, check the drummer’s posture as she moves from drum to drum, especially when playing fills involving the toms. If you see her falling off-balance quite a bit, there may be a problem with the way in which the kit is set up, or simply a posture or “over shooting” problem - too much wasted motion.
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Maybe it’s not the drummer. Let me say that again, for those who might have dozed off. Maybe your time-feel problem isn’t the drummer! I can’t tell you how many times I’ve played in ensembles where chops deficiencies, adrenaline, or simple rushing or dragging of phrases have occurred in the other instruments in a band, and I’ve had the leader or someone else look at ME. If ever there was a more tiresome cliché, I’ve never heard of it. Time is NOT the drummer’s responsibility alone. Time is relative, first of all. The drummer might not be messing up at all, but when things fall apart or don’t feel good it’s often because the band’s not together. Tempo control and rhythmic accuracy are everyone’s problem, not just the sole responsibility of the drummer. Let me say that again - time is job #1 for EVERYBODY. Yes, even a soloist in the middle of an artistic, face-scrunched frenzy is supposed to count, and to know where he is in the form. Sorry folks, you don’t get to blame your own mistakes on the drummer. Well, you CAN if you want to (and you often do), but that won’t solve the problem.
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Does the beat sound monotonous? This is where some variety in instrument choice can come in handy. Early on I mentioned having 2 separate ride cymbals as part of a basic drum kit. If money is a big problem, you can get along with just one, but the chances are that if you search around your band room, you can find some sort of cymbal that will suffice for a “B” ride. Why do you need this? Listen to any good combo album or big band album, and note how the sound changes at the bridge, or other form delineation points in the tune. Usually there’s a change in the drum feel, and 90% of the time it’s because the drummer changed ride surfaces. Either she went to the hi hat, another ride cymbal, or another surface, or stopped playing a ride rhythm altogether; whatever it is, a good drummer knows that leaning into a single ride cymbal for more than a chorus or two leads to ear fatigue, so she’ll change up. Try dropping the drums out in a place where drums are written - that can make a nice contrasting change in arrangement. Or go to ride cymbal only, with no other sounds. Or go to just bass drum & hi hat, or just hi hat, or just a rhythmic click-figure on the snare drum rim... the possibilities are endless if you’re not afraid to experiment a little.
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“Ghost” notes - While the right hand (on a right-handed drummer’s kit) is busy playing the ride cymbal, the hi hat is madly chunking out 2 and 4, and the bass drum is feathering all 4 beats (see below), the left hand may or may not be idly hanging out over the snare drum. In my case, it’s playing all the time - that’s the limb I use to “salt & pepper” the beat to taste. Mostly this is done using “ghost” notes (extremely soft notes) that skip along in the cracks, adding more shuffly feel when that’s needed, barking out a rhythmic answer to a soloist’s question, and generally “mixing it up” so that the time feel breathes and evolves over time. It takes a little practice to do this effectively, but the reward is a cookin’ swing feel that doesn’t get boring. The same applies in a funk context, where the combination of snare drum and hi hat notes (played around the back beats being smacked out by the left hand on the snare) can spice up things quite a bit. Your drummer should learn to play as many different variations on the paradiddle as can be written down—we’ll pop a few exercise sheets up here in the web space soon. In the mean time, paradiddles, flamadiddles, and the myriad permutations thereof can provide a lifetime’s worth of funky 16th note material when assigned to various surfaces around the drum kit.
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And finally, “Four on the Floor.” For many years I was taught that in swing or be-bop music, the bass drum was only used to play accents, and that you don’t play it the rest of the time. In the intervening years I met some people who actually DRUM for a living with big bands and be bop combos, and found out that the reverse is true. In swing you play the bass drum all the time, on every beat, along with the string bass. The reason that people thought this wasn’t true is because skilled drummers “feather” the bass drum - that is, they tap it very, very lightly on every quarter note, and blend it carefully with the sound of the bass, so that you don’t actually hear it as much as feel it. It’s an indispensable element of the swing and be bop feel - without it, your drum part sounds very anemic and thin, and the beat loses much of its forward motion. The trick (and this is hard for younger drummers, but that’s what being young is for - to learn and make mistakes) is to barely touch the surface of the drum head with the beater of the pedal, and to bounce the beater off the drum so that the drum can resonate fully and not be dampened in the process. Leaving the beater on the head in this instance would bring the time to a halt on every single beat, a sound you don’t want in a legato style like jazz. In fact, I try not to smash the beater into the head and leave it in contact with the head in any style. The drum just plain sounds better (and you can play it louder) when the beater comes away from the head after the head is struck.
When you feather the bass on all four beats, it becomes really noticeable only when it drops out - this can be a nice contrast, or it can help set up a big accent (often played ON the bass drum) by leaving a little silence right before the bomb. It takes some practice and experience to know how to use this effect, but it’s worth the effort. Your swing time will swing a lot harder if you make use of this procedure. Young drummers will hit the drum too hard at first - no matter, just keep on trying to pull it back in volume until it blends in and eventually becomes a part of the string bass sound. You’ll be glad you learned this technique, and even those who thought it was “wrong” will thank you once they’ve heard how much better your beat cooks when you use it.
5. Set-ups and Fills - In the big band setting, one of the jobs of the drummer is to help back up rhythmic figures in the brass. Generally speaking, the most important of these from a support standpoint are those where the lead trumpet is on top of the voicing. For this reason, when a drum part for an arrangement gets lost, or simply has too little information on it to be useful, I’ve often been given a lead trumpet part to read from. This won’t cure ALL ills (sometimes there are rhythm section figures which are not picked up in the brass, and sometimes there are significant brass figures which don’t include the lead trumpet, but for the most part the lead trumpet is the leading indicator of figures which need backing) but you’d be surprised how many of the important kicks are right there in the 1st trumpet part.
Kicking a big band is an art, and takes practice. Arrangers sometimes don’t put enough brass rhythm notations on a drum part, but there are other times when the arranger indiscriminately puts ALL available rhythm information (sax & trombone figures, etc) and doesn’t adequately indicate which rhythm is played by what instrument. I’ve been caught with my pants down several times when reading a chart in which there is an unaccented rhythm written out (which turns out to be a huge brass accent) followed by an accented rhythm (which turns out to be the saxophone section at a much lower volume level). There is no standardized notation - the big band era didn’t last one or two hundred years like the Baroque or Romantic eras, and there haven’t been hundreds of revised, edited versions of big band charts as with the Classical piano repertoire. To this day, no standardized teaching exists, and the resultant mish-mosh of drum charting styles and variations could make a persons’ head spin!
One of the worst ways to write a drum part is to write a drum part, that is to attempt to notate every note you want the drummer to play. Even if these parts were readable (and they usually aren’t) a pro drummer will ignore the notated part, and a student will get so bogged down trying to follow a written part that the whole band will generally fall apart on the first reading. Some charts written for young bands have found a happy medium, where a “suggested” part is scored for a few measures, followed by slashes to mark the form, and kicks in appropriate places. In any event, it is a good idea to remember that your rhythm section players are often trying to read a part that doesn’t really tell them much about what to do.
Pianists and bassists have it at least a little easier in that they can take private lessons from an experienced player who can tell them how to interpret what they see on the paper, and work on things like constructing bass lines and effective methods of comping. The drummer, however, is at a loss in these situations because it’s hard to tell what in the world the the wild variety of drum parts mean without hearing the band along with them. One way around this difficulty is to have recordings of the arrangements you’re playing, and to send those along with your drummer to a lesson, or at least have them available for the rhythm section to listen to.
Another more effective plan is to bring in specialists on your rhythm section’s instruments. Have them sit in on a rehearsal with the big band, read through the charts with the band, observe the students playing the parts, then split into sectional rehearsal to work out some problems. To really enhance the effectiveness of this method, it’s also be good if everyone can get back together with the full band at a later time and revisit the same charts, to do some final tweaking and make further suggestions.
There are a few basic conventions that can be conveyed here, to help youngsters understand what they see on the page:
Kick Examples
A.
B.
C.
The figures
written here show some examples where the brass figure is
“cued” at the top of the part, and others where the accent
is simply incorporated into the drum part in the staff. In many
cases, an accent is preceded by a written rest on the drum part, but
the actual drummer fills that space with a set-up note which helps
the brass section feel where the accent needs to be placed, then
kicks the actual accent with a note either on the snare drum,
sometimes but not always combined with a crash cymbal or hi hat
sizzle (best for sharp, up-beat accents) or the bass drum combined
with a crash cymbal or sizzled hi hat(best for down beat accents or
longer notes).
These are just a few examples, but can help to give a general idea what to do in similar cases.
D.
E.
F.
Finally (and this
is where experience and listening to as many recordings of good
drummers as you can lay your hands on comes in) not every
rhythmic figure, even when indicated by the arranger, needs to be
backed up. In fact, if you’ve got a chart where every single
brass figure is laid out on the drum part and you kick them all,
you can make an otherwise swinging chart sound like the Dresden
bombing. “Use tact, poise, and reason,” as
pianist/composer/singer Donald Fagen once said, “and gently
squeeze them.” Set-ups and fills are essential to making an
arrangement cook along, but as the young drummer progresses,
she’ll find that, as an old friend once said, “not
ev’ry note’s a pearl.” You don’t need to catch
every single available kick. Experience will inform your sense of
which ones are important. A good rule of thumb is, if the band
director indicates a need for a kick or a set-up, write it in, and
make sure you hit that one at least! The rest are
discretionary, based on your musical sense and the way the chart
feels like it’s headed.
Anyway, It’s been real and it’s been fun, but the clock on the wall says our time is up, so this concludes our mini-clinic. I hope some of this info has been helpful, and as always, “Let’s be careful out there.”