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Saturday, August 15, 2009
Keeping an open mind
The world is brimming with musical philosophies and there are many approaches to learning. One of the goals of this is to help you get in touch with yourself and the way or ways you learn best. There’s no one right way to do things. Similarly, there’s no one wrong way either. Each person enters the musical arena with a different physiological and phychological makeup. Because of this, it’s important to to tailor your learning to best fit your needs.
Recognize that you’re an individual with unique strengths and weaknesses. However, don’t use this as an excuse to close off from the world around you, to rationalize mediocrity, or make excuses to avoid learning the essentials of music making. Instead, use your individuality as a springboard for honest and thoughtful musical exploration.
If you reject concepts and ideas that seem foreign or even in conflict with your own, you’ll never improve. Instead, you will spiral down a dark path toward stubborness and ignorance. Learning an instrument means that you must be an open receptacle for information and ideas. so, stay flexible, study the trails that have already been blazed, and need the advice of those who have more experience than you.
Recognize that you’re an individual with unique strengths and weaknesses. However, don’t use this as an excuse to close off from the world around you, to rationalize mediocrity, or make excuses to avoid learning the essentials of music making. Instead, use your individuality as a springboard for honest and thoughtful musical exploration.
If you reject concepts and ideas that seem foreign or even in conflict with your own, you’ll never improve. Instead, you will spiral down a dark path toward stubborness and ignorance. Learning an instrument means that you must be an open receptacle for information and ideas. so, stay flexible, study the trails that have already been blazed, and need the advice of those who have more experience than you.
Mental Preparation
Before you pick up the sticks, it’s important to cleanse your mind of any myths or other wrongheaded notions you may have about music. First of all, don’t worry about becoming the best drummer in the world. Instead, focus on your budding relationship with music, and begin difining some basic objectives.
Start by asking yourself these questions:
1. would i like to become a professional or am I only intersted in music as a hobby?
2. Is there a practical style of music that I would like to learn about?
3. If so, what?
4. Am I only interested in playing on a drum set or are there other percussion instruments I’d like to try?
5. How commited am I to regular practice?
What other questions might you have? It’s important that you begin developing a keen sense for music and drumming, and asking yourself questions will help you to become more focused. Keep in mind that you don’t need to have every question answered immedeately. All you need to do is start ruminating on them. Also, remember that your answers to many of these questions will change as the weeks, months, and years go by and your skills improve.
Question? Are you saying that spontaneity is bad? there’s nothing wrong with jamming or spontaneity. That’s not the point. Certainly, there’s an elemnt to music that is born of surpise: from experementation, mistakes, brusts of inspiration, and from just throwing caution to the wind and just whacking those drums.
each week , make a list of your musical goals and see how it evolves over time. When you play drums, or any instrument for that matter, you must first realize that everything you do must be deliberate and well concieved. Mindlessly failing away on your drum set does you no good. In other words, if you don’t think about what you’re doing, your playing will reflect it. Strong performances are mostly the result of training and mental discipline. You know you’re a solid player when you have the ability to play what you want to play, rather than what just happens to come out. So for now, just concentrate on being deliberate and thoughtful in your practice. In the end, your jamming (or improvising) will be better for it. Why? You’ll be in control, not your bad habits.
2. Is there a practical style of music that I would like to learn about?
3. If so, what?
4. Am I only interested in playing on a drum set or are there other percussion instruments I’d like to try?
5. How commited am I to regular practice?
What other questions might you have? It’s important that you begin developing a keen sense for music and drumming, and asking yourself questions will help you to become more focused. Keep in mind that you don’t need to have every question answered immedeately. All you need to do is start ruminating on them. Also, remember that your answers to many of these questions will change as the weeks, months, and years go by and your skills improve.
Question? Are you saying that spontaneity is bad? there’s nothing wrong with jamming or spontaneity. That’s not the point. Certainly, there’s an elemnt to music that is born of surpise: from experementation, mistakes, brusts of inspiration, and from just throwing caution to the wind and just whacking those drums.
each week , make a list of your musical goals and see how it evolves over time. When you play drums, or any instrument for that matter, you must first realize that everything you do must be deliberate and well concieved. Mindlessly failing away on your drum set does you no good. In other words, if you don’t think about what you’re doing, your playing will reflect it. Strong performances are mostly the result of training and mental discipline. You know you’re a solid player when you have the ability to play what you want to play, rather than what just happens to come out. So for now, just concentrate on being deliberate and thoughtful in your practice. In the end, your jamming (or improvising) will be better for it. Why? You’ll be in control, not your bad habits.
Saturday, August 8, 2009
All About Drums
YEaHHhhhh.... DruMminG HaRdd ... !!! RoCK Th3 CyMbALzZz EwAyyyyY !!
HaVe HiXz PLAce.. !! BuILd A FaSten DruMminG staMinA... !!
ThUs YOU CAN DRUM FAST
HaVe HiXz PLAce.. !! BuILd A FaSten DruMminG staMinA... !!
ThUs YOU CAN DRUM FAST
The Right Sound
If you have not played a drum kit before, the biggest question is how do you know if it sounds any good?
Drum kits in the flesh may not sound anything like your preconception. What you hear on recordings, television and live concerts can be very misleading. The drums have been processed through all sorts of studio and PA gear. In any case, drums sound quite different from a distance than they do when you’re sitting right on top of them, behind the kit. This is especially true when you’re playing on your own and the ring and resonance of the drums is not being absorbed by the sound of the other instruments.
It also hasn’t helped that for the last two decades drummers have regularly mimed on TV to tracks that have never been near a real drum kit nor seen a drumstick. They’ve been programmed on a computer, more often than not by a producer or keyboard player. The bottom line is this: drums ring and resonate a lot more in the flesh than you may imagine. This is perplexing for new drummers. I remember a young drummer telling me he’d just bought some new drums and they were ringing and how could he stop it?
He was genuinely surprised when I told him that was the whole idea. If his drums resonated a long time it probably meant they were good drums and the heads were fresh. Drummers still regularly plaster their top heads with horrid strips of sticky tape to get a more controlled and shorter sound, which is what they know from their CDs. If they could go into the studio and isolate their favourite drum tracks on the mixing desk they would probably be dumbfounded to hear just how much ringing and ambience were present.
The thing to appreciate is that the ringing overtones of a drum are mostly lost in the overall sound when a band plays. But that ambience and long decay is the way the drums project. If you muffle too much of it, your sound will be dry and dead and you won’t cut through. Out front you’ll perhaps hear some impact, but no body and tone. There will be times, when you use close miking, when you will need a bit of damping. We’ll talk about that later. But for now, don’t worry too much about your drums ringing.
Drum kits in the flesh may not sound anything like your preconception. What you hear on recordings, television and live concerts can be very misleading. The drums have been processed through all sorts of studio and PA gear. In any case, drums sound quite different from a distance than they do when you’re sitting right on top of them, behind the kit. This is especially true when you’re playing on your own and the ring and resonance of the drums is not being absorbed by the sound of the other instruments.
It also hasn’t helped that for the last two decades drummers have regularly mimed on TV to tracks that have never been near a real drum kit nor seen a drumstick. They’ve been programmed on a computer, more often than not by a producer or keyboard player. The bottom line is this: drums ring and resonate a lot more in the flesh than you may imagine. This is perplexing for new drummers. I remember a young drummer telling me he’d just bought some new drums and they were ringing and how could he stop it?
He was genuinely surprised when I told him that was the whole idea. If his drums resonated a long time it probably meant they were good drums and the heads were fresh. Drummers still regularly plaster their top heads with horrid strips of sticky tape to get a more controlled and shorter sound, which is what they know from their CDs. If they could go into the studio and isolate their favourite drum tracks on the mixing desk they would probably be dumbfounded to hear just how much ringing and ambience were present.
The thing to appreciate is that the ringing overtones of a drum are mostly lost in the overall sound when a band plays. But that ambience and long decay is the way the drums project. If you muffle too much of it, your sound will be dry and dead and you won’t cut through. Out front you’ll perhaps hear some impact, but no body and tone. There will be times, when you use close miking, when you will need a bit of damping. We’ll talk about that later. But for now, don’t worry too much about your drums ringing.
Sustainable Woods
The mention of real mahogany leads us to another question. How damaging is a drum making to the world’s shrinking rainforests? Whenever I’ve asked drum companies they have, of course, all said they only use hardwoods for their regular lines from sustainable, managed and replenishable stocks. They’re well aware of the problem.
But this is a hot political issue and despite n or because of - many hours looking around on the web I don’t feel qualified to make any binding judgments. There are surprising labyrinthine issues and arguments, which are far too abstruse and involved to explore here. Most people accept, however, that deforestation of old growth timbers is detrimental to the world’s eco-systems. Many species are under threat and some trees take hundreds of years to grow to maturity.
But is the world going to stop using hard wood products? It’s a similar dilemma we face every time we fill up the car with petrol. Are we suddenly going to stop driving? I don’t think so. Luckily the impact of the drum industry on timber resources is minute compared with that of the construction and furniture industries. But it’s still an issue that drummers might want to take time to consider. You can divide hardwoods into two categories. Those which are managed, replanted and harvested; and those from tropical forests, mainly in the Far East, Africa, Central and South America, etc, which are to a large extent irreplaceable. I think we’ve all heard something of the rain forest issues.
The managed forests, on the other hand, are mostly in the northern hemisphere and include relatively fast growing species like maple, birch and beech. These are what most high-end kits are made from. My guess is that if you buy a typical professional set made of maple or birch, etc, you’re on pretty safe ground. Phew! But what about the truly exotic woods which increasingly appear on mouthwateringly beautiful, limited edition drums? You may need to ask some searching questions of the manufacturers.
There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation, for instance that the wood is from trees which have fallen through natural causes, storms or earthquakes, or that the timber has been salvaged from ancient wooden buildings, etc. There are reputable timber companies that deal in small quantities of exotic timbers that have come through these relatively blameless routes. A good example is the Exotic Finish series from DW, which scours wood yards for rare, one-off logs that may have been lying around for decades.
And then there are DW’s Lake Superior Timeless Timber drums. These are veneered with timber made from logs that had been submerged at the bottom of Lake Superior for a century. The reason genuinely old timbers are so prized is that they come from ancient trees from deep in the forest, where there is little light and the growth rings are exceptionally densely packed. This means the wood is extra hard and resonant.
It is impossible to get that sort of wood from regularly harvested, sustainable, new growth forests. So modern hardwood drums, while being beautifully made and finished, lack that extra something that comes from truly old wood. And this, of course, is the argument for vintage wood shells. Drums from the 1920s and 1930s, for example, were made at a time when old growth timber was more readily available.
The longer you keep your modern kit though, the more wood will dry and increase in resonance. If you’ve got a well-made modern kit, just remember it will one day be a vintage kit too.
But this is a hot political issue and despite n or because of - many hours looking around on the web I don’t feel qualified to make any binding judgments. There are surprising labyrinthine issues and arguments, which are far too abstruse and involved to explore here. Most people accept, however, that deforestation of old growth timbers is detrimental to the world’s eco-systems. Many species are under threat and some trees take hundreds of years to grow to maturity.
But is the world going to stop using hard wood products? It’s a similar dilemma we face every time we fill up the car with petrol. Are we suddenly going to stop driving? I don’t think so. Luckily the impact of the drum industry on timber resources is minute compared with that of the construction and furniture industries. But it’s still an issue that drummers might want to take time to consider. You can divide hardwoods into two categories. Those which are managed, replanted and harvested; and those from tropical forests, mainly in the Far East, Africa, Central and South America, etc, which are to a large extent irreplaceable. I think we’ve all heard something of the rain forest issues.
The managed forests, on the other hand, are mostly in the northern hemisphere and include relatively fast growing species like maple, birch and beech. These are what most high-end kits are made from. My guess is that if you buy a typical professional set made of maple or birch, etc, you’re on pretty safe ground. Phew! But what about the truly exotic woods which increasingly appear on mouthwateringly beautiful, limited edition drums? You may need to ask some searching questions of the manufacturers.
There may be a perfectly reasonable explanation, for instance that the wood is from trees which have fallen through natural causes, storms or earthquakes, or that the timber has been salvaged from ancient wooden buildings, etc. There are reputable timber companies that deal in small quantities of exotic timbers that have come through these relatively blameless routes. A good example is the Exotic Finish series from DW, which scours wood yards for rare, one-off logs that may have been lying around for decades.
And then there are DW’s Lake Superior Timeless Timber drums. These are veneered with timber made from logs that had been submerged at the bottom of Lake Superior for a century. The reason genuinely old timbers are so prized is that they come from ancient trees from deep in the forest, where there is little light and the growth rings are exceptionally densely packed. This means the wood is extra hard and resonant.
It is impossible to get that sort of wood from regularly harvested, sustainable, new growth forests. So modern hardwood drums, while being beautifully made and finished, lack that extra something that comes from truly old wood. And this, of course, is the argument for vintage wood shells. Drums from the 1920s and 1930s, for example, were made at a time when old growth timber was more readily available.
The longer you keep your modern kit though, the more wood will dry and increase in resonance. If you’ve got a well-made modern kit, just remember it will one day be a vintage kit too.
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