Drumming
As a sufferer (undiagnosed) of ADD/OCD (obsessing about new ideas until I forget I was obsessed and then move on to some other obsession), I frequently have odd thoughts driving me to internet research. Yesterday was another of these odd thoughts.
I fell asleep for a couple of hours with my oldest daughter, who has been having trouble going to bed by herself. I was whipped anyway, so I donned the iPod, set it to shuffle, and laid down with her to establish that we were not, in fact, abandoning her in a dark room because we are mean parents, and adults need sleep too, so life is fair. When I woke, I had this strange vision of Phil Collins, emplaced in a massive drum set, parceling out slices of time for all of humanity. He was the nexus of our perception of time, and the universe rotated around his ability to consistently strike a beat with a regularity and a precision much the envy of those that design atomic clocks.
The vision led me to wonder about the accuracy of drummers in general. Music relies heavily on tempo, particular the music we enjoy today on the radio. Classical music shares this need, but, in general, there is a conductor providing visual clues of meter. Modern music needs the drum to pound it out and keep the performance all together.
So, to the net I turned.
There is an annual World’s Most Accurate Drummer contest, but unfortunately the press release doesn’t provide the timings. Then there is this 177 page thesis on micro-timing in music. I haven’t read it all, but so far it seems fascinating.
Last night I found a link to another scholarly paper that analyzed Phil Collins (ironic enough, given that I wasn’t searching for him specifically). The paper showed variations in his use of different components. For example, his high hat might proceed his snare by ten milliseconds, consistently. Or his bass might precede the theoretical beat by fifteen milliseconds, but with remarkable precision. For the life of me, I can’t find this link right now but will add it later if it turns up.
Finally, there is this interview with Ian Anderson from Jethro Tull, and again, Collins shows up without me really looking for him.
For instance (Anderson continues), Doane Perry has been measured as being a good 15 milliseconds ahead with his bass drum on a metronomic beat, whereas his snare drum tends to be sitting behind the beat, by the same 15 milliseconds. So Doane’s drumming — because the bass drum is always edging a bit in front — has an urgency to it, similar to the one occasion that Phil Collins played drums with us. He sat right on the front of the beat, and you really felt all the time that you had to follow the drummer, which is alright. But there’s an urgency, a very leaning-forward feel to it. Dave Mattacks — who we play with occasionally — has a style where his bass drum tends to sit very much on the beat, never in front. But Dave’s snare is so laid back that unless the band is aware of this, tempos tend to fall behind. These are some of the subtle differences in the way people play.
Barrie is not a metronomic drummer (Anderson adds), and no offense intended. Instead, he thinks in terms of patterns, and he’ll be thinking ahead quite a few bars when he’s playing — about how he’s going to improvise and embellish or develop a pattern. So he’s playing less for the moment and more with a view towards an overall arrangement and a level of detail. He’s a more intellectual sort of drummer, like maybe Bill Bruford was with Yes.
When it comes down to pure technical things (Anderson continues without pause), people are very different. And 15 milliseconds may not sound like a lifetime, but it is in drum terms. So if you have a drummer with a very laid-back approach on the snare drum, then everybody has to feel comfortable with that approach. And if you’re playing with Phil Collins, you have to be aware that you’ve got to keep up with the guy, because he’s not going to wait for you.
This leads to some fascinating questions, of which I have not had the time to research. Does each drummer have a unique stagger in his play, like a musical fingerprint? Does the machine precision of a drum machine diminish the warmth of music? Is precision even desirable beyond a certain point? Can drum machines be programmed with the ‘fingerprint’ of famous drummers to lend a new feel to their output?
And certainly this applies to non-percussive instrumentation. We could talk about piano players, violinists, guitarists and whatever else that might be interesting. It all comes down to human timing in music, and it seems that, like anything else in a performance, variations provide texture and warmth.
And no discussion of drumming would be complete without a link to the Greatest Drum Solo of All Time… (3:23 into this clip)
Look at that drum emplacement! He could defend that position from a platoon of Marines.
This concludes today’s obsession.
Technorati Tags: drumming, microtiming, phil, collins, precision, music
Filed under: Grab Bag
Hi – now you’re talking my subject! Those micro-seconds you’re talking about is that sense of being ‘on top of the beat’ or ‘behind the beat’. It doesn’t mean their speeding up or slowing down because the time between the beat remains constant (i.e. not variable, compressing, or expanding). Anyway, we can chat more on this when I see you on Monday.
Chris
Yeah, the beat seems to remain relatively constant, and that is something I wanted more data on. While someone may be in front of the beat, does the spacing between beats vary by any appreciable amount? I would find it hard to believe that someone can maintain single millisecond timing for an extended period of time. Wouldn’t there be some variation, even if the ear can’t really discern it? From my days in band, I felt I had a good sense of timing, but if someone put electronics to my tempo, how consistent would I be?
Whenever I had to sub in on bass drum, Mr. Haga (the Band Dictator) always informed me I was “behind the beat”, now I know what he meant. A Drum Major who couldn’t play the drums, I was a sham!