A couple weeks ago, I wrote a post on my first experience sitting behind the Rock Bank drum kit and what an embarrassment it was. Well, I ran across this gem on YouTube yesterday which shows that I'm not the only drummer that has some trouble with Rock Band. Have fun:

I couldn't believe my eyes. Rush hasn't been on American television for 33 years and when they decide to break that streak, they pick The Colbert Report. Best question of the interview:

You're known for some sort of long songs. Have you ever written a song so epic that, by the end of the song, you're actually being influenced by yourself at the beginning of it because it happened so much earlier in your career?

So here's a little Friday afternoon treat for you. Enjoy!

While traveling last weekend, a good friend recommended I give Coldplay's new album, Viva la Vida, a listen. I'm not a huge Coldplay fan, but I thought that X&Y was a very solid album and a great collection of songs, so I went ahead and got a copy of the new album.

Overall, it's a pretty good album which gets better after repeated listening (their last album was exactly the same way). I think Coldplay writes great songs, but I have never really heard anything in the drumming that made me sit up and take notice. However, something caught my ear on my first listen and I knew then and there that I was going to need to figure it out.

It's on track four, a melancholy little tune called 42. About 1:35 into the song, Will Champion kicks in with a tasty little groove that, taken out of the context of the song, would actually work just as well as a funk groove. Here's a transcription:

As you can see, the phrase starts solid on the downbeat, but a couple sixteenth notes on the hi-hat offset the groove by an eighth note until it comes back together at the end. This displacement of the back beat has the effect of really driving this part of the song and creating a very funky feel to boot. In fact, this pattern reminds me a lot of some of the grooves laid down by Clyde Stubblefield on James Brown's tunes over the years, specifically I Got The Feelin' and Cold Sweat.

Here's a quick video of me playing this groove so you can get a feel for it (assuming you haven't or have no intention of buying the album):

*Note: If you see an image above for Microsoft Silverlight instead of a video player, please click on the link and download Silverlight. It's perfectly safe and will allow you to watch my video.

Try it out. There's a lot of fundamentals here for building great funk grooves.

Dixon Drums launched a contest last weekend that I think a lot of you are going to want to check out. They're calling it "Drum Your Way to Hollywood" and, if you win, Dixon is going to give you some great gear and you get to play on a television special.

First, watch this overview of the contest:

Now, here are the details:

1. Go out and visit your local Dixon Drum dealer (to find the one closest to you, click here)
2. Bring a friend along and have him/her record you playing your best 2 minute drum solo on the DEMON kit
3. Upload it to http://youtube.com/group/DixonDrumsContest and share your link with anybody you think will vote for you

The public will vote to decide the top six entries to be submitted to an A&R Channel panel in Hollywood who will declare a Grand Prize winner. The Grand Prize winner will win a 3-day/2-night trip for two to Hollywood, California and perform with studio musicians live in front of an A&R panel at a major recording studio! The performance will be filmed and featured on the A&R Channel on television! The winner will also get to talk music and drums with the execs. Five other talented, inspiring drummers will get free gear from Dixon.

< final the and voting public for eligible be to 2008 27, September on ET p.m. 11:59:59 by submitted completed must entries>

In addition, Dixon will present the Grand Prize winner with a Dixon Outlaw Series 7-piece drum set and a full complement of hardware (ARV: $10,000). The five runner-ups will each receive a Dixon snare drum (ARV: $300). Be sure to check out the full contest rules so your video is submitted properly and gets posted for voting.

All entries must be completed and submitted by 11:59:59 p.m. ET on September 27, 2008 to be eligible for public voting and the final judging.

One of the things I like best about this contest is that it's being held in small, independently owned music and drums shops, not in the major retails chains. Those huge warehouse style stores have their place, but for my money and time, I find a lot more knowledge and expertise in the smaller stores owned and operated by people with a passion for music.

This is a great opportunity to what you already love to do, just in front of a camera. And for an investment of one hour of your time you get a shot at winning some great gear and possibly flying to LA to jam and hang out with some of the top musicians in the country.

Now if you'll excuse me, I need to go look up my local Dixon dealer...

The bass player in Lake 32, Jeff Laird, is also our resident audio/recording engineer. As we finish writing our first set of songs, the band is looking to get some quality recordings we can post on our web site and on MySpace, but we don't want to drop a couple of grand to go to a recording studio for a few days.

Obviously, recording drums is not an activity for the faint of heart. Where other instruments can plug directly into the board, the drums need to be miced and EQed acoustically which can make for a long and frustrating process. And an expensive one if you close-mic each drum on the kit. I play a six-piece Gretsch kit, so that's a minimum of nine microphones when you throw in the two overheads and a condenser for the hi-hat.

Jeff has proposed a new micing method I'm interested in trying. It's called the Glyn Johns method and it only requires four microphones: One for the kick, one for the snare and two overheads. As opposed to focusing on the quantity of microphones, it focuses on the quality of the gear and the exact placement of the mics around the kit to get a really quality recording.

Jeff sent me an article that lays this out in detail, so I won't bother to reproduce it here and encourage you to check it out for yourself.

We're actually going to set this up in my home rehearsal area next weekend and do some recording the following week. I'll be sure to follow-up on this with the results and post some drum tracks so you can hear the outcome for yourselves.

Has anyone else used this method before successfully? Any tips or tricks you can offer Jeff and I as we work through this in the coming weeks?

For the past few months, myself and the other three members of Lake 32, Chris Sebastian, Rich Houke and Jeff Laird, have been writing and rehearsing in order to begin playing some dates late this Summer and this Fall. I'm pleased to announce that we've booked our first gig for later this week.

This coming Friday night, July 25th, Lake 32 will be opening for Morning Vision Blue at Ten Mile House in Affton, Missouri. We have a 45 minute set lined up and should hit the stage around 9:30 PM. Also performing that evening will be Kristen Foht and Brian Hoehn.

[Update]: Lake 32 is now headlining the show tomorrow night. We will have three short opening acts starting at 9:00 PM and we will take the stage around 11:30 PM. 

Here's the address:

Ten Mile House
9420 Gravois Rd.
Affton, MO 63123

Map

If you're free Friday night, come out to Ten Mile House and support live local original music in St. Louis. See you there!

I spent some time this afternoon learning how to create a Deep Zoom application with Microsoft Silverlight by grabbing a bunch of digital photos of my favorite drummers and creating a digital mosaic. Here it is below:

If instead of the mosaic you see an image for Silverlight, go ahead and click on it to download the Silverlight player. It's perfectly safe and required to view the mosaic.

To zoom in and look at the photos in more detail, double-click or use your mouse wheel. You can also simply click and drag to move around in the photo. Give it a try, you'll like it.

Many thanks to Bernhard Castiglioni and DrummerWorld.com -- all the photos above are from that site.

Have a great weekend and enjoy!

There are a few gigs coming up for both of my bands here in St. Louis coming up and I wanted to drop a note out here so no one can say I didn't mention them ahead of time.

Lake 32 is opening for the CD release and farewell concert for Morning Vision Blue at Ten Mile House on the evening of Friday, July 25th. We've been writing and rehearsing for several months and this will be our first show, so please come to see us and stay to hear MVB's final show.

Both Lake 32 and Meteor Pilots are playing the Race for the Rivers benefit music festival on Saturday, August 23rd. The Pilot play at 5:00 PM and Lake 32 follows at 6:00 PM. This is a free event in Frontier Park, St. Charles, right on the Missouri River front. It should be a great day of local music, so please come on down and check it out and support a great cause.

That's all for now on the gig schedule. I'll make updates as new shows come up.

I had a great gig with Trigger 5 Sunday afternoon at the Augusta Brewing Company down along the Missouri River. It was a beautiful place to play and a wild set as I didn't know the majority of the songs, but Abe (bass player) and Alex (lead guitar) did a great job of queuing me on the stops and start in the tunes. Also, thanks much Mike Heeter for the invite to sit in on the gig -- I had a blast.

I am primarily a modern/prog rock guy, so sitting in for three sets with a traditional country band was a terrific learning experience. There are few genres of music where the drummer is absolutely required to play for the song than in country. There are a few areas here and there where you can add some color to your playing but, for the most part, you are there to drive the beat and help establish the feel for the song.

From the drummers standpoint, there are basically three "grooves" in you need to be able to play to successfully pull off a country gig:

1. A 50's rock-n-roll beat
2. A shuffle/swing beat
3. A train beat

I got a little insight yesterday to playing an effective and grooving train beat I thought I'd share.

Dissecting the Train Beat

At its most basic, a train beat consists of eighth notes on the snare drum with accents on 2 and on the & of 3 and 4. Transposed, it looks like this:

This is one of those areas where you can add some nice touches of color, like accenting both eighth notes on the second beat, like this:

Depending on the feel of the song, you can play this rhythm as either straight eighth notes or by shuffling them, like so:

Traditionally, the train beat has been played using brushes. While you can easily play the rhythm with sticks, you will require a lot of volume control to avoid having the snare drum completely take over the tune. The only issue with brushes is getting enough volume to cut through at a live gig, especially outdoors and without microphones on your kit, as was the case yesterday at the Trigger 5 gig.

Enter the Tala Wand

I first bought a pair of the Steve Smith signature Tala Wands by Vic Firth a couple of years ago. I know that the other major stick manufacturers also have similarly constructed sticks, so if you don't care for Vic Firth, you can probably find something comparable. I've used these sticks on a few occasions where I needed to cut through the mix but still strictly control the volume. They sound great on my Zildian K Custom Session Hi-hats and really produce a nice pop on the snare drum.

The key to the unique sound of the Tala Wand is that it's a hybrid between a brush and a stick. Multiple thin wooded dowels surround a foam core and give it a scattered, brush-like sound but allow the stick to really pop off the drum head and cut through the mix at a live gig.

To get a feel for the difference in sound, here is a quick video of me playing a classic train beat using a set of brushes, Tala Wands and a standard pair of sticks:

*Note: If you see an image above for Microsoft Silverlight instead of a video player, please click on the link and download Silverlight. It's perfectly safe and will allow you to watch my video. 

See the difference? I picked up my pair of Tala Wands at my local drum shop for $14.95, so they're not a big investment and they can really add a different texture to your sound, whether that sound is country, rock, jazz or whatever.

Yesterday evening, I became perhaps that last drummer in the world to sit down and play the video game, Rock Band. Some friends invited us over to their house for dinner and a "concert," and I was keen to give this a try after reading an excellent article in this month's Modern Drummer by Andy Ziker about his students improving their technique by playing Rock Band at home.

My daughters were very excited for me to join them in this, which is interesting: I've tried multiple times to teach them the basics of the percussive arts to no avail. So, I had two primary objectives going into last evening's "tour":

1. To see how well my daughters we able to play "the kit" in Rock Band
2. To see how well I could play

The Non-Drummers Drum
I started by hanging back and letting the kids play a couple songs so I could get the hang of how everything worked. My eldest daughter sat down at "the kit" first and they were going to play "Say It Ain't So" by Weezer.

All in all, she did a really great job. The first thing I noticed is that Rock Band represents a new way to help build solid time-keeping skills. Anybody my age remembers sitting down at the kit, headphones squarely fixed over our ears, connected to a metronome pumping that incessant clack-click-click-click-clack-click-click-click while we are trying to play something musical to it. It was difficult, but it was the way we learned to develop our sense of time and, eventually, play to a click track in a recording studio.

Rock Band actually enforces the same kind of rigid time-keeping as the metronome, but makes it fun and musical at the same time. As my daughter plowed through "Say It Ain't So," I watched her carefully (this particular song in the game has a lot of eighth notes on the "hi-hat" and snare hits on 2 & 4, more closely mimicking the actual groove of the song) and she was keeping good solid time and, consequently, racking up a huge score in the game. We've worked the metronome at home many times and not enjoyed the same success.

The other interesting technique-builder in Rock Band is independence. Several of the songs, especially when you get into the higher skill levels, require you to work the hands and the "kick drum" simultaneously. And again, because it's a game, the real song is playing in the background and there is a bonus score to consider, I watched my daughter nail that Weezer song in a way that she probably would not have been able to do studying with me in my studio.

I certainly don't think that Harmonix Music Systems (the production company for Rock Band) intended to create an educational game for drummers but, in a way, that's exactly what they've done. I didn't observe the same level of rudimentary skill building Mr. Ziker writes about in his MD article, but Rock Band definitely can help new drummers learn time-keeping and independence in a way that is fun and appeals to this new generation in a way that the "old school" methods simply won't.

Old School Meets New School
Then it was my turn to sit down and try the kit. Expectations were high. Most of the people in the room had heard me play live with a band before, so it was expected that I would crush any song that was selected. I mean, after all, it's just a game, right?

My wife grabbed the guitar and we selected "We Won't Get Fooled Again" by The Who. One of my very favorite drummers of all time, Keith Moon, and a tune that I've play a hundred time on stage. I was going to kill at this game...

Long story short, it was a debacle. Being fair and self-critical, this was the wrong song to start with. As free as Moon was with the groove on that tune, it didn't translate well to little colored bars streaming toward me on the screen. In effect, I was lost and thrashing around "the kit" like a newbie. It was embarrassing, but I got a nice round of applause when me managed to make it all the way through the song and not get booed off the stage.

I decided it was time to try something a little more straight ahead, so I picked "Foreplay/Longtime" by Boston. I made it through that tune pretty well (and kudos to our friend and the host of the party, Carol Garrett, on laying down the beautiful vocal line on a tough song). However, it was not without troubles.

Let's step back to the time-keeping aspect of the game. I can play very well to a click when need be. That being said, I'm definitely more of a "feel" player. Steady time is important, but so is letting the music "breathe" to achieve the right emotional connection with the listener. Rock Band will have none of that. If you get even a little bit off those eighth notes on the "ride cymbal," the drum track in the song stops and your start losing points and street cred very quickly.

The other thing I struggled with is not playing the "kick drum." I've been playing for so long, playing with only the right and left hands felt strange to me. I have a reputation for a heavy right foot, ala Chad Smith of the RHCP. It was everything I had to keep my right foot still. However, my left foot, pedal-free, was happily bouncing up and down on the off beats, creating a very funky groove for which I received no bonus points in the game.

Good For You, Good For Me
Overall, I think there are worse video games for kids to play than Rock Band for sure. I don't think anyone is going to be the Joe Satriani from playing the guitar in the game, but the role of the drummer is well represented and does teach some of the basics of the instrument to non-drummers and new students.

Though I didn't perform very well, it was an interesting challenge for me to play the game. When you've been playing for as long as I have, you get set in your ways and I think it's healthy for something like this to come along and kick you in the butt.

As I've told every student I've ever taught: "You get better by doing three things: Practice, practice and more practice."

Looks like I'm off to Best Buy this weekend.