"You're so solid"......when this compliments starts to become unflattering. :(

[iwokojance]

As a songwriter, performing/recording with a solid drummer is much more desirable than doing so with a showboat drummer. Not that I don't appreciate that kind of drumming. It has it's place. It's fun to watch players like Dennis Chambers jam...but he also knows how to lay back a little and let the song work. The best drummers know how to show restraint and play to compliment the music.

I like rock music a lot, and a musician like Charlie Watts is perfect.

[MOUSE]

Just to add for interest sake, the Brian Eno story ....

time perception in drummers

Early this winter, I joined Eagleman in London for his most recent project: a study of time perception in drummers. Timing studies tend to be performed on groups of random subjects or on patients with brain injuries or disorders. They've given us a good sense of average human abilities, but not the extremes: just how precise can a person's timing be? "In neuroscience, you usually look for animals that are best at something," Eagleman told me, over dinner at an Italian restaurant in Notting Hill. "If it's memory, you study songbirds; if it's olfaction, you look at rats and dogs. If I were studying athletes, I'd want to find the guy who can run a four-minute mile. I wouldn't want a bunch of chubby high-school kids."
The idea of studying drummers had come from Brian Eno, the composer, record producer, and former member of the band Roxy Music. Over the years, Eno had worked with U2, David Byrne, David Bowie, and some of the world's most rhythmically gifted musicians. He owned a studio a few blocks away, in a converted stable on a cobblestoned cul-de-sac, and had sent an e-mail inviting a number of players to participate in Eagleman's study. "The question is: do drummers have different brains from the rest of us?" Eno said. "Everyone who has ever worked in a band is sure that they do."
...
It was while they were there that Eno told Eagleman the story that inspired the drumming study.
"I was working with Larry Mullen, Jr., on one of the U2 albums," Eno told me. " 'All That You Don't Leave Behind,' or whatever it's called." Mullen was playing drums over a recording of the band and a click track—a computer-generated beat that was meant to keep all the overdubbed parts in synch. In this case, however, Mullen thought that the click track was slightly off: it was a fraction of a beat behind the rest of the band. "I said, 'No, that can't be so, Larry,' " Eno recalled. " 'We've all worked to that track, so it must be right.' But he said, 'Sorry, I just can't play to it.' "
Eno eventually adjusted the click to Mullen's satisfaction, but he was just humoring him. It was only later, after the drummer had left, that Eno checked the original track again and realized that Mullen was right: the click was off by six milliseconds. "The thing is," Eno told me, "when we were adjusting it I once had it two milliseconds to the wrong side of the beat, and he said, 'No, you've got to come back a bit.' Which I think is absolutely staggering."
Eagleman arrived at Eno's studio late the next morning, carrying a pair of laptops and a wireless EEG monitor. "This thing is so cool!" he said, pulling the latter from its foam-cushioned case. "They did the full T.S.A. search on me at the airport." He clamped the EEG on his head—it looked like a giant tarantula perched there—then watched as sixteen wavering lines appeared onscreen, in candy-stripe colors. Each line represented the electrical activity at a different point in his brain. The drummers would wear this while taking a set of four tests, Eagleman explained. The tests were like simple video games, designed by his lab to measure different forms of timing: keeping a steady beat, comparing the lengths of two tones, synchronizing a beat to an image, and comparing visual or audible rhythms to one another. "The EEG can pick up twenty-thousandths of a second," he said. "Brain activity doesn't even go that fast, so we're oversampling by a lot. But why not?"
While Eagleman set up testing areas in two rooms, Eno bustled around the studio tidying up, talking to his cats, and brewing tea. The stable had been converted into an airy, skylit space with a circular staircase that led to the former hayloft, now filled with computer workstations. The back corner was flanked by a pair of enormous monochords: single-stringed electric instruments of Eno's design, made of railroad ties. Eno was clean-shaven and dressed all in black. He had a round, impish face and rectangular glasses with a pixellated pattern punched along the temples.
"Drummers are very hard to control," he said, stuffing some Christmas cards into their envelopes. "I didn't hear anything for days. Then suddenly everybody decided to come, and to bring their friends. So we may have a flood of drummers. Or we may have no one at all." He was a little worried that they'd get hungry or bored. ("They're probably more likely to come if there's a sort of 'scene' going on," he'd written Eagleman a few weeks earlier.) So he sent an assistant to buy pastries and mixed nuts, and brought out "various entertainments" for the drummers to play with, including a drum synthesizer.
"The more competitive they feel about this, the better," Eagleman said. "A big part of it is making sure they pay attention."
"That will be hard," Eno replied.
The first subject wandered in at around noon—a scruffy, swivel-hipped young redhead named Daniel Maiden-Wood, who played drums for the singer Anna Calvi. By midafternoon, the place was full. Larry Mullen, Jr., was on tour in Australia, but the makings of a remarkable rhythm section were sprawled on Eno's sofas and chairs. Among them were jazz musicians, Afro-Cuban percussionists, and the drummer for Razorlight, a British band with a pair of multi-platinum albums. Will Champion, of Coldplay, came in looking like a lumberjack who'd taken a wrong turn. (When he removed his yarn cap to reveal a large bullet head, Eagleman said it was perfect for the EEG.) Champion had worked with Eno on "Viva la Vida," the 2008 album that topped both the British and the American charts, solidifying Coldplay's standing as the world's best-selling rock group. "He's like a human metronome," Eno said. "If you say to him, 'What is seventy-eight beats per minute?,' he will go tap, tap, tap. And he's dead on."
The friendly rivalry that Eagleman had imagined among players never quite materialized. (He might have had better luck with a roomful of lead singers.) Instead, they told drummer jokes. How do you know when there's a drummer at your door? The knocking gets faster and faster. Had we heard about the drummer who tried to commit suicide? He threw himself behind a train. Eno had been recording drum parts most of his life, but he claimed to be rhythmically challenged. "I suffer from what my friend Leo Abrahams calls the honky offset—the tendency of white players to be early on the beat," he said. "It's eleven milliseconds. If you delay the recording by that much, it sounds much better."
Nevertheless, as pairs of drummers shuffled back and forth from the testing stations, a certain wounded professional pride was in evidence. The players had no trouble comparing a tone or keeping a steady beat, but the visual-timing tests were giving them fits. Eagleman had promised that the results would be kept anonymous, but he'd programmed each battery of tests to end with a cheeky evaluation: "You're a rock star," for those who scored in the top twenty-five per cent; "Ready for the big time," for the second quartile; "Ready for open-mike night," for those in the next group; and "Go back to band camp," for the bottom quarter. No one wanted to go to band camp.
A drummer's timing is a physical thing, they agreed, like dancing. Tapping a rhythm on a trackpad robs it of all sense of movement or muscle memory. Yet many of them played to click tracks even onstage, and their sense of tempo had been conditioned and codified by years in the studio. Hip-hop was eighty or ninety beats per minute, they said, Afrobeat around a hundred and ten. Disco stuck so insistently to a hundred and twenty that you could run the songs one after another without missing a beat. "There wasn't a fraction of deviance," Eno said. In the heat of a performance, drummers sometimes rushed the beat or hung back a little, to suit the mood. But as click tracks became more common such deviations had to be re-created artificially. To Champion's amusement, Coldplay had lately taken to programming elaborate "tempo maps" for its live shows, with click tracks designed to speed up or slow down during a song. "It re-creates the excitement of a track that's not so rigid," Champion said.
When it was his turn to take Eagleman's test, Champion spent nearly twice as long at the computer as the others—his competitive spirit roused at last. He needn't have worried. Eagleman's results later showed a "huge statistical difference," as he put it, between the drummers' timing and that of the random control subjects he'd tested back in Houston. When asked to keep a steady beat, for instance, the controls wavered by an average of thirty-five milliseconds; the best drummer was off by less than ten. Eno was right: drummers do have different brains from the rest. "They kicked ass over the controls," Eagleman said. His next task would be to use the EEG data to locate the most active areas of the drummers' brains, then target them with bursts of magnetic stimulation to see if he could disrupt their timing. "Now that we know that there is something anatomically different about them," he said, "we want to see if we can mess it up."
Whether they'd want to participate again was another matter. Champion, for one, looked a little punch-drunk after his test. "It's hard not to feel like it's a sort of personal evaluation," he said, as he was putting on his coat. "Hopefully, it will be useful for some larger purpose. But you still want to feel like you're up to snuff." He shrugged. "Luckily, it told me that I should be a rock star. So it's nice to know that that wasn't wasted."
...
What would it be like to have a drummer's timing? I wondered. Would you hear the hidden rhythms of everyday life, the syncopations of the street? When I asked the players at Eno's studio this, they seemed to find their ability as much an annoyance as a gift. Like perfect pitch, which dooms the possessor to hear every false note and flat car horn, perfect timing may just make a drummer more sensitive to the world's arrhythmias and repeated patterns, Eagleman said—to the flicker of computer screens and fluorescent lights. Reality, stripped of an extra beat in which the brain orchestrates its signals, isn't necessarily a livelier place. It's just filled with badly dubbed television shows.
"We're stuck in time like fish in water," Eagleman said, oblivious of its currents until a bubble floats by. It's usually best that way. He had spent the past ten years peering at the world through such gaps in our perception, he said. "But sometimes you get so far down deep into reality that you want to pull back. Sometimes, in a great while, I'll think, What if I find out that this is all an illusion?" He felt this most keenly with his schizophrenic subjects, who tended to do poorly on timing tests. The voices in their heads, he suspected, were no different from anyone else's internal monologues; their brains just processed them a little out of sequence, so that the thoughts seemed to belong to someone else. "All it takes is this tiny tweak in the brain, this tiny change in perception," he said, "and what you see as real isn't real to anyone else."
...

[David Stanoch]

This is a very interesting thread to read, full of wisdom, insight, reassurance and humor from the experience of all of have participated. I think it's a shining example of what makes the DC a great hang and learning environment.

While there's lots of tempting perspective to latch on to here I'll try to keep it brief (a real challenge for me, I know...), but I've definitely given thought to the subject - thoughts you can read, if interested, here:  http://www.rhythmelodic.com/david_lessons_timekeeping.html]http://www.rhythmelodic.com/david_lessons_timekeeping.html

The last couple posts really caught my attention...

As a songwriter, performing/recording with a solid drummer is much more desirable than doing so with a showboat drummer.... The best drummers know how to show restraint and play to compliment the music.

You'd think everyone would get this by now, but not so. So many young players, in particular, are inspired by the razzle-dazzle and showmanship of drumming that it becomes a rite-of-passage to learn to settle down, listen and open up to comprehending what everyone else in the band typically wants from their drummer.

In my personal experience there was no better lesson for me in understanding my role behind the kit in a band than leaving that post to come out front and play melody on vibes or guitar and feel another drummer supporting me (or not...) from behind. Once you are out front and trying to lock in w/the rhythm section, your perspective does a 180º turn. I finally understood the "leading through supporting" balance the great drummers provide much clearer than I thought I did.

Lastly, real quick - a question for MOUSE: What, sir, is the source of that Eno story you posted? I'd appreciate knowing the answer as I'd like to pass it along. It's fascinating stuff. Thanks in advance!

[MOUSE]

In a way the rock circus and glossy magazines hook kids into drumming with that showmanship and mindblowing 1000 beats per second kick drums, nothing wrong with that but doesn't portray the hard slog those "name" drummers did to get there, and that behind all the show there is usually a good groove going and i think many kids don't get that from the start.  It's a wonder twirling hasn't been banned anyway with all the health and safety compliance going on today  ;D

Aside, wonder  has anyone ever actually had to have a drum stick removed from an eye socket ;) ........ ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)


Sir, here is addy for that long winded and interesting thing i posted.
   http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/25/110425fa_fact_bilger?printable=true&currentPage=all]http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/25/110425fa_fact_bilger?printable=true&currentPage=all

David the "Thoughts about timekeeping" concept of your, i read through it, and then your Biography, you really know what you are talking about and i Thank You for sharing that with this community. 8)

[Chris Whitten]

I've told this before....
I did a drum clinic once.
My rare drum clinics are based around song performances - so you get the picture.

At the end of the 'show' a young kid came gamboling up to me and gushed "I love your feel". I admit i was shocked, taken aback, you never hear that kind of thing. So I thanked him and tried to speak briefly about feel. But I soon noticed a confused look and his eyes glazing over. It's then I twigged he'd actually said "I love your fills".  :-[

[Tim van de Ven]

I've told this before....
I did a drum clinic once.
My rare drum clinics are based around song performances - so you get the picture.

At the end of the 'show' a young kid came gamboling up to me and gushed "I love your feel". I admit i was shocked, taken aback, you never hear that kind of thing. So I thanked him and tried to speak briefly about feel. But I soon noticed a confused look and his eyes glazing over. It's then I twigged he'd actually said "I love your fills".  :-[

I suppose that you could take solace in the fact that he didn't say, "I love you Phil".  ;)

[David Stanoch]

I've told this before....
I did a drum clinic once.
My rare drum clinics are based around song performances - so you get the picture.

At the end of the 'show' a young kid came gamboling up to me and gushed "I love your feel". I admit i was shocked, taken aback, you never hear that kind of thing. So I thanked him and tried to speak briefly about feel. But I soon noticed a confused look and his eyes glazing over. It's then I twigged he'd actually said "I love your fills".  :-[

Chris,

Go figure, right?

I hadn't heard that before. I laughed out loud but it was because I feel your pain. I'm laughing again, actually. "Whaddagonnado?" is the thought crossing my mind.

In a way the rock circus and glossy magazines hook kids into drumming with that showmanship and mindblowing 1000 beats per second kick drums, nothing wrong with that but doesn't portray the hard slog those "name" drummers did to get there, and that behind all the show there is usually a good groove going and i think many kids don't get that from the start.  It's a wonder twirling hasn't been banned anyway with all the health and safety compliance going on today  ;D

Aside, wonder  has anyone ever actually had to have a drum stick removed from an eye socket ;) ........ ;) ;) ;) ;) ;)


Sir, here is addy for that long winded and interesting thing i posted.
   http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/25/110425fa_fact_bilger?printable=true&currentPage=all]http://www.newyorker.com/reporting/2011/04/25/110425fa_fact_bilger?printable=true&currentPage=all

David the "Thoughts about timekeeping" concept of your, i read through it, and then your Biography, you really know what you are talking about and i Thank You for sharing that with this community. 8)

MOUSE,

Thank you so much for the kind words, of course, and especially that link to the full piece from the excerpt you posted. I believe in this theory and also the relativity of time. Billy Martin and his first teacher, Allen Herman, share a fascinating discussion of those concepts in Billy's new "Life on Drums" DVD, which I highly recommend to everyone.

I forwarded the link to Allen, whom I've gotten to know recently, and he loved it. Thanks very much once again - it's an epic article!

[MOUSE]

But then! if we are so good at time, why am i always rushing to get to work in the mornings because i'm late  lol must be all the late nights.

One day i will give up my day job ....sorry had to share that dream with you. ;D

[Ardent15]

Speaking as a guitar player (which is my main instrument  ;D )and from my admittedly limited experience playing in band situations, I find that a "solid" drummer who may be "boring" is far preferable to someone who tries to showboat and ends up losing the rest of the band.

Phil Rudd and Charlie Watts...that solid simplicity is very, very powerful on a deep level to me.

[NY Frank]

I suppose that you could take solace in the fact that he didn't say, "I love you Phil".  ;)

Ba-dum - pshhh.

I haven't re-read this long running thread, but I'm sitting here chilling while cocktailizing, so I'll comment:  I would Always consider "you're so solid" a compliment.  To me, that's someone saying: "you play in the pocket, you play for the song."   

The interesting thing I'm learning over time is: the less I play, the more I enjoy playing.  Over the last few gigs, I've really been stripping things down and focusing way more on the rhythm, not the fills.  It's actually very rewarding if you can get your head there.

[Ardent15]

The interesting thing I'm learning over time is: the less I play, the more I enjoy playing.  Over the last few gigs, I've really been stripping things down and focusing way more on the rhythm, not the fills.  It's actually very rewarding if you can get your head there.

The way I see it (this applies to guitar too), focusing on the rhythm is a way of checking your ego at the door. If you focus on the rhythm, you think about what supports the song underneath, what the bass player is doing, what the pianist or rhythm guitarist is doing..if you focus on fills or solos, you can come off as being self-absorbed.

The fills/solos/lead stuff is usually the icing on the cake. The rhythm is the foundation of it all.

[Ryan Culberson]

Played a rare mid-week gig last night with my band that was quite well-received.  This morning when I woke up, I checked out our Facebook page and saw a wonderful compliment from a respected drummer and studio owner here in Bakersfield.  When I read the compliment about my playing, I immediately thought of this thread.  These are the type of compliments that I find most validating... 



Cheers,
Ryan