So where did this stuff come from?

Bo Eder

Bo Eder

Platinum Member
As some of you know, I've been watching and getting into George Kollias' Intense Metal Drumming II DVD, and although I haven't sat through the whole thing yet, I'm wondering where this style of super fast drumming came from?

I listen to the guitar parts, and those don't sound too crazy, but the drumming literally just becomes this blur going on underneath the guitars. Does anyone have an idea how this style of drumming evolved? I suppose if you played your regular ol' 2 & 4 snare drum stuff instead of what George plays, it would probably sound a little dull, but then I start hearing some musical stuff when you take away the vibrating drums. It looks really cool, though.

Any ideas? It'd be interesting to see why people came to play this way.
 
It all follows from Kill 'Em All, by Metallica, as near as I can tell. No one else was doing that ridiculous speed thing before that record-- Motorhead played kind of fast, but that was a different thing. I can't tell you what happened after KEA-- I haven't bought a metal album since 1983...

You sure I can't interest you in some Melvins, man? It's way more fun...
 
toddbishop said:
I can't tell you what happened after KEA-- I haven't bought a metal album since 1983...
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Reign In Blood, happened. Dave Lombardo absolutely let loose and as far as an all out assault of speed goes, it still holds it's own to this day IMHO.

But all in all, yep I agree. Listen to the early Motorhead albums like Overkill or Ace Of Spades and you can hear "Philthy" Taylor planting the seed....laying down the germ that would inspire the early thrash drummers like Lars, Lombardo or Charlie Benante. They pretty much inspired so much of what came after.

As Todd mentioned, Kill 'Em All, along with Slayer's Reign In Blood and Anthrax's Among The Living will offer pretty good examples of the origins of that style of playing.
 
I haven't listened to that specific DVD at all (or heard much of Kollias's playing), but usually I think the intent is to create a rhythmic dichotomy between the melodic instruments and the rhythmic ones. Of course, like any dichotomy, this can become overdone if not varied, which is why I like metal parts like this which actually fit the melodies' complexity most of the time.
 
Bo Eder said:
As some of you know, I've been watching and getting into George Kollias' Intense Metal Drumming II DVD, and although I haven't sat through the whole thing yet, I'm wondering where this style of super fast drumming came from?

I listen to the guitar parts, and those don't sound too crazy, but the drumming literally just becomes this blur going on underneath the guitars. Does anyone have an idea how this style of drumming evolved? I suppose if you played your regular ol' 2 & 4 snare drum stuff instead of what George plays, it would probably sound a little dull, but then I start hearing some musical stuff when you take away the vibrating drums. It looks really cool, though.

Any ideas? It'd be interesting to see why people came to play this way.
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It's a bit of the usual "but this one goes to eleven" thing. More screaming, more double bass, until it's sufficiently different that my parents hate it. Pantera was very influential, whether modern metal bands admit it or not.

But sample-replacement/enhancement software, popularized in the early 2000s along with Autotune, also played a part. It's impossible to record bass drums at such speeds and get the clarity and consistency you hear on recordings. Programs like SoundReplacer and Drumagog made it possible for bands to achieve that sound, sometimes even before they had hired a drummer, since such software could be found in many home and bedroom studios.
 
A bit more in depth that then Todd, that's like saying Everyone it all started with Miles Davis because he was the most famous.

Bo, checkout this movie: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0478209/ Really lays out a good timeline. Basically it starts with the proto-metal stuff of the 60's and 70's them moves into the New Wave of British Heavy Metal then into the American Thrash scene (Slayer Metallica ect). Just like people who grew up listening to Trad Jazz created Bop, the people who grew up listening to Thrash created the more extreme styles of Metal we have today.

As I see it, the really turning point was when Thrash with its long instrumental passages and riff-based song parts became Death Metal. So they went from THIS to THIS to THIS. WARNING***EXTREME METAL CONTENT***Possible NSFW***

I'm really skimming over a lot here but the point is that the overall feel was about the intensity and a overall layer of unrelenting percussion. Theories abound but I see it as getting back to a more primal style of musical expression played with the fineness of a skilled musician.
 
Pocket-full-of-gold said:
Reign In Blood, happened. Dave Lombardo absolutely let loose and as far as an all out assault of speed goes, it still holds it's own to this day IMHO.

But all in all, yep I agree. Listen to the early Motorhead albums like Overkill or Ace Of Spades and you can hear "Philthy" Taylor planting the seed....laying down the germ that would inspire the early thrash drummers like Lars, Lombardo or Charlie Benante. They pretty much inspired so much of what came after.

As Todd mentioned, Kill 'Em All, along with Slayer's Reign In Blood and Anthrax's Among The Living will offer pretty good examples of the origins of that style of playing.
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Yes, no doubt that double bass drumming as we know it today first originated with Taylor on Overkill (the song) which lead to Metallica/ Slayer et al.
But as to Bo's original question- surprised no-one had mentioned Death (and the subsequent advent of "death metal") which I would have thought to be the primary original influence on Kollias and the like.
It can be seen as a natural progression, just more and more speed with each generation of bands.
BTW Bo, if you think Kollias' drumming is just a blur, stay away from the band "Henker" (even I have to admit the bass drums are going so fast it sounds like a lawnmower)!
 
brentcn said:
It's a bit of the usual "but this one goes to eleven" thing. More screaming, more double bass, until it's sufficiently different that my parents hate it. Pantera was very influential, whether modern metal bands admit it or not.

But sample-replacement/enhancement software, popularized in the early 2000s along with Autotune, also played a part. It's impossible to record bass drums at such speeds and get the clarity and consistency you hear on recordings. Programs like SoundReplacer and Drumagog made it possible for bands to achieve that sound, sometimes even before they had hired a drummer, since such software could be found in many home and bedroom studios.
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So, when I listen to this stuff, am I hearing triggers on the bass drums? Or is it possible to play this fast with a consistent sound without them? I like the term "lawnmower drumming", but at times it also sounds like someone pulling a zipper ;)

I'll have to go back and listen to your examples, I do have one Megadeth album from the early 90s, but I don't recall the drums sounding anywhere close to George. I suppose, for this old jazzer, this evolution is just like how jazz kept getting faster and faster (I remember struggling to keep up playing Coltrane's Giant Steps in college). BUt thanks all for the replies - I'm off to go study some!

BTW - someone gave me a Dragonforce CD a while back, and I remember laughing when I first heard it - I thought I was listening to a video game soundtrack ;)
 
In addition to the good answers above:

"One" by Metallica played on MTV. It sent millions of kids to buy a double pedal and learn it.
Of course, many like me learned it, and thought, ok, I got that down, and left it at that. Others said, ok, now how to I improve upon this...

The whole guitar shred movement of the 80's was accompanied by drum shred movement.
Deen Castronova, Atma Anur and Scott Travis on all those Shrapnel record records pushed the concept of what could be done with double bass. And then when Scott Travis got the gig with Judas Priest, it brought that style more mainstream. Kids listened to those took that and mixed with all the other influences mentioned (NWOBHM, Metallica, Slayer, etc) and pushed it.
 
In the late 80's and into the 90's death metal really started to make its entrance. As was stated earlier, the band Death (formed in 83, first album Scream Bloody Gore in 87) is generally credited with starting the genre. Soon after we were blessed with bands like Bolt Thrower (In Battle There is No Law, 88), Obituary (Slowly We Rot, 89), Morbid Angel (Alters of Madness, 89), Deicide (self title, 90), Cannibal Corpse (Eaten Back to Life, 90), and Malevolent Creation (The Ten Commandments, 91). All of these bands were formed in Florida, except for Bolt Thrower who is from Coventry, England, and Cannibal Corpse who moved to Florida from Buffalo, New York.

George's band Nile released their first album in 98, and he joined the band in 2004. Derek Roddy spent a brief period in Nile, as well as Malevolent Creation.

I love this stuff, takes me back to high school. It also brings back some great memories, as I was lucky enough to share the stage with everyone listed with the exception of Death and Bolt Thrower. Good stuff.
 
Bo Eder said:
So, when I listen to this stuff, am I hearing triggers on the bass drums? Or is it possible to play this fast with a consistent sound without them? I like the term "lawnmower drumming", but at times it also sounds like someone pulling a zipper ;)

I'll have to go back and listen to your examples, I do have one Megadeth album from the early 90s, but I don't recall the drums sounding anywhere close to George. I suppose, for this old jazzer, this evolution is just like how jazz kept getting faster and faster (I remember struggling to keep up playing Coltrane's Giant Steps in college). BUt thanks all for the replies - I'm off to go study some!

BTW - someone gave me a Dragonforce CD a while back, and I remember laughing when I first heard it - I thought I was listening to a video game soundtrack ;)
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You're listening to some combination of the mics on the drums, and few samples of a well-recorded bass drum hit. The sample "hits" are lined up automatically and/or visually with the peaks of the recorded bass drum notes. With a few clicks, the performance may be quantized as well. The same is true of snare and toms. Cymbals are left alone, usually, because their artifice is just too obvious, and they are pretty quiet in the mix anyway.

It's possible to play this fast, of course (we've all seen the videos). What's not possible is the clarity and consistency of sound amidst a wall of distorted guitars and driven bass. Every bass drum hit is made to sound as if it were hit with the full force of the leg, and allowed to ring out into the overheads and room mics, which were treated with beautiful EQ and compression that somehow did not appreciably affect the rest of the drum sound. There's too much bleed to make that happen.

If the drummers are playing, it's an impressive display of speed. But they don't have to, and the sound belongs to the samples more than the drummer.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GpsKp-vdBLY
 
I think a very good example, and important point in the evolution of this ridiculous speed is Cryptopsy's first album from 1994. Here's a band who thought, "hey, this death metal stuff is pretty cool... but what if we made it fast?" They found a drummer who speed came to naturally, pushed him to his limit, while the guitars played more mid-tempo, I'd say they slowed down the guitars from what was going on before them, so that the drums could be doubled in speed.

first song, first album, 1994, opens with a 320 bpm blast...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQnOMtxgc1w

Jesus CRUNCH cereal.
 
Bretton said:
I think a very good example, and important point in the evolution of this ridiculous speed is Cryptopsy's first album from 1994. Here's a band who thought, "hey, this death metal stuff is pretty cool... but what if we made it fast?" They found a drummer who speed came to naturally, pushed him to his limit, while the guitars played more mid-tempo, I'd say they slowed down the guitars from what was going on before them, so that the drums could be doubled in speed.

first song, first album, 1994, opens with a 320 bpm blast...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQnOMtxgc1w

Jesus CRUNCH cereal.
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I really like this... lots of fun bass guitar work.
 
Bretton said:
I think a very good example, and important point in the evolution of this ridiculous speed is Cryptopsy's first album from 1994. Here's a band who thought, "hey, this death metal stuff is pretty cool... but what if we made it fast?" They found a drummer who speed came to naturally, pushed him to his limit, while the guitars played more mid-tempo, I'd say they slowed down the guitars from what was going on before them, so that the drums could be doubled in speed.

first song, first album, 1994, opens with a 320 bpm blast...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eQnOMtxgc1w

Jesus CRUNCH cereal.
Click to expand...

Are you not familiar with the bands I listed? The speed was already there. Go listen to some of it and you will see.
 
Bo Eder said:
So, when I listen to this stuff, am I hearing triggers on the bass drums? Or is it possible to play this fast with a consistent sound without them? I like the term "lawnmower drumming", but at times it also sounds like someone pulling a zipper ;)

I'll have to go back and listen to your examples, I do have one Megadeth album from the early 90s, but I don't recall the drums sounding anywhere close to George. I suppose, for this old jazzer, this evolution is just like how jazz kept getting faster and faster (I remember struggling to keep up playing Coltrane's Giant Steps in college). BUt thanks all for the replies - I'm off to go study some!

BTW - someone gave me a Dragonforce CD a while back, and I remember laughing when I first heard it - I thought I was listening to a video game soundtrack ;)
Click to expand...

George uses Axis triggers and pedals (GK signature of course) and uses a ratty old Alesis DM-5 module for the samples (he assured me that simply micing the bass drums would result in a muddy sound so triggers are required).
Saw Nile last year and had the pleasure of meeting the man himself- the bass drums sounded amazing and I was really surprised to learn they were coming from a DM-5!
As for Megadeth- not even in the same class as far as double bass is concerned (they're the slowest out of the Big 4 thrash bands).
 
I used to listen to nile, even went to see them once and I agree some of the riffs are just rock riffs and IMO need a straight up rock beat.

Btw I saw that DVD, it gave me a headache. Had to switch it off!
 
Dre25 said:
I used to listen to nile, even went to see them once and I agree some of the riffs are just rock riffs and IMO need a straight up rock beat.

Btw I saw that DVD, it gave me a headache. Had to switch it off!
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Well, the little bit of the video my wife watched garnered a chuckle ;)
 
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