NerfLad
Silver Member
I've always thought the Annual Guitar Center Drum Off is a great marketing tool for the instrument and the community as a whole (not to mention Guitar Center themselves). It's really exciting and well presented (and it's exposed some great, deserving cats to the world), and of course anytime someone I know is involved I fully support them, but I've never been comfortable with the idea of it being a competition.
Of course I'm okay with competitions, but for something so personal as drumming, I would prefer for there to be a level of abstraction. A good example of this is the World's Fastest Drummer competitions, where the contestants are judged on the level of their technique, by way of how comfortable they are executing alternating fundamental stroke motions at high speed.
We could add this level of abstraction to the Drum Off and still have it be cool and drumset-centric. The problem right now lies with the fact that the only rules in the Drum-Off are that you have no accompaniment when you play; you play a drum solo (there might also be some setup restrictions, but I digress). I think 95% of the people on this forum would agree that the drum solo is an art form.
Of course, art's quality isn't truly quantifiable, and it just doesn't feel right to me for one person to be rewarded over another by the arbitrary decision of a group of judges, no matter their star power (or, at the local level, delusions thereof). (Yes, there is such a thing as bad art, but that's not what I'm here to discuss. Please assume for argument's sake that all of the contestants in the Drum-Off are self-aware enough to be of reasonable artistic conviction... or at least would contend that they are.)
I think a better basis for a competition would be to have everyone playing the same material (I dunno.... let's just say The Black Page, for instance, even though that's a very extreme example) and judging their execution rather than just saying "play a drum solo for [between 90 and 300] seconds and we'll see who we like best". Even having that as a category and then also having free-form solos to judge their creativity wouldn't be so bad.
It would be like if American Idol made the contestants write all of the songs they performed and then judged them on their songwriting as well as their singing; a scientific experiment with no control variable.
Giving the structure of the contest more rigidity would sacrifice some of the promotion of freedom and individuality that I think is philosophically inherent to the drums as a whole, and should certainly not be squelched, but it would give the competition some stronger ground on which to stand.
[/rant]
Agree, disagree? Too long; didn't read?
Of course I'm okay with competitions, but for something so personal as drumming, I would prefer for there to be a level of abstraction. A good example of this is the World's Fastest Drummer competitions, where the contestants are judged on the level of their technique, by way of how comfortable they are executing alternating fundamental stroke motions at high speed.
We could add this level of abstraction to the Drum Off and still have it be cool and drumset-centric. The problem right now lies with the fact that the only rules in the Drum-Off are that you have no accompaniment when you play; you play a drum solo (there might also be some setup restrictions, but I digress). I think 95% of the people on this forum would agree that the drum solo is an art form.
Of course, art's quality isn't truly quantifiable, and it just doesn't feel right to me for one person to be rewarded over another by the arbitrary decision of a group of judges, no matter their star power (or, at the local level, delusions thereof). (Yes, there is such a thing as bad art, but that's not what I'm here to discuss. Please assume for argument's sake that all of the contestants in the Drum-Off are self-aware enough to be of reasonable artistic conviction... or at least would contend that they are.)
I think a better basis for a competition would be to have everyone playing the same material (I dunno.... let's just say The Black Page, for instance, even though that's a very extreme example) and judging their execution rather than just saying "play a drum solo for [between 90 and 300] seconds and we'll see who we like best". Even having that as a category and then also having free-form solos to judge their creativity wouldn't be so bad.
It would be like if American Idol made the contestants write all of the songs they performed and then judged them on their songwriting as well as their singing; a scientific experiment with no control variable.
Giving the structure of the contest more rigidity would sacrifice some of the promotion of freedom and individuality that I think is philosophically inherent to the drums as a whole, and should certainly not be squelched, but it would give the competition some stronger ground on which to stand.
[/rant]
Agree, disagree? Too long; didn't read?