Dang!
I've always been a fan of your heavy hitting style, but I don't think I realized how much funky groove you have going on as well.
Some nice Bonham inspired licks there too!
But I was thinking, uh, wheres the bass player? lol...
Thanks, Ian! I've honestly never thought of my playing as funky, but I guess you're right; if I get this thing nailed right, it should have a tight funk about it. Funny thing about my relationship with funk - there's so much about the most of today's alt-funk players that I don't like that I end up running away from whole idea. It's a knee-jerk response that throws the baby out with the bath water and I should keep in mind the likes of Bonham, Chris Dave, et al, and my various electronic influences when thinking of playing with funk instead of worrying about how square it can come off.
Wow, great stuff! Interesting sound and compositions, and your drumming looks and sounds real good in that context.
I'm sure that this duo is a conscious choice, but personally I would have liked to hear some bass in there too - have you tried playing this stuff with a bass player and if yes, did it not sound the way you wanted?
Thanks for that!
A little more on the bass player issue ... when Trent (the other guy in the vid) placed his add to start a band, he was looking for both drums and bass. He and I hit it off right away on personal level (we're pretty much best friends at this point - 14 years later), and on a musical level, I was super impressed at the level of complexity, organization, smoothness, and originality of his material. And he'd never heard his songs played with a drummer before, so he was pretty stoked about that. We worked through his stockpile of songs until we had them nailed down before looking for a bass player, but we started getting opportunities to play shows before finding one, so we just thought: screw it, let's go play shows as a two-piece. It worked surprisingly well and we got a lot of encouraging feedback from the people that saw us.
So that's how we got rolling as a two-piece. When we went to record our first batch of songs, Trent added all the bass parts and it sounded really good so we proved to ourselves that as much as we would like a bass player, we didn't really
need one.
After that first recording, we went through 3 different bass players over the next several years, but in each case, having that additional member disrupted our method of working together so new material became much harder to work on.
Also, Trent never went through a shedding phase and never learned any theory or how to just improvise, so for a lot of players, that's deal-breaker. But I don't see that as a bad thing since I really like the material he comes up with, and I'll take a prolific writer light on chops over a non-writing shredder any day.
The last bass player we had was pretty good (vid in my signature has him playing), but our personal interactions were strained and he was wanting to get really math-y with the new material, and neither one of us had any interest in alternating odd-time bars just because. I like playing odd time stuff as much as anyone but I like playing grooves even better. If I can have both I'm over the moon. But I really can't handle the idea of sacrificing the groove or the song just to demonstrate odd meter capability.
So, two-piece it is ... for now.