Pollyanna
Platinum Member
I was reading Andrew's interesting and relevant blog this morning - he was talking about dynamic transitions. One passage grabbed my attention (my emphasis):
As a drummer, your job is to set the dynamic range of the music. If you play loud, everyone else kind of has to. With that in mind, if you can exercise the restraint necessary to hold back the bashing impulse, you will find that when you do finally release that impulse, the effect will be dramatically heightened.
People love bashing drums. Thinking about it always makes me laugh - innate human goofiness. Or maybe innate modern (or post rock) human goofiness?
It's interesting to watch those old clips where the drummers almost never got to forte and comparing with so many clips of today where the drummers rarely go below fff.
When novices get on the drums, most times they try to ape the big stadium drummers, just slamming away. That's how you drum, isn't it? It feels natural ... lift your arm and drop it ... WHAM! ... hey, that's cool! ... and so on. I suspect some people have never seen a refined drummer.
What do you think happened? Did rock simply spin the music world into another orbit? Is it just a response to a world increasingly full of noisy machines - that we feel we have to shout? How much of the bashing impulse is pent up violence?
Personally, I played rock for a long time and, years after starting with a laid back band, every time I play there is still a bit of a struggle to keep it down. Undoing decades of "training" ain't easy.
As a drummer, your job is to set the dynamic range of the music. If you play loud, everyone else kind of has to. With that in mind, if you can exercise the restraint necessary to hold back the bashing impulse, you will find that when you do finally release that impulse, the effect will be dramatically heightened.
People love bashing drums. Thinking about it always makes me laugh - innate human goofiness. Or maybe innate modern (or post rock) human goofiness?
It's interesting to watch those old clips where the drummers almost never got to forte and comparing with so many clips of today where the drummers rarely go below fff.
When novices get on the drums, most times they try to ape the big stadium drummers, just slamming away. That's how you drum, isn't it? It feels natural ... lift your arm and drop it ... WHAM! ... hey, that's cool! ... and so on. I suspect some people have never seen a refined drummer.
What do you think happened? Did rock simply spin the music world into another orbit? Is it just a response to a world increasingly full of noisy machines - that we feel we have to shout? How much of the bashing impulse is pent up violence?
Personally, I played rock for a long time and, years after starting with a laid back band, every time I play there is still a bit of a struggle to keep it down. Undoing decades of "training" ain't easy.