The Beatles, "Come Together" Who's Doing It Right?

The drumeo guy way over complicates it. I'm almost wondering if he listened to the Aerosmith version

I'll take Ringo's word for it.

Though I will say you can hear the ride cymbal on the Beatles version, though it's rather soft. So Ringo must have played cymbal along with the bass drum.
 
Drumeo guy, 100% That's what I hear. I never heard a ride cymbal as part of the opening riff; it only sounds "right" if you play it on a crash, or, in this case a ride with some wash to it. He's nailing the tom part, too.

That's not to take away from Ringo in any way. Ringo had a tremendous feel for songs, but I doubt he had a memory of exactly what he played like Gadd showing us EXACTLY what he did on 50 Ways. It's not like he was in a band that then toured that song for a year and a half. I doubt he even thought about it again until that video.



Dan
 
(Oops, I was just about to post the isolated drums - but I-P beat me to it)

So if all of this really matters to this amount of detail - and I'm of the mind that it kinda doesn't - then luckily we actually have access to the isolated drum stem from the original recording....

To say the Drum guy nailed 100% is a bit of a stretch IMO - considering he orchestrated it for 3 toms - and I don't hear even a hint of there being three toms. Yes, there is a crash - crash/ride on 1 & - but as you'll hear from the isolated drum stem, it is so soft in the mix. Is it there? yes. Is it essential? Hardly (Again IMO).

All of this is where I think we too often get so lost in the trees - we can tend lose sight of the majesty of the forest.
Things I take away from listening to this are - Ringo's varied use of swing in the 16th notes. The fact that he doesn't always play the intro riff exactly the same - subtle differences in tom orchestration, certainly variations in accent levels. It is just obvious that he is not playing - this pattern, then that pattern - I mean, he is - but he is so clearly performing them, snapping them to the music he's playing with.

I guess my point is - that the point should never be just to play the part "right" - but to play the part (or something like it) that works as good in the situation we are playing in, than it did for Ringo playing in his situation.

IMO - the "correct" part is still always approached as a living breathing thing - subject to adjustment, tweaking, emphasis, and modification to best suit the music we are playing right now.

IMO - zero points are earned for playing the correct part, if it's not making our bands sound the best they can be. Don't get me wrong - what I'm suggesting can be quite subtle - or quite dramatic. For instance, if my band feels better with me playing 1/8th's on the hats during the "Come Together" bars - I am absolutely going to play them. If with my kit, in this room, with this band today, sounds better if I just play the BD on 1 & with no cymbal - then I won't give a second thought about playing it that way.

IMO - in a cover band, my job is to reproduce or emulate the playing from popular records in a way that makes my band sound best. And no, I don't find it at all egotistical to imagine that I might have a better idea for what will work for my band than what Ringo original played so successfully... just the opposite, I consider it to be my primary job.

The job I spent countless hours studying playing with records - trying to learn how to support my band the way the great drummers on these records supported theirs. And again - this is not about going all "free jazz" on cover band gigs. Absolutely - the vocabulary is important. But faithfully recreating original parts is not the only job - in fact, IMO it is not even the most important job.
 
dcrigger said:
(Oops, I was just about to post the isolated drums - but I-P beat me to it)

So if all of this really matters to this amount of detail - and I'm of the mind that it kinda doesn't - then luckily we actually have access to the isolated drum stem from the original recording....

To say the Drum guy nailed 100% is a bit of a stretch IMO - considering he orchestrated it for 3 toms - and I don't hear even a hint of there being three toms. Yes, there is a crash - crash/ride on 1 & - but as you'll hear from the isolated drum stem, it is so soft in the mix. Is it there? yes. Is it essential? Hardly (Again IMO).

All of this is where I think we too often get so lost in the trees - we can tend lose sight of the majesty of the forest.
Things I take away from listening to this are - Ringo's varied use of swing in the 16th notes. The fact that he doesn't always play the intro riff exactly the same - subtle differences in tom orchestration, certainly variations in accent levels. It is just obvious that he is not playing - this pattern, then that pattern - I mean, he is - but he is so clearly performing them, snapping them to the music he's playing with.

I guess my point is - that the point should never be just to play the part "right" - but to play the part (or something like it) that works as good in the situation we are playing in, than it did for Ringo playing in his situation.

IMO - the "correct" part is still always approached as a living breathing thing - subject to adjustment, tweaking, emphasis, and modification to best suit the music we are playing right now.

IMO - zero points are earned for playing the correct part, if it's not making our bands sound the best they can be. Don't get me wrong - what I'm suggesting can be quite subtle - or quite dramatic. For instance, if my band feels better with me playing 1/8th's on the hats during the "Come Together" bars - I am absolutely going to play them. If with my kit, in this room, with this band today, sounds better if I just play the BD on 1 & with no cymbal - then I won't give a second thought about playing it that way.

IMO - in a cover band, my job is to reproduce or emulate the playing from popular records in a way that makes my band sound best. And no, I don't find it at all egotistical to imagine that I might have a better idea for what will work for my band than what Ringo original played so successfully... just the opposite, I consider it to be my primary job.

The job I spent countless hours studying playing with records - trying to learn how to support my band the way the great drummers on these records supported theirs. And again - this is not about going all "free jazz" on cover band gigs. Absolutely - the vocabulary is important. But faithfully recreating original parts is not the only job - in fact, IMO it is not even the most important job.
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Agreed. Some things, although note-correct, do not translate well live, and certain things have to be modded one way or another in order to provide an engaging listening experience. Nothing post-Rubber Soul was performed live anyway.

That said, I do NOT muffle my toms when I play this live--there's simply too many things to consider in terms of how Ringo's sound evolved, and my band skips around in our setlist anyway.

Still, for me, the magic happens when one DOES hit as close to the mark as possible in a tribute situation.


Dan
 
Personally speaking, I focus a lot more on feel rather than notes.

Usually any cover on YouTube comes up woefully short. Obviously, we can never be somebody else and play like somebody else but I wish people would focus more on the feel.

You know why they don't? Because it's difficult, you have to hear it, you have to make subtle changes in the way you hit a drum or a cymbal or where you put the snare drum. It's a whole nother level to do that.
 
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dcrigger said:
(Oops, I was just about to post the isolated drums - but I-P beat me to it)

So if all of this really matters to this amount of detail - and I'm of the mind that it kinda doesn't - then luckily we actually have access to the isolated drum stem from the original recording....

To say the Drum guy nailed 100% is a bit of a stretch IMO - considering he orchestrated it for 3 toms - and I don't hear even a hint of there being three toms. Yes, there is a crash - crash/ride on 1 & - but as you'll hear from the isolated drum stem, it is so soft in the mix. Is it there? yes. Is it essential? Hardly (Again IMO).

All of this is where I think we too often get so lost in the trees - we can tend lose sight of the majesty of the forest.
Things I take away from listening to this are - Ringo's varied use of swing in the 16th notes. The fact that he doesn't always play the intro riff exactly the same - subtle differences in tom orchestration, certainly variations in accent levels. It is just obvious that he is not playing - this pattern, then that pattern - I mean, he is - but he is so clearly performing them, snapping them to the music he's playing with.

I guess my point is - that the point should never be just to play the part "right" - but to play the part (or something like it) that works as good in the situation we are playing in, than it did for Ringo playing in his situation.

IMO - the "correct" part is still always approached as a living breathing thing - subject to adjustment, tweaking, emphasis, and modification to best suit the music we are playing right now.

IMO - zero points are earned for playing the correct part, if it's not making our bands sound the best they can be. Don't get me wrong - what I'm suggesting can be quite subtle - or quite dramatic. For instance, if my band feels better with me playing 1/8th's on the hats during the "Come Together" bars - I am absolutely going to play them. If with my kit, in this room, with this band today, sounds better if I just play the BD on 1 & with no cymbal - then I won't give a second thought about playing it that way.

IMO - in a cover band, my job is to reproduce or emulate the playing from popular records in a way that makes my band sound best. And no, I don't find it at all egotistical to imagine that I might have a better idea for what will work for my band than what Ringo original played so successfully... just the opposite, I consider it to be my primary job.

The job I spent countless hours studying playing with records - trying to learn how to support my band the way the great drummers on these records supported theirs. And again - this is not about going all "free jazz" on cover band gigs. Absolutely - the vocabulary is important. But faithfully recreating original parts is not the only job - in fact, IMO it is not even the most important job.
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All true. And yet there is such a gray area in all of this and what comes to mind is

1) people who change the original part without even knowing what the original part is

2) people who change the original part without realizing that the original part is what creates the feel or the vibe for the song, so once you've alter that in some ways, you " potentially " change the vibe or groove of the music

I get that you alter things accordingly to fit the musical situation. That's a gray area, someone could say they're doing that and it would sound awful. And I could come hear you do that and it would sound fantastic.

As usual, no absolutes, it's just music. And thanks always for your contribution here.
 
Maybe I should have specified, I’m not talking about feel. Just the orchestration of the parts.
Do you think Ringo ascended on the toms or descended ? Do you think the last note is on on the high or low tom ?
In the interview of Ringo that I posted he ascends. He does not play the cymbal.
No big deal, he sounds great, like he always does. I doubt he goes back and listens to his old albums and furthermore, he played this tune like 60 years ago just on a recording. I doubt he toured and played night after night for years. I think just about anyone would approach any song differently than they did 60 years ago, right?
 
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Bo Eder said:
How can you ask if Ringo is “doing it right”? He’s the guy that did it first. He IS the part we all try to emulate. Kind of a silly question.
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Maybe ‘ doing it right’ is not a good way of putting it. I meant who’s playing closet to the original recording in terms of which drums and cymbals they strike. I’m not talking about the feel. Nobody has a feel like Ringo ! I’m not trying to be silly.
 
jaymandude said:
All true. And yet there is such a gray area in all of this and what comes to mind is

1) people who change the original part without even knowing what the original part is

2) people who change the original part without realizing that the original part is what creates the feel or the vibe for the song, so once you've alter that in some ways, you " potentially " change the vibe or groove of the music

I get that you alter things accordingly to fit the musical situation. That's a gray area, someone could say they're doing that and it would sound awful. And I could come hear you do that and it would sound fantastic.

As usual, no absolutes, it's just music. And thanks always for your contribution here.
Click to expand...
Absolutely - there are no absolutes. As there are way too many different kinds of scenarios that a drummer can find themselves in for there to be.

There's dedicated tribute bands - probably the most exacting as far as priority on actual reproduction is concerned.

Then there are cover bands - club gigs, weddings.... where the audience recognizing and relating to the tune's performance is obviously important, but generally evaluated less for accurate reproduction and way more for "is the audience having a good time?" - "is the dance floor full?" - "is the band keeping the club full of happy drinkers?".

Then there are artist acts or speciality acts that purposely choose to perform a cover "Their Way" - be that a slightly different arrangement, tempo or feel to a drastically different treatment.

Lots of scenarios - though I suspect most of us, most of the time work most often in that middle category. And personally I find I spend a fair amount of time on boards like this trying to remind everyone that most of the time - cover bands are NOT tribute bands. And try and point out that the slavish dedication to detail approach that a tribute band needs is an approach that likely won't best serve a successful cover band player - particularly a free lance one.

If nothing else it just becomes too much music to learn in too much detail - and to little focus on what it takes to pull a band together musically - even then playing a song, we might not have ever heard before. I can't count the number of times I've helped keep the dance floor full, the party going full steam - playing a variety of songs.... most that I knew quite well... and others that I may have heard once or twice on the radio.

And learned way early on that it was far more valuable for me to know the basic forms, arrangements and road map of 50 songs than knowing the note for note of every pattern played in 10.

Because no one has ever cared whether I play the hi hat through the "Come Together" party - or play 1/8th's on the ride during it.... or playing the tom triplets melodically upward or downward. No one has ever cared.

I'm not saying it is not important to know as much as we can - but not at the expense of learning to be fluid, adaptable, supportive and big big listeners.... while we are playing.

So many of the things we as drummers claim are so essential to a song working are not that at all. They may be internal to making THAT record work, but not the song. And not even to make the song sound a lot like that record to our audiences - keeping in mind our singer doesn't sound like the original, our band isn't capable of playing tons of the parts on the records, and we don't have (as you mentioned) time or resources on a wedding gig to put towels on the toms while also only letting the audience hear the drums through a heavily compressed overhead mic (the only way to make those cymbals sound like that) for this one song.

No - what's essential is playing something that sounds like that intro riff - because people actually recognize that - and quite honestly.... nothing else as far as the specific drum parts go.

And that's for Come Together - a song that actually has a average audience recognizable drum element.... tons of other pop records have no such elements at all. The drum parts on the original are some variation of what should seem obvious to anyone listening to the other players and who is familiar with the style.

Again I would suggest that while it is important to learn as much song specific vocabulary as we can - a big part of why that's important is so we can draw connections to things that similar between different songs. And how things from one song may be incredibly similar to things in another song. And then try and figure out why the parts that are the same work - and why the parts that are different, needed to be different.

This, I believe, is the whole purpose of learning vocabulary. Just like with language - the point isn't to be able to recite a bunch of books from memory. But to be able to understand those books - and use that vocabulary to understand other books.... and even express our own thoughts with that vocabulary.

I would suggest - that so it also goes with drumming - learn what guys played, to try and understand why they chose to play what they played - so we more quickly and easily understand what others played - and even get a sense, for what their other choices might have been.

All so we are as capable as we can be at assessing whether what we are playing with our band is working, is appropriate.... even when playing a piece of music we don't already know.
 
Paul Blood said:
Maybe I should have specified, I’m not talking about feel. Just the orchestration of the parts.
Do you think Ringo ascended on the toms or descended ? Do you think the last note is on on the high or low tom ?
In the interview of Ringo that I posted he ascends. He does not play the cymbal.
No big deal, he sounds great, like he always does. I doubt he goes back and listens to his old albums and furthermore, he played this tune like 60 years ago just on a recording. I doubt he toured and played night after night for years. I think just about anyone would approach any song differently than they did 60 years ago, right?
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I understood what you meant and I agree. The Beatles frequently made it clear that they weren't as obsessive about the minutiae of their recordings as so many millions of us were and are, and that their memories were not infrequently imprecise, as when they didn't agree with each other and/or George Martin and/or their various engineers (Norman Smith, Ken Scott, Geoff Emerick, etc) as to details. What's more, and I could be especially wrong about this bit, but after recording only 8 takes of the song on one day back in 1969, I believe Ringo then didn't play the song again (at least live) for literally decades. And in the interim, I'm quite sure he listened to it thousands of times less often than so many of us. So his input, his memories, each and every pearl of wisdom that drops from his mouth is nigh upon invaluable and should be treated as the priceless gem is it. But not infallible.
 
I've always played it like: 111122 1112
I augment the upbeats with kick drum so it's like 111K22 111K
The Drumeo sounds like: 111112 1313
Upon listening to the isolated track, it's like: 111112 1113
The cymbal with the kick is definitely crash-riding
 
Ringo's drummers Gregg Bissonette on this. Starts at 11:30.


Gregg says it is a three tom pattern starting from low to high.
One of the things that is tricky about all Ringo parts is that he is a lefty playing a right handed kit.
I know when they play 'With A Little Help From My Friends' in the All Starr Band, Ringo wants to hear his main drum fill (in the middle of the song) played note for note perfect. I played it with them (and Gregg) and Gregg told me to not play during those two bars.
I obviously played other Ringo songs on tour and tried first to understand exactly what he played, then I generally played the songs 90% accurate. I wasn't precious about every note, or repeating the fills, but most definitely played in the style of Ringo as best I could,
When we started rehearsing for the tour it was apparent Paul hadn't played some of the songs after the day they were recorded for a Beatles album. They were a studio band for the second half of their career. Recorded songs for several weeks and months, then once finished never played them again.
 
dcrigger said:
Absolutely - there are no absolutes. As there are way too many different kinds of scenarios that a drummer can find themselves in for there to be.

There's dedicated tribute bands - probably the most exacting as far as priority on actual reproduction is concerned.

Then there are cover bands - club gigs, weddings.... where the audience recognizing and relating to the tune's performance is obviously important, but generally evaluated less for accurate reproduction and way more for "is the audience having a good time?" - "is the dance floor full?" - "is the band keeping the club full of happy drinkers?".

Then there are artist acts or speciality acts that purposely choose to perform a cover "Their Way" - be that a slightly different arrangement, tempo or feel to a drastically different treatment.

Lots of scenarios - though I suspect most of us, most of the time work most often in that middle category. And personally I find I spend a fair amount of time on boards like this trying to remind everyone that most of the time - cover bands are NOT tribute bands. And try and point out that the slavish dedication to detail approach that a tribute band needs is an approach that likely won't best serve a successful cover band player - particularly a free lance one.

If nothing else it just becomes too much music to learn in too much detail - and to little focus on what it takes to pull a band together musically - even then playing a song, we might not have ever heard before. I can't count the number of times I've helped keep the dance floor full, the party going full steam - playing a variety of songs.... most that I knew quite well... and others that I may have heard once or twice on the radio.

And learned way early on that it was far more valuable for me to know the basic forms, arrangements and road map of 50 songs than knowing the note for note of every pattern played in 10.

Because no one has ever cared whether I play the hi hat through the "Come Together" party - or play 1/8th's on the ride during it.... or playing the tom triplets melodically upward or downward. No one has ever cared.

I'm not saying it is not important to know as much as we can - but not at the expense of learning to be fluid, adaptable, supportive and big big listeners.... while we are playing.

So many of the things we as drummers claim are so essential to a song working are not that at all. They may be internal to making THAT record work, but not the song. And not even to make the song sound a lot like that record to our audiences - keeping in mind our singer doesn't sound like the original, our band isn't capable of playing tons of the parts on the records, and we don't have (as you mentioned) time or resources on a wedding gig to put towels on the toms while also only letting the audience hear the drums through a heavily compressed overhead mic (the only way to make those cymbals sound like that) for this one song.

No - what's essential is playing something that sounds like that intro riff - because people actually recognize that - and quite honestly.... nothing else as far as the specific drum parts go.

And that's for Come Together - a song that actually has a average audience recognizable drum element.... tons of other pop records have no such elements at all. The drum parts on the original are some variation of what should seem obvious to anyone listening to the other players and who is familiar with the style.

Again I would suggest that while it is important to learn as much song specific vocabulary as we can - a big part of why that's important is so we can draw connections to things that similar between different songs. And how things from one song may be incredibly similar to things in another song. And then try and figure out why the parts that are the same work - and why the parts that are different, needed to be different.

This, I believe, is the whole purpose of learning vocabulary. Just like with language - the point isn't to be able to recite a bunch of books from memory. But to be able to understand those books - and use that vocabulary to understand other books.... and even express our own thoughts with that vocabulary.

I would suggest - that so it also goes with drumming - learn what guys played, to try and understand why they chose to play what they played - so we more quickly and easily understand what others played - and even get a sense, for what their other choices might have been.

All so we are as capable as we can be at assessing whether what we are playing with our band is working, is appropriate.... even when playing a piece of music we don't already know.
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I agree! And another point. I have played with many cover bands that played Beatles songs. When I played with musicians that had a great sense of tempo I was able to play the original drum parts. But when I played with musicians that had a bad sense of tempo, I could not play the exact drum parts because the players lost the tempo. My primary job in a band is to keep the band playing as tight as possible and on tempo. Sometimes I have to sacrifice the exact drum part in order to keep the band playing together on tempo. Many musicians think that Beatle songs are easy to play; that is until they try to play them, correctly.


.
 
Hollywood Jim said:
Many musicians think that Beatle songs are easy to play; that is until they try to play them, correctly.


.
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So true.
Ringo plays an almost continuous tom solo during the second verse of Let It Be. First I had to force myself to do it as it just feels wrong. Second It was super hard to make it sound legit, not just an idiot stomping all over a great song. I struggled with it every show.
 
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