What are drummers for?

Well If bands consisting of guitarist and organ could only have a bass or drummer which do you think most bands would choose? No offense to bassist but I think a lot would pick drummer. That’s what they did at a church I play.
 
Well If bands consisting of guitarist and organ could only have a bass or drummer which do you think most bands would choose? No offense to bassist but I think a lot would pick drummer. That’s what they did at a church I play.
Larry Graham’s mother didn’t at her church ;)

Seen plenty of bands where the keyboard player does bass. If they have it covered, fine by me because I can’t play every gig out there anyway.
 
Conversely, programming is also great for drummers like me to communicate melodic concepts since my facility at actually playing strings/keys/horns/woodwinds/etc is well below the level required to demonstrate my ideas.

If I were to program a part well enough that it lives through to a final version, so be it. It's not always strictly necessary or viable to replace those things with human players.

I'd still rather have my rudimentary parts and concepts explored and fleshed out by a person because I just like the interplay and collaborative process of music making in a group setting.

To that end, I also have little issue with programmed drums. I have an issue with poorly programmed drums, or boring songs and lazy songwriters, but those things are greatly subjective.

I don't care that a future emphasis on programming may make drumming a less lucrative or viable career if programming becomes more prevalent. I can still listen to recordings with live drummers. I can still play my drums. I imagine the bands I enjoy that use live drummers will continue to do so.

I also don't care that a future emphasis on programming may (for better or worse) make music of the present and future sound different than the music of yesteryear.

this point made me think that non-drum set instruments have been programmed for a lot longer than drums...horns, pianos, organs...most melodic instrument parts have been "covered" by synths, programming etc since the 70's...I wonder how that has affected those instrument families/players?
 
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