What is there to even play on a drum set?

It’s that old thing where the more you learn the more you understand how little you know... :unsure: I would get into the maths but I can only count up to 4...;)?(y)
I didn't even know that!
I can only count to 4 as well, cuz I drive a lot and my middle finger is always busy.
 
Now back to the stoning-so if we replace notes in your model with stones:
So far we have all the 16th note possibilities of one hand multiplied by two for limited accents per hand multiplied by two again for orchestrating on up to just one note. Now multiply this by the same possibilities of the other hand:

(2 x 2 x 2^16) x (2 x 2 x 2^16) = more than 68 billion hand combinations." 68 billion stones. Wow that's a lot of stones-we may run out of stones. What if they are rolling stones-maybe hard to catch but at least they gather no moss. And the mass of said stones so great it causes an earthquake that not only kills the stoned but the stoners. LOL. So your stoning will not go unavenged. I feel better about the whole situation. Moral of story-Never throw stones at a statistician. It's not quite the New Year yet!
Don't kill the stoners!
They're just chillinnn, mannn...
 
I actually jump in right about at 3 1/3...give or take >/= 1 1/4...I think it's because I started out with albums.
 
A lot, as most of us have learned. I'm always thinking about permutations on or off the drums. If you don't like math or long posts you should either skip this thread or just read the bolded sentence lower down for a fun fact.

I remember being young and very naive in middle school and thinking that I had played let's say ~80% of what there was to play on drums. One day about 10 years later and after having played with about a dozen stylistically different bands I realized that I had barely scratched the surface of ~1% of what one can do on the drums. After learning some basic probability and statistics I quickly realized that even the ~1% was a very gross underestimate of what there is to do on drums.

Take a basic set-up of ride, snare, kick, and high hat. To start, consider all the different patterns of single strokes that you can play in one bar of a 1/16 note grid with just the right hand. We can use binary numbers to realize the possibilities. Just like the various combinations of computer bits available in 2 bytes worth of memory, we can represent a single measure of sticking patterns using a '1' for notes played and a ‘0’ for the 16ths not played. Just playing every quarter note looks like this:

1000100010001000

The equation to figure out all the combinations of 0s and 1s, aka rests and notes, is "two to the power of 16". SIXTEEN different locations for one of TWO possibilities.
2^16 = 65,536 one handed possible ways to split up a bar of 4/4.

For EACH of those 65,536 patterns, the left hand is also capable of playing any 16th note pattern.

2^16 multiplied by 2^16 = 4.29 billion patterns. At least every other person alive today could have a pattern named after them.

Now some say variety is the spice of life and dynamics are certainly one of the spices of drumming and it takes time and practice to play the combinations of notes & rests we already know with all of their unique accenting possibilities (otherwise the drum book industry wouldn't be as big of a customer to the paper industry). Since each note in the 16th note grid can technically be played as either a rest or a note or an accented note, that means the right hand now has over 43 million possibilities (= 3^16). But since my calculator is about to get overloaded let's pretend that for each one handed 16th note pattern of ‘0’s and ‘1’s, you can only play up to one of those ‘1’s as an accented note per bar. That alone still doubles the possible patterns for one hand.

Let's not totally neglect orchestration. We're often playing on more than just one drum/cymbal with each hand in a bar which makes these equations quite tricky. But again, my calculator. So let's be conservative again and say that despite all the ways we can move around the drums, we are limited to playing just one of the notes in the 16th note grid on a different sound source. No mambos, no rolling down the toms, just a single optional crash cymbal at some point in the measure. Nonetheless, this again doubles the combinations for each hand.

So far we have all the 16th note possibilities of one hand multiplied by two for limited accents per hand multiplied by two again for orchestrating on up to just one note. Now multiply this by the same possibilities of the other hand:

(2 x 2 x 2^16) x (2 x 2 x 2^16) = more than 68 billion hand combinations.

Oh, but those damn feet. If you just add a single kick note on the downbeat you've again doubled all the possibilities. Let's simplify the possibilities again as we consider the legs and say that the left foot and right foot can only play notes in an 1/8th note grid, and they cannot accent notes. So now each lower body limb adds "two to the power of 8" times as many possibilities (2^8 per leg).

~68 billion hand combinations x 2^8 bass patterns x 2^8 high hat patterns = 4.5 quadrillion four limbed combinations.

Okay, even though we've already been conservative with the actual combinations that are technically possible, I'll admit that tons of these drums beats/patterns will sound like junk or just redundant. So let's say that of these 4.5 quadrillion patterns, only one out of every million of them sound good or interesting to play.

Great so now we're down to just a measly 4.5 billion combinations.

Now let's pretend that we are superhumans and can read, practice, then play each of these combinations in ONE SECOND then immediately move on to the next one. We never take a break to eat or sleep, let along take time to read this lengthy absurd post on drummerworld dot com. Oh, and never mind that in order to play one new measure per second every second your average tempo must be at least 240 bpm. No problem, we’re superhumans after all.

So we divide 4.5 billion beats by 60 sec/min, 60 min/hour, 24 hrs/day, and 365 days/year to find out how long it would take us to play these...

**Using VERY conservative estimates it would take 142 years to play all of the possible four-limb, one-measure patterns in a 16th note grid assuming you were somehow able to play a new pattern every single second of every year**

-------------------


For the full scope, keep in mind we already cut this down to playing only one out of a million possible patterns, in a world where you can only play one accented (or one ghosted) note per measure, where you must keep your hand playing the same sound source except for crashing once if you choose, and where your feet haven't yet learned about 16th notes.

What haven't we considered? Eternity, practically speaking.

These calculations do not account for all the other things you can do on drums in addition to just accenting more notes or orchestrating on more than one sound source per limb:

All the of the different time signatures we play, subdivisions that are possible (these calculations don't even account for playing blues, jazz, or basic polyrhythms with a triplet meter), playing some of the notes in unison as flams, using buzz strokes, 32nd note doubles, and the whole spectrum of dynamics that we're accountable for. Okay, now we've got our homework cut out. Oh, one last thing. Don't forget to practice everything at a range of different tempos.

This understandably can seem like daunting information - to hear that in order to play all the possible decent sounding Garibaldi-esque beats in a lifetime you'll not only never sleep or eat again, but you'll have to simultaneously set the Guinness book of world records for longest living human by about three decades.

But for me it's really inspiring to think about all these possibilities, and humbling whenever I start to think “what’s next?” There are so many things we can do on drums that it really is hard to get bored if you're being creative. I find it inspiring, challenging, and a useful method for me to always be expanding my drumming.

Like I said, you had the option of skipping this entire thread. You could have instead practiced 0.000000000000001% of these permutations by now.

Not enough information.
 
If we teach all 7 billion or so humans on planet how to play drums and then we divide sets of combinations we should be able to tackle the problem in due time. No we build an army of robotic drummers totaling 1 trillion in number and then no problem- 24/7 afterwards they’ll need a new problem. Which the robots will obviously and expectedly turn on the Problem creator with a probability of 99.999999% so never see the problem addressed in tearful irony. A world of robot drummers should put some stressful conditions and natural selection of humans to compete with super-powered robots so then we finally become the better drummers. So indirectly they create us. So a win win
 
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I don't know much about drumming but, at a certain point, even I had to start trimming the tree to get things under control. If I try to learn everything, I end up never really learning anything. There's something to be said for narrowing one's focus a bit.

I wasted a lot of time studying permutations before deciding to learn accepted standards (e.g. rudiments, money beats, and oft played songs) instead of being so abstract.
 
But do you need to play all possibilities playing Mustang Sally. LOL .It is about music and rather than see all possibilities we often see similar patterns- whereas the actual possibilities would be far larger than the simple drum model we have. All the AI generated music I’ve heard sounds familiar so nothing novel yet. It’s interesting the music that gains popularity with humans-seems we use a limited tool box so create genres, etc. it’s really like languages .

my version of Mustang Sally would have a ton of these options in it....just to piss off all of the "money beat" guys....
 
This gives me a reason to play nothing but linear patterns, It would drastically cut down the total number of available patterns. ?

I concur! However even playing completely linear, at every 16th note we could either play RH, LH, RF, LF or a rest, giving us 5^16 permutations in a measure. Out of these ~152.5 billion permutations, let's say that only one out of every thousand of them are worth investigating. If we retained our superhero ability to play a new 16th note linear measure every one second of each year (still having to maintain a 240 bpm in order to do so), then it would take take over 4 years and 9 months to get through them all!

[ = (5^16) / (1,000 * 60 sec * 60 min * 24 hrs * 365) ]
 
As you point out, the rhythm space is vast, and mostly unexplored!

I recently wrote a crude, but functional software application to help me to explore and practice some of these billions of possible rhythms. For now, the software can display four beats of 16th notes, or 4 beats of 1/4 note triplets (12th notes?) for each of our four limbs. An audial and visual metronome is included.

The user can create rhythms by clicking in the circles to enable or disable that beat.
For each limb, there are three modes: constant, ordered and random. Constant mode just plays the rhythm set by the user. Ordered mode plays all 1, 2, or 3 beat combinations in order. Random mode plays 1 - 15 beat combinations randomly.

So, for instance, I can set a constant rhythm for the ride hand, and hihat foot, and set the other two limbs to display random 2 beat combinations.
(For some reason I'm unable to attach the movie clip, perhaps too large. Here is a screen shot.)


RhythmDriver.png


Even with this limited model, which does not include accents, other time signatures, etc, many rhythms can be generated. Because the rhythms can be represented as bit strings, it is easy in software to manipulate the rhythms by performing operations on the bit strings. This opens the door to extending the random mode to model more interesting transitions.

While many of these rhythms and rolls may be impractical or unpleasant to use in a musical setting, I enjoy exploring moving my arms and legs in unfamiliar, surprising ways, and the feeling of independence between my limbs.

The bottom half of the screen I use for roll studies. I define a roll as a fill with constant stick pattern and tempo for the duration of the fill. (I don't know if anyone else uses this definition.) One example is a double stroke roll played by hitting each drum twice at eighth note tempo. For rolls I consider 4 dimensions: stroke (single, double, etc), number of hits per drum, rate of speed played against the tempo, and the number of drums involved.

I practice rolls with following strokes: hands together, flams, single stroke, double stroke, triple stroke (3 per hand), quadruple stroke (4 per hand), and paradiddles.

I practice 1, 2, 3, 4 hits per drum.

I set the metronome to play 1/4 notes, and practice rolls at 1/4, 1/8, 1/12, 1/16 tempos.

I practice these rolls clockwise, and counter-clockwise, leading with left and right hand, on all groups of 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6 drums. The software will display the groups in order, or randomly.


Ride Sally Ride!
 
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