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Glad this thread got made and it includes the non-kit parts of percussion, really solid job OP. Hope there's some activity all around.Previa_fun posted:What's recommended for cleaning cymbals? There are a bunch of fingerprints and smudges on mine that I'd like to take out and I've read everything from Windex to toothpaste to ketchup... RandomCheese posted:I use ArmourAll auto protectant to clean my cymbals, but that is because they are entirely rubber and plastic. Cleaning an e-kit is easy. There's also a product called Groove Juice that may be identical to what all the other cymbal companies sell, but I remember being incredibly effective when I used it. The cymbals definitely got brighter in tone, but it wasn't a major change and it didn't particularly bother me with those cymbals. I don't think it's going to bring out any tones that weren't present when you bought it, you're just cleaning off whatever gunk has accumulated that affects the vibration of the cymbal, the shape and composition are still the same RandomCheese posted:On the topic of practice away from the kit, I am always counting note subdivisions when I walk to and from work. Get into a good stride and your steps provide a nice metronome with which to count against, you can even tap out rudiments on your thighs or pockets to get some hand action as well. This is great for locking in the feel of different subdivisions as well as keeping the running count in your head while you focus on other things. I do this as much as I can, it's a really great way to maximize "useful" time. A crazy extension of this that one of my teachers and a few students did for a while was a daily run during which they counted out a thousand bars of 4/4 (each step is a quarter note) before starting over. I've never done that, but any exercise that develops your ability to count accurately for a long time while doing other poo poo is invaluable.
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May 6, 2013 02:30
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Jazz Marimba posted:Thanks a ton! I would love to add stuff on marching percussion, but I know absolutely nothing about it. Can you help me out? I'd also like to add a section on hand percussion, but I couldn't find...anything really. There aren't any go-to books or solid resources like there are for kit and orchestral stuff :\ I'd be happy to put some info together about hand drums if you like, I'm not really an authority on the subject but I've been playing the congas for a several years and studied with some really great teachers. In finals in my last semester of "jazz school" right now so pretty busy but in the coming week or so I should have a chance to get something up. Is there a particular area/instrument/application of hand drums that the goon percussion collective wants information on? If left to my own devices I'll try to cover the differences between the most common instruments, choosing an instrument, tuning, basic technique & patterns, as well as the history behind the instruments and the music they're used in. I've found some really great resources online, but they tend to be kind of scattered and difficult to evaluate, I'll dig up some of what I've found and post it when I find it. In the mean time here's some good hand (and other!) percussing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AXN-_asIaYs Celia Cruz does guaguancó. http://www.dailymotion.com/video/x4q22h_clave-y-guaguanco-from-y-tenemos-sa_news#.UYxO67W23pI Clave Y Guauguancó does guaguancó.
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May 10, 2013 03:19
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Jazz Marimba posted:Yeah! Could you send me a PM? Just sent you some poo poo! Kodo posted:ooo, thanks for the video links. Also links to an excellent version of 'Guantanamera': http://youtu.be/W777MIR8-ko Didn't see that, that's awesome too. She's incredible. Vaguely related, just found this, the style of music is Changui, sort of a precursor to a lot of the most prominent styles of Cuban music (particularly son montuno). Bass is insane. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N53o9rFn0EU Every time someone quotes me I realize how long overdue I am for a name change. God I hope no one I play with recognizes me.
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May 12, 2013 03:33
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A picture will help for sure - are the grooves less pronounced and the bell shallower even than the one you posted? Have you ruled out HHX and Vault cymbals? They both have the hammering marks (usually they're pretty distinct but there are some that are closer to the HH stuff) but much less prominent grooves. If the bell is way shallower, particularly if the cymbal is really light, it might be Vault ride (I've noticed a lot of "pure" jazz cymbals have bells so small you can barely use them as bells, and I don't think I've seen any non-Vault Sabian cymbals with bells that small).
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May 15, 2013 00:41
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Previa_fun posted:Here's a photo of my cymbal:  Jazz Marimba, I've got a little bit more time now, I'll send you more things soon. Do you actually play jazz marimba?
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May 19, 2013 05:15
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The Dark Wind posted:Question for all you metal drummers out there. Now that I have some space in my parent's basement, I can practice drums again whenever I'm home, so I've decided to try to clean up my playing over the summer. I am a fairly decent albeit messy player, so I'm going back to the basics and just working on rudiments with a metronome, instead of just trying to bang out songs while listening to my iPod. I know the single stroke roll is pretty huge for metal, but I'm wondering how often you find other kinds of rolls as well? Like, I'm having trouble figuring out how drummers manage to do those super fast fills that bounce from snare to different toms. Take for example, the first 20 seconds of this video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=65BvhDrbmLA. Is he just playing single stroke rolls and has developed the dexterity to jump between the different drums that fast, or is it feasible that he might doing something like playing double stroke rolls in order to afford him more time to jump between snare and toms? Both methods are viable and have their benefits and drawbacks, but in that intro he's definitely just playing fast singles. You could play it with doubles but it'll be less intense unless you have totally perfect doubles, it's just hard to be both consistent and loud for both strokes at that speed. There are tons of places where you could play doubles in metal, you just have to decide if it's worth trading power for efficiency (or whatever other concerns arise) in the particular situation you're in. He's actually playing the fills exactly as fast as the weird blast-beat thing he's playing, so his left hand is basically at the same speed all the time, always at 8th note rate, sometimes on the downbeats during the groove but usually on the upbeat 16th notes (and the right hand takes over the on-beat 8th notes, making it a single-stroke roll). Getting your chops to that point is like developing an athletic skill as much as a musical one. It just requires a lot of endurance sessions, stretching, and technique refinement. But mostly just time at a practice pad or drumset. Once you can play single strokes cleanly at that speed it won't be as much of a leap as it seems to play them all around the kit (it'll take some practice, but not as much as getting your hands up to speed in the first place). None of this is to say it has to take 10 years to play that fast - if you practice every day for a good chunk of time and work up the speed of your singles gradually, but keep pushing yourself a little bit at a time, you can make incredibly fast progress - just make sure you're always double checking your technique and you're not tensing up to get more speed. Faster playing is more relaxed playing(sorry if this is obvious but it's important to remember).It's also much more important to be able to play with consistency and control for a long period of time at a slower tempo than try to play faster in short bursts, which can end up teaching you to tense up for bursts of speed which is dangerous and will slow down your progress. Jazz Marimba posted:Awesome! Unfortunately no, I can't improv in the least so I'm taking that Gary Burton class right now. And while I love the sound of a marimba, you can't sustain notes on it like you can on a vibraphone, so blah Cool - Looked up the Gary Burton class, looks like a good thing he's doing. Welcome to the totally bizarre world of being a jazz musician in the 21st century!
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May 20, 2013 12:42
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RandomCheese posted:"Pass the goddamn butter" was how my drum teacher got me to learn 3/4 stuff. "Nice cup of tea" works for 3/2. Not totally relevant to the question, but there's so many good ones to be discovered/created. One of my favorites, for 5 against 4: "SHE's PREGnant, DONT know WHAT to DO" (same deal, impossible to convey over text but if you say it over the pattern you'll hear it immediately)
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Apr 10, 2014 02:51
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quote:I was wondering what all of your practice routines look like, and if you could give me tips on how to organize mine? I never particularly succeeded with trying to keep a set routine for practicing over a long period of time, if that works for you that's definitely super efficient but that just never quite gelled with me. I still managed to get some solid periods of 6-8 hours of playing a day, but if I tried to be super regimented I couldn't sustain it, that's only really manageable for me if I'm relaxed, enjoying it, and feel like I'm making progress the whole time. Still was extremely focused when I was working on something, but I didn't let it bother me if I was in a different place working at different times every day, as long as I was working on it. I tend mold the process to the goal rather than making a goal of a good process - it helps to have external deadlines, but setting goals for yourself (that really push it) can be super useful. They should be specific, more "I'm gonna be able to play these 4 bars from this book as slow as necessary 10 times in a row without loving up" than "I'm gonna be able to swing at 300bpm next week". As your goals change, the way you spend your time can change. I find lately less and less of my time is spent at the drumset, even though I have one in my apartment I can play anytime - I don't exactly not want to play the drums, but I can work out rhythmic ideas just as well at my desk as on a drumset. The important thing is that you focus on some task that will get you to your goal (usually involving doing something that you can't do over and over until you can do it) and throw enough hours at it that it works. Kodo posted:
I can't imagine why someone wouldn't recommend it - this is the best poo poo. If you want to play any improvised music (and jazz definitely involves a lot of improvisation), free-form practice and consciously shedding "pure" improvisation are pretty important. Books and exercises are really useful for getting your chops up and getting the common "vocabulary" of whatever style you're learning under your belt, but listening, playing along with records, and just playing (by yourself and especially with others) are really important to learning how to improvise confidently & find a "voice" or whatever it is that's makes good improvisers not boring.
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Jul 27, 2014 21:28
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Kodo posted:I agree with what you say, I suppose I mean to say that 'winging it' or coming up with ideas naturally is a subconscious decision so you can't actively do it unless you're already playing something else. Ideas pop up at any given time, but to just sit there and jam until one does discover something is just one tool in the toolshed when trying to come up with ideas; and while fun it may not be the most effective practicing strategy under certain time constraints or playing levels. I feel like this topic can easily go on a lot of philosophical tangents about the music making process, so I'd like to leave that argument elsewhere and just reiterate that from my own experience and from the few teachers I had that jamming was not the most constructive use of my time for these reasons. Yeah, totally agreed, perhaps a wholehearted recommendation of "winging it" was a bit overboard. I meant more the realm of consciously practicing improvisation than jamming. Hope I'm not getting into excessively philosophical territory but I think, especially within the context of jazz drumming (inferred from the Art of Bop Drumming in the original question), this stuff is pretty practical. It's also much less useful for getting better at anything other than improvisation itself, so if you're trying to get your co-ordination or polyrhythms together or trying to get your rudimental chops up, this won't help much, but it can help you get to applications and getting a serious feel down for stuff that is so far only technically "playable". That said, I draw a pretty big distinction between jamming and improvising (I think this is where the doing it properly thing comes in). I agree with that jamming is not super productive. But sitting down to "jam" is a lot different from sitting down to attempt a 20 minute coherent improvisation with a beginning, middle, and end and has cohesion and development or whatever you want to aim for, and I've found the latter to be an incredibly valuable method of focused practice (and it requires zero chops, I try to approach it with its own goals that are entirely independent of any technical goals). Your point about constraints is also super important, you won't actually get better at improvising if you only do it the way that comes naturally, you have to find every way you possibly can to force yourself to do things somehow other than the way you would by default. You may or may not do this when you're improvising in a performance, but it will make you much more aware of all the options for how you can go about developing your improvisation regardless. I think improvisation is a skill that you can practice through repetition/hours invested just like rudiments or chart reading, and if you want to play jazz it's just as important to practice improvising as it is to practice your technical stuff (but you need to practice that too, of course). It all still really comes down to whether whatever you're spending your time on is the most efficient way to reach your goals.
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Jul 28, 2014 07:57
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Grump posted:Is there any shot of my $700 Pearl Forum Series set sounding good in a uncarpeted basement? Warning--big nerdpost on tuning overtones incoming. I know a lot of people do have very good reasons for muffling their drums and it sounds great, and I do it too if that's the vibe I need, but if getting rid of them doesn't work, there may be another way! (credentials: lived in and played drums every day in a concrete basement while going to music school. Not recommended, but if that's where your drums are that's where your drums are!) I think you probably can get those to sound really good (I have a very broad taste in tunings, but I have encountered very few drumsets I couldn't do something pretty cool with - I love kid's drumsets), but you're not going to get them to sound like that video when you're playing them in any room, let alone a basement. Those drums are all close-mic'd, so you hear each individual drum, unimpeded by the sounds around it, later mixed to the proper volume. That's not how drum sounds work when you're in a room with them - the drums and cymbals are all competing with each-other and any other instruments that are playing for sonic space and covering up each-other's overtones. I'm basically a huge advocate for overtones (they're literally how we tell the difference between instruments and what determines what's consonant and what's dissonant- read up on them if you don't know how they work!) and think it's usually better to try to make the overtones sound good in the room they're in than try to eliminate them. Being technical, if you got rid of all the overtones you wouldn't hear much of a sound anyway. A snare that rings for a few seconds by itself will sound crisp and full when it's playing with a ride cymbal, bass drum, guitar, bass, and wailing singer or whatever. Because of that, unless you have microphones really close to your drums that are going to either a recording or a PA system, you usually don't actually want your drums to sound like that when you're in the room with them. I think because we hear drums 90% of the time on recordings people tend to want their drums to sound like a great recording while they're playing them, but if you're in a room with a great drum take being recorded and then listen to it on the record, the drums sound REALLY GOOD both on the record and in the room, but not at all the same. Most recordings (quite possibly even the video you posted has some of this, at the very least it's a nice room with acoustic treatment and nice microphones) have the drums gated to reduce the ringing, limited, compressed, equalized to bring out the best overtones, and mixed to be exactly the right volume, and all of that is totally independent of what the drums sound like in the room. A concrete basement will amplify a lot of overtones that you may not want, and definitely not the same overtones that most recordings highlight, but that doesn't mean your drums have to sound bad just because you can't get rid of the overtones. There are a ton of different approaches to tuning, but really the only way to know if you're doing it right is to listen really closely and see if you like the overtones that come out when you're playing in situations you actually play in. You don't need to worry about whether it rings longer than you expect it to, just pay attention to whether the overtones sound good when it does. Basically, if you're trying to make your drums sound like recordings of drums, whether they're records or youtube videos, you'll spin your wheels for a long time. A totally unique tuning that brings out the best qualities of your drums and the space you're playing in is what you want to strive for, not a perfect match of somebody else's tuning for their drums and their space. If you genuinely think it sounds good, and you play it confidently, it will almost certainly sound good to everyone listening too, and I think the most fundamental way to get that confidence is trying every tuning you can possibly come up with back to back until you start to have opinions on which options are better/worse than which other options. It does help to hear other excellent tunings in person to learn from, but I don't know a good way to learn how other people's drum tunings sound in person than to just try to hang out with drummers and hear their kits, or go to shows and try to stand near the stage when they're setting up before they turn the mics on. If it's a bar or something you can probably just ask the drummer about their tuning. Pretty much every drummer likes talking about drums. If you can't find other well-tuned drumsets to hear, just, like, love your drums for who they are and try to bring out the best in them, don't try to mold them to be like other drummers' drums who were born in craftsmen's workshops and raised in lavish recording studios. Sidenote - I don't know if this is "accepted practice" or whatever, but while it's usually good to have a head mostly in tune with itself, I find that having the head slightly (or even significantly) out of tune with itself can help selectively change the overtones that are produced. It's not precise or anything, but it gives more options. EDIT: One more sidenote - When I play shows on less-than-stellar gear I sometimes tighten both heads of the snare drum as tight as I can get comfortably get them with a drum key and tune from there, and that's gotten me many compliments on snare sound. Sometimes the dumbest way is the best way (best to ask permission before attempting the dumbest way on someone else's gear though). killerllamaman fucked around with this message at 19:56 on Jul 30, 2014 |
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Jul 30, 2014 19:36
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KiddieGrinder posted:I had a few questions hoping you guys could help me with. I even bolded the important bits for you skimmers. You're basically spot on about a lot of stuff already minus the terminology. Which is stupid simple. Keeping your heel on the pedal and pivoting on it is called "heel down", floating above your pedals with just the toes touching is "heel up", and both are totally valid & common. Because you're using smaller muscles, heel down gives you more control in some ways at the expense of power. If you feel like your bass drum isn't loud enough, I would definitely recommend playing heel up like you're doing, and don't be afraid to just practice playing your bassdrum loud (and soft and loud again) by itself for extended periods of time to build up leg strength and control. That bass drum is pretty small, so you might have to play the bass drum with a little extra force, or dial back on your hands a bit compared to a kit with a full-sized kick to bring it all into balance. Tuning can also make a huge difference in volume, if laying into the drum still doesn't make it loud, you might adjust the tuning. As for seat height, your thighs should probably not be angled up - plenty of people sit like that and I'm sure they have their reasons, but as far as I know for ergonomic purposes you want your seat high enough that your thighs are angled slightly downwards, and your snare high enough that your hands are not hitting your legs when you play it. Balance is a pretty important consideration with seat height, especially if you're playing heel up and your feet are hovering (but you never really want to use your legs to support yourself because then they can't focus on playing). A good test (for whenever you do get to change up what your sitting on) is too sit with your feet just over but not touching the pedals and then wave your arms in the air like a madman, or try out some gospelchops licks with your feet off the ground or whatever you can think of to get your torso moving and your mind thinking about other stuff - if you fall over or have to adjust your balance regularly, you either need to adjust your seat height or posture. quote:Lastly, my shittacular kit brass cymbals are very bent out of shape already after only 6 months or so of sporadic use. Is brass worse for strength and durability than bronze? I wouldn't want to shell out big money for a nice set of cymbals only to have them warped after a similar amount of time. Does this mean I'm also hitting them incorrectly? I usually try to hit the crash with the shaft of the stick, not the tip. This is common with really cheap cymbals, not really anything to worry about and well-made bronze cymbals are unlikely to warp unless you are hitting them with a hammer (but they might crack instead). For technique, the important things are: 1.) make sure your stick is not hitting the edge of the cymbal at anything close to a right angle, you want it to be pretty flat relative to the cymbal so you get some surface area contact. 2.) Make sure you are playing "off" the cymbal not "through it". http://zildjian.com/education/getting-started/basic-techniques/drumset describes it as a glancing blow, but I'm not quite sure that's the right word for doing it when you're playing loud but that's the general idea. A lot of players use a sweeping motion to achieve this, I tend to focus on relaxation more than anything so the stick rebounds almost as if I were hitting a drum. This will still bend your cheap cymbals though and there's nothing you can do about that other than play quiet, so definitely check your technique but don't worry too much about whether it's making a noticeable difference to these cymbals or not. Unrelated, I present the drum thread with a sick gnarly bass drop from hell, in which the bass is a drum (I think!): http://youtu.be/igPOYCzH77w
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Sep 14, 2014 14:35
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Glad it helped! Googling around idly I found http://www.drummagazine.com/features/post/how-to-set-up-your-drums which has some pictures that might help visualize the distances and heights of everything relative to a human playing them. If you are having trouble not hitting the edges of cymbals, they might either be too high or need to be titled towards you a little bit. Notches in your stick are to be expected, but for me they almost always come from either the hihat or the snare drum rim, so don't worry too much about tearing up your sticks, just something to be aware of. I have never found a good way to play along to recordings on speakers either, headphones are the way to go.
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Sep 14, 2014 19:58
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