On Drumming

Paradiddles

I learned how to play the drums when I was 13 through this book, Realistic Rock Drum Method byCarmine Appice. I didn’t know who he was and I remember wondering why he was wearing eyeliner. 

But I’ll be damned if he didn’t know how to write a good instructional drum book. 

I also had a drum instructor who taught me first how to play along with “Eye of the Tiger,” and eventually how to play along with none other than Neil Peart, Hallowed be Thy Name, on Rush songs like Red Barracuta and Tom Sawyer. He also introduced me to some other awesome prog rock but I have forgotten all of the names. I think Dream Theater was one of the bands. 

He also made me play countless number of rudiments every day. Swiss Army Triplets. Paradiddle after paradiddle.

Drumming Now

I think this guy, Zach Hill (see video below), might be the new generation’s Neil Peart, in the sense that he might inspire a new generation of drummers. In no other sense is he like Neil Peart.

I mean, just look at his blood-covered drum set. While the glorious glow of a polished gong shone down upon Peart as he sat in his drumset fortress, Hill bangs like a homeless man on three meager drums and a cracked and jagged cymbal. I read somewhere his drumset is often covered in blood at the end of the show from hitting his knuckles on things.

Talking Drums

But enough about white people drumming. After all, it is Black History Month. I’ve been reading the excellent The Information by James Gleick and in it he explains the fascinating practice of “talking drums.”

Apparently, Africans used drums to convey information across long distances - faster than any European on horse back. One village would hear and reconvey the message to the next village.

And we’re not talking simple messages like, “Fire.” Here’s one example: “The mats are rolled up, we feel strong, a woman came from the forest, she is in the open village, that is enough for this time.” This was a birth announcement in Bolegne, a village of the Belgian Congo. 

Apparently this is how it worked: In other languages, and in African languages, speech-tones factor a great deal in a words meaning. While English uses speech-tones only sparingly - e.g. “You are mad” spoken with rising intonation conveys a question while using a dropping tone conveys a statement - other languages make use of different tones as an important characteristic. The same arrangement of letters can mean wholly different things if spoken in different tones. 

So they used drums to match the speech tone of the words. One problem, however, is that more than one word uses the same speech tone. Two high tones followed by a low tone, for example, might mean father, moon, river, and a hundred other words. So the drummer overcame this obstacle by drumming several words for context. For example, rather than simply drumming the word for “moon,” which could also be a hundred other things, the drummer would drum, “the moon, which looks down on us from the sky.” 

Finger Jabbing

Now people drum with their fingers. Once, when I was younger, I found myself at a DJ Revolution concert. I thought he was going to do some beat juggling, digging in the crates, and scratching on the 1s and 2s. Turned out he just stood behind a table for his laptops and bobbed his head to a beat while he selected the next song to play. To be fair, he probably had that mp3-via-vinyl set up, but it was still so boring watching a guy basically pick songs off his laptop.

Revolution was extra boring because DJ Mike Realm opened for him and was highly phsyical. He spent his whole time frantically digging through the crates, throwing around records, serving ‘em up and cutting back and forth between breaks. He was sweating in his tailored suit and skinny tie. That’s what I want to see in a DJ - not some dude scrolling through iTunes. 

Not all electronic music is made by a guy sitting at a laptop, however. For example, I was amazed to see how AraabMuzik makes beats. The old fashioned way. Well not the old, old fashioned way.

I don’t know if my prog-rock-loving drum instructor would have considered this drumming, but it looks like he knows his paradiddles if you ask me.