The curse of the drum set in modern music

[raapie]

To be fair to the listeners, a lot of popular music is or is derived from music that can be danced to, and that does call for a pretty regular rhythm.

"To be fair to the listeners"????

Sorry, but art is created by an artist created based on a soul driven mind. If you make music for the listeners you're doing some marketing

[foosnark]

respirator, anyone who's ever heard Danney Carey from Tool will laugh at the points you made above

Yeah. And anyone who's ever heard Dave Weckl or Max Roach or every other drummer who's somebodies favorite. Thats not the point.

I was going to bring up Tool simply because they're a popular band that very often departs from 4/4, and yet doesn't sound weird doing it. I had to count off measures to prove it to my ex-roommate.

My first album I had very few tracks in 4/4; my second one I believe they were all 4/4 (might have had a 6/8 in there) but I kept the percussive stuff interesting anyhow. Some of the non 4/4 stuff sounds very natural, unlike the way a lot of jazz seems to approach it as lopsided.

[Amberience]

respirator, anyone who's ever heard Danney Carey from Tool will laugh at the points you made above

Yeah. And anyone who's ever heard Dave Weckl or Max Roach or every other drummer who's somebodies favorite. Thats not the point.

I was going to bring up Tool simply because they're a popular band that very often departs from 4/4, and yet doesn't sound weird doing it. I had to count off measures to prove it to my ex-roommate.

My first album I had very few tracks in 4/4; my second one I believe they were all 4/4 (might have had a 6/8 in there) but I kept the percussive stuff interesting anyhow. Some of the non 4/4 stuff sounds very natural, unlike the way a lot of jazz seems to approach it as lopsided.

Hence my post of Danny Carey (Tool's drummer, my favourite band ever)

[DWb]

To be fair to the listeners, a lot of popular music is or is derived from music that can be danced to, and that does call for a pretty regular rhythm.

"To be fair to the listeners"????

I meant 'to be fair to them in our discussion' - sorry, it was a bit ambiguous. It seems a bit harsh to lay into clubbers for not being adequately supportive of music composed in alternating bars of 11/8 and 5/2 with no discernable downbeat.

Sorry, but art is created by an artist created based on a soul driven mind. If you make music for the listeners you're doing some marketing :hihi:

Well, that's another (long and flameful) argument. But in any case, if I'm making dance music (and pretty much all popular music inherits at least a part of its rhythm from some form of dance music, be it techno or cajun) then I wouldn't feel too much of a commercial whore for making it physically possible to dance to...

[Hovmod]

I went so far that for three or four years I listened to nothing but classical music (thoroughly disproving whoever said something about 600 years of not having a beat - hey man, it's about your head, not the music. If you don't get it, you don't get it. Go look.

Hey man is it really? Like, far out.

yeah, holy SHIT, I can sound pretentious and condescending sometimes. Sorry mate.

[Amberience]

Not all music has to make you think, is what you're trying to say I think.

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[kab]

re: Tool... lots of bands mess with time signatures (see earlier Fates Warning, Meshuggah, Candiria just off the top of my head.

The problem here is that there is a certain segment of the population that "expect" something from music.. a standard beat, something consistent.

Music that makes you pay attention (for lack of a better term) will by and large always be outside the mainstream. I don't see why this is a bad thing.

[deleted]

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[DWb]

Thats why deebee (ok the bass is to big neway) and broken beats will never grace daytime radio in their current form. And whats wrong with that?

You mean like Fatboy Slim didn't? Surely the thing that keeps them from the daytime airwaves is that they stick to their guns musically and don't load up on the cheesy pop hooks... although as you say, there's nothing wrong with that.

Also most drum and bass and breaks tunes follow the basic 4/4 rhythm pretty closely - four beats to the bar, normally with a kick on 1 and a snare on 2 and 4 and a couple of other kicks for accent. There's more going on - a lot more - but the basic structure's the same.

[Stupid American Pig]

I thought drumm and bass just meant that you loaded up "funky drummer" at twice its normal speed and then added a heavily modified 808 kick to it

[Lawnmower Of The Damned]

Drummers aren't always the problem. It's common for a drummer to want to break out and try some odd timing, but the band usually just tells him to shut up and play the beat they told him to.

This is one of the areas where I'm lucky. Since I play all my own guitar, bass, keyboard and drums I can do whatever the hell I want and no one can stop me

And since the new Nine Inch Nails album has come up, my buddy who works at a music store sold me a copy a few days early. You guys will be happy to hear "You Know What You Are" and "With Teeth". Actually, most of the album has some pretty good unusual rhythms. Remember, it's out May 3rd, so GO BUY IT! It's Trent's best album yet, IMHO.

[videzyrah]

even without a drummer, in typical music you often end up with hand clapping, tambourine shaking, etc. that basically serves the same function(s) as a drumset would, just with less oomph.
similarly, as a drum student years ago I remember learning ways to mimick various brazilian percussion ensembles' polyrhythm styles alone on a kit.

[xoxos]

"the curse of robotism in the petrie dish-styled culture......" but great thread title!

[emdot_ambient]

respirator, thanks for an interesting topic. I've been thinking kind of along those lines for a while now. I never thought about the roll of the drum set per se in this regard, but I'm sure its development and roll in music has contributed some to the phenomena you're discussing.

I don't think trying to place blame is very productive (and I know that wasn't your initial intent), as there are obviously a lot of factors at work here (most recently the corporatization of the music industry, and the fact that nowadays it's just too damned easy to plug in a drum sampler and away you go). The real point is how can we attempt to break out of these, as I call them, musical templates?

Step One is simply the will to do so, and that may be the hardest part.

Step Two is finding some alternative to the ubiquitous rhythm section and the musical templates we accept as "normal."

In this regard there are several examples composers can turn to for inspiration. Traditional (aka World or Ethnic) music has several interesting examples of alternate rhythmic schemes. Indian music has a totally non-western way of organizing rhythm. The gamelon orchestras of Java and Bali, I've always thought, could really be coopted using electronic sounds to create something very unique. Even ancient European forms like the medieval/renaissance periods and Celtic music had danceable rhythms not based on our ubiquitous forms. I'm not suggesting adopting these wholesale--I really dislike all the "modernized" ethnic stuff used in the Deep Forest stuff--but rather just looking to these for inspiration.

I know this isn't popular, but my own music lately has tended to be inspired by old school electronica where rhythm is imparted to the song mostly in sequenced and arpeggiated synth parts. This is partly because I have a lot of that kind of music to get out of my system, but also because after so many years of beat, my ears need a break. Whenever it becomes an automatic response to reach for (insert musical idea here) it's time to try and find something different.