Great drummer stories, Herb!!

Last year I was working with some guys who wanted to be a blues band. The drummer, who thought it was his project though I was musical director, was just awful. He played everything too fast and sped up from being too fast! He would crow about "all my experience" every rehearsal. Then I did some research. He had played in exactly 2 bands in his "experience", and neither of them lasted more than a few months.

We were rehearsing one day, and it was what I dubbed a "maintenance rehearsal". I told them "This week we are going to go over those first 20 songs and fix lyrics you are singing wrong, accents to your lyrics, like where the emphasis is supposed to be, and clean up some transitions from verse to chorus to solo to bridge and so forth." So we started that rehearsal and fixed a few things. Then we got to a song where there were drum breaks and coming out of them he lost tempo completely. I then said something every drummer hates. I told them "I have run every one of these songs through a BPM analyzer. I want to run "Walkin' By Myself" with the drum machine." So I set the click track up, piped it through the PA, and off we went. IMMEDIATELY the band was tighter. So the next thing I did was say "Okay, Let's run it again with the click but this time play your live drums with it." We started, and in 4 measures he was off the click. We tried it again, and again, by the 5th measure he was off. We tried it a third time, again, by 4 measures he was off. And then he got defensive and started telling me that even if you listen to the originals the tempos drift, to which I replied "I don't care. Here we are going to play in PERFECT time."

I then asked him not how MUCH he practices, but HOW he practices. He told me that he made a CD of our stuff (all blues covers) and every night he goes downstairs and plays along with the CD and runs each song twice. I told him "That is exactly what I thought, and that is exactly wrong. IF it is true that the original songs drift, why would you want to play along with something that drifts? Here's what you do." And I set the click track again and said "Play just your high hat." Which he did. After 8 measures I sad "Now add snare." And 8 measures was okay. Then I said "Now bring in the kick." and as soon as the kick came in his meter went out the window. And I then said "THIS is what you need to do when you practice. Learn to play DRUMS, not songs.

And that was the end of that band. LOL!!!

Last edited by eddie1261; 01/19/17 12:20 PM.