Drumming and writing music.

Sleep

Junior Member
I have a question concerning drumming of course and how music should be written. I've been playing in a band for about a year so far. The guitarist in my band likes to 'jam' more than he likes to write music if that makes sense. But this leads to a lot of frustration on my part as a drummer because nothing ever stays the same. The general theme of the song is the same. But he likes to change certain sections according to his mood and how he feels. To include leads (mind you this is a 3 peice band), slight to sometimes drastic sound changes, and so on. We never practice our music in sections either. My guitarist says he doesn't like playing like that because it disrupts his way of writing music. So we generally just 'jam' it out.

I've recently started taking drum lessons and have been gaining an understanding of Time Signatures and Odd Time signatures. I'm starting to learn, if I'm correct, that music as much as it has to do with chemistry, it also has to add up mathematically if that makes sense. What I want to know is how do most of my brethren here write and compose music with your bands?

Do your practice your music in sections? For example: Your guitarist brings you something he's written. Do you practice it measure by measure? Do you talk about the timing at all? When it comes to changing something around, is it talked about amongst your members until it's agreed upon? How important is it for everyone in the band to understand time signatures and odd time signatures?

I could use some advice from experienced drummers/musicians.
 
Yes music MUST mathematically add up or it is arbitrary. You're definitely more of a technical musician (as are most drummers) and that's a good thing. Your guitarist is not though so I can see the frustration. The band that I'm in practices section by section if we need to, it's a very common thing to do. Writing wise we either start with a riff and jam it or someone has a whole song structured and we just build off of it. "it messes up my style" is a way of saying he can't start from halfway into the song. A lot of musicians can't because well, they don't exactly know what's happening precisely. Just tell him you need to base the song off an actual structure. You'll all be on the same page, even if he jams it differently, you'll all still be on the same page.

Jamming is always a good thing, but so is planning and structuring a song so that you CAN jam it out. Just balance it and every thing should work out.
 
Yes music MUST mathematically add up or it is arbitrary.

Playing devil's advocate for a sec, what precisely does this mean? How does music "add up"?
 
I agree with Nour Ayasso. But before you start hashing out how things are structured on a theoretical level, do it on a commonsense way; treat it as a language. You're trying to have a conversation and sometimes that means one person will have the floor while other people listen appreciatively, maybe shouting out the occasional "amen". That doesn't mean they should be inconsiderate windbags.

My suspicion is that your guitarist is trying to have his cake and eat it too. In order to really jam out, you need a strong rhythmic and structural foundation, but he doesn't want to contribute to it. That's not fair to you or the other member of your trio and betrays an immaturity on his part that he can't stretch out within a defined form.

My suggestion, before it becomes a crisis, is to set up practice like this- jam to a single motif, riff, phrase; whatever you want to call it for a time and be very strict with it. Stretch out as far as you can but always in relation to that motif. Then do the same thing with another motif and so on.

Later on, when you're rehearsing or on stage, your guitarist can go off in whatever direction he's thinking, but as soon as he switches direction, you'll be right there with him.
 
In my travels I’ve noticed two basic approaches to playing and writing that most players are some mix of, with a few existing at each extreme.

One is the player who has studied scales & theory and spends a lot of time working on execution. For these types, any simple framework will do so they can improvise away without much concern for the song structure (because it’s all about them). These players tend to be really good technically, but with underdeveloped compositional chops. As a drummer, they can be maddening to play with because you can’t nail them to a song structure, and what you can nail them to tends to not be very interesting. Also, they’re not usually sympathetic listeners, preferring that the rhythm section to hold down the fort while they wank themselves into oblivion. Anything thoughtful or interesting from the rhythm section is a distracting nuisance to them. It’s also a lot harder to solo over 5/4 or 7/8 – so keep a straight 4/4 man!

The other type is just the opposite – a lot of time spent composing by thoughtfully seeking out, or stumbling into cool and interesting parts that morph from one to the next in a pleasing way, with little consideration paid to soloing since integrated parts are where it’s at for them. Because the theory side isn’t getting over-thought, often the melodic patterns will come out in non-standard forms with odd-times and intervals. Not much for jamming, though, since the technical side and improv skills are underdeveloped, so if you get a brainwave you want to toss out there in real time, they’re usually ill-equipped to take it in and respond.

I’ve played with both types and both have their pros and cons. I prefer a bit of both, but since technical wizardry is meaningless without a song (IMO), if I had to pick, I’d take the latter every time. Jamming is great for coming up with stuff, but you still need the discipline to stop and work stuff out. It's a great idea to record jams so great ideas don't get lost, but again, someone's got to sift back through that stuff to pull out the gems and actually make something from it. Do you guys have a singer? Singer involvement is an excellent way to get things structured.

Sounds to me like your guitar player sits squarely in the first camp. Best cure for that is a strong songwriting presence in the band – someone who won’t tolerate endless noodling. Often that’s the singer, but there are also bass players (and even drummers!) with an ear for melody and song construction.
 
How important is it for everyone in the band to understand time signatures and odd time signatures?
This is almost a separate thread here, but I'd say it depends. For example, there are two guitar players I've been in bands with that did nothing but sit deep in their couches with acoustic guitars and conjure up some of the coolest melodic patterns I've ever heard - that just happened to be in odd times. But they had NO CLUE they were doing it and it definitely wasn't intentional. I almost think if they'd had enough formal training to understand that most things are in 4/4, they'd probably have accepted that and wrote everything in 4 - but they didn't and wrote things in some of the weirdest times I've ever heard, though in every single case, they were as natural sounding as anything in 4/4 so in the majority of cases, I didn't even bother counting it out to see what it was. I just knew there was either an added or removed 8th note somewhere and because it was so intuitive, there was no reason (outside of curiosity) to count it out.

The other side of that is someone who does understand odd time, but lacks the musicality to pull it off without it sounding like it was done for its own sake. I'm not much of a fan of odd time if sounds like some contrived exercise just to demonstrate that ability and I know a lot of people who've got caught up in that. I'll take a groovy 4/4 over some math festival any day.

Where it becomes critically important to understand odd time signatures (and how they get subdivided) is when you need to communicate a rhythmic idea to someone else. I'm playing with a guitar player now who loves playing odd meter stuff, but he also speaks the language so can describe what he's doing. I'm also fluent in odd meter, which is good because this latest riff he came up with has an accent in the middle of a bar (of what amounts to 17/8) that I kept hearing as the "1" and we could never get in snyc because of it. It wasn't until he accurately described it, and I understood it, before we were able to sort it out and make it rock. That ability made the difference between keeping or tossing that part (we kept it).
 
Thank you guys for the responses. I'm going to try and see if I can't better the communication between the two of us.
 
I find it very helpful to actually write out the music when writing music. My band and I all use TabIt, which I think is the best tablature software out there and if you were to actually pay for it I think it's about $20. There's a bunch of other good notation software out there, too, like guitarpro, tuxguitar, musescore, etc.

Tabbing out all of our ideas has really helped me get a grip on writing music. Things like recognizing odd times, triplets, dotted quarters and eighths, syncopation, and tempo are a whole lot easier to figure out. And with some good software you can actually write pretty fast, too, like copying and pasting measures or whole versus or choruses. And it's nice to be able to show and play back new ideas to other band members instead of trying to explain it otherwise or trying to tell them how to play something.

I'm a very technically-minded musician, to the point of sometimes having trouble thinking out of the 4/4 "box". Also I'm in a metal band, so studying out riffs and tabbing out whole catalogues might not be as appealing or applicable for a lot of other people, especially jam-oriented musicians. But if you've got the patience to learn your way around a decent program and sit down for hours and transcribe whole songs, you might think it's even fun.

Also, I can't play guitar very well, but now I know how to take musical ideas and meodies I have and translate them into ergonomic, playable guitar parts via tablature.
 
I have a question concerning drumming of course and how music should be written. I've been playing in a band for about a year so far. The guitarist in my band likes to 'jam' more than he likes to write music if that makes sense. But this leads to a lot of frustration on my part as a drummer because nothing ever stays the same. The general theme of the song is the same. But he likes to change certain sections according to his mood and how he feels. To include leads (mind you this is a 3 peice band), slight to sometimes drastic sound changes, and so on. We never practice our music in sections either. My guitarist says he doesn't like playing like that because it disrupts his way of writing music. So we generally just 'jam' it out.

I've recently started taking drum lessons and have been gaining an understanding of Time Signatures and Odd Time signatures. I'm starting to learn, if I'm correct, that music as much as it has to do with chemistry, it also has to add up mathematically if that makes sense. What I want to know is how do most of my brethren here write and compose music with your bands?

Do your practice your music in sections? For example: Your guitarist brings you something he's written. Do you practice it measure by measure? Do you talk about the timing at all? When it comes to changing something around, is it talked about amongst your members until it's agreed upon? How important is it for everyone in the band to understand time signatures and odd time signatures?

I could use some advice from experienced drummers/musicians.

My band decided to cover a Death song called "keep on knockin" and my guitarist wasn't playing the riff correctly. This threw everyone else off timing and made it sound amateur... Then at the end, I'd tell him he was doing it wrong he'd just get really defensive and stubborn. These are a prime example of people you don't want to work with. The fact that he just needs to "jam it out" means that he's too lazy to actually learn how to write or record anything into a solid compilation. It's one thing to be like Bonham and play everything differently each time, but even Bonham knew the overall structure; it's not like he was hoping he was crashing on the right beat, these are things that remained solid each time.

Try to write a drum part or someone else's from a song you like. It seems like it'd be easy, but it's quite challenging. That'll be a good exercise (for me too)!

Also, that's really good that you are taking lessons early on. I had to go back and teach myself from the beginning because my atrocious technique..
 
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