Re: THE BIG KITS VS SMALL KITS DEBATE
Good points, Finn (and I'm totally guilty of buying gear "just in case" But…
My earlier point being that percussionists are gear-oriented instrumentalists. If you've ever played percussion in orchestra, one of the first things you do when you get a new score is go around collecting all the instruments the composer wants. A lot of times a composer will use an instrument for just one beat of one measure (the infamous "count 100 measures of rest to hit a triangle once" saying).
Anyway. It comes down to, for me – the big kit player doesn't necessarily hear nuance, maybe he/she hears several distinct, loud notes. Or fourteen different pitches of splash cymbal, or lots of bass drum madness. It may not be my personal way of playing, but I think it's a little elitist to dismiss the musicality of that perspective.
Good points, Finn (and I'm totally guilty of buying gear "just in case" But…
finnhiggins said:That's not thinking like a composer, deciding what tone is appropriate. That's thinking like a consumer, trying to justify impulse spending. And the divide there is the one that separates good big-kit players and bad ones. Unfortunately there's a lot more consumers in the world than there are composers, so that approach dominates overwhelmingly. Worse, composers are trained more than they are born. So if you let your consumerism dominate at the time you're learning your instrument then you're arguably letting the composer inside shrink away and die when deciding which things you want to hit.
My earlier point being that percussionists are gear-oriented instrumentalists. If you've ever played percussion in orchestra, one of the first things you do when you get a new score is go around collecting all the instruments the composer wants. A lot of times a composer will use an instrument for just one beat of one measure (the infamous "count 100 measures of rest to hit a triangle once" saying).
Anyway. It comes down to, for me – the big kit player doesn't necessarily hear nuance, maybe he/she hears several distinct, loud notes. Or fourteen different pitches of splash cymbal, or lots of bass drum madness. It may not be my personal way of playing, but I think it's a little elitist to dismiss the musicality of that perspective.