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In this chapter… The backbeat. Coming in sideways. Terry Savlon, Bovington and Tickly Under There. John Lee Hooker. The train wreck: the worst thing that can happen to you on stage apart from accidental death by electrocution. In the vast majority of the rock music of the last 60 years, there is a discernable backbeat. The drummer hits his snare drum on beats 2 and 4 in the bar. He accents these beats. These two beats stand out in the music. And it’s not just rock that has a backbeat: most popular music of the last nearly 90 years has a backbeat, regardless of genre. In jazz, blues, disco, death metal, dubstep, you name it... the 2 and 4 are accented. For some reason we as listeners love this pulse. As musicians, we hear the backbeat and it helps us to know where we are in the rhythm. If we were to make a mistake and momentarily lose our place in the music, we could immediately get back in to it by reference to the backbeat. It’s a fundamental element of rhythm in popular music. A very small number of amateur musicians however, do not feel the backbeat as keenly as the rest of us. Sometimes they will start playing on the 2 as if it is the 1, for example. This is known as coming in sideways. For many of us, coming in sideways would take a concerted mental effort. It goes against all our rhythmical instincts. It goes against the rhythm of the music we’ve listened to and danced to all our lives. For the rhythmically dyslexic... it’s no problem at all. Here are three short anecdotes about players I have encountered with varying degrees of rhythmical dyslexia. I tell these anecdotes in order to showcase the dramatic effect this affliction can have on the rest of the band: Terry SavlonTerry Savlon, was the singer in a band called Frog Zenith. This was a short-lived band that lasted all of one gig before splitting up. I was one of the band’s two guitar players. At some point during the second set of Frog Zenith’s one and only gig, we launched into a cover of Ring of Fire by Johnny Cash. Terry suddenly came in sideways with his opening vocals. He either came in one beat too early or one beat too late, I can’t remember. Either way, the effect would have been the same. Ring of Fire has a fast “Boom Cha Boom Cha” rhythm and Terry had started singing on a “Cha” when he was meant to come in on a “Boom”! He had gotten the Boom and the Cha mixed up! Unbeknownst to Terry, this had the effect of an electric shock running through the rest of the band behind him. We were thrown into a state of disarray and confusion. We looked left and right at each other in panic, trying to decide how to remedy the situation. Should we all switch and follow Terry? Should we stay where we are, hold our breath and hope he self-corrects soon? In the end, two of us went Terry’s way and the other two of us stayed put. Now half the band were “Boom Cha” while the other half were “Cha Boom”. The overall effect was “Choom Choom”! The music was highly unstable and we were now dangerously close to being involved in a train wreck (i.e., the song coming to a crashing premature halt). Somehow, we miraculously survived and got back on track. It was a very close call! Meanwhile, Terry was standing at the front of the stage with his back to us, singing his heart out. He was blissfully unaware of the chaos that had just taken place behind him. Chaos which he had caused. He was instead deeply involved in expressing the song’s theme of all-consuming romantic passion to the audience. Quite how he could have been so oblivious to the strong backbeat of this song, I don’t know! BovingtonI knew an open-mic’er called Bovington. He played acoustic guitar and sang his own compositions: humorous novelty songs in the style of Pam Ayres (for those of you in the UK who are old enough to remember this poetess/singer/light entertainer). Like Uncle Tony, who I mentioned in an earlier chapter, Bovington was an older gentlemen who had difficulty knowing where a bar ended. He didn’t hear the backbeat in the music. There was no backbeat in his music. He simply changed chord whenever he felt the urge. And his urge rarely corresponded with the end of a 4/4 bar. Bars could be three-and-a-half or five beats long, for example. Bovington was allergic to counting. Also similar to Uncle Tony, Bovington loved the idea of having a band around him, instead of just playing solo. He wanted to hear his compositions fleshed out with drums, bass, keyboards and electric guitars. Alas, this was not possible. Nobody at the open mics had the telepathic skills to anticipate when Bovington would change chords. It was extremely difficult to play along with him. Incidentally, there is a very interesting recording of the great John Lee Hooker singing Red House, originally by Jimi Hendrix. It’s worth a listen, if you can find it. John Lee Hooker, who mainly performed solo, would change chords whenever he felt like it, just as Bovington did. He didn’t worry about following the usual 4/4 structure of Red House, even though he was playing with a band on this version. The musicians in this band were amazing. They were mind readers. Somehow they were able to anticipate John Lee’s premature or delayed chord changes faultlessly. How they did it, I will never know. DouglasDouglas was the bass player in a local hard rock cover band called Tickly Under There. He had a severe case of rhythmical dyslexia, but his band mates stood by him and over time he improved. In the early days however, it was possible for him to play a very strong riff, such The White Stripes’ Seven Nation Army or Led Zeppelin’s Whole Lotta Love, a quarter note out of sync with the rest of the band. This feat is nigh on impossible for nearly every other musician alive on Planet Earth. For Douglas, it was child’s play. Amazingly, after making this mistake, Douglas was able to maintain the same tempo as the others and yet remain a quarter note out of sync. Somehow, he didn’t immediately hear the disparity with the other musicians in the band, and he could continue pretty much indefinitely on this track. However, the effect was like a musical suicide bomber suddenly appearing on stage. It was so jarring to his Tickly Under There band mates, they would inevitably have to stop: A train wreck! How to deal with rhythmical dyslexia:If you are auditioning players for your band, it should be obvious quite soon if they suffer from rhythmical dyslexia. Sufferers can improve, but probably not quickly, so it’s best to say thanks but no thanks. If you feel you yourself have a degree of rhythmical dyslexia, you might try this. Listen to classic rock, jazz or pop songs and try to identify the backbeat. Clap your hands along with the backbeat. The snare drum is normally played on the backbeat, so you can listen out for that. It’s a big clue. Perhaps take some lessons with a music teacher (one who plays modern music: rock, jazz or pop) and ask them to help you to identify the backbeat in different songs at different tempos. The next level would be to set the metronome at half speed and try play short riffs or passages of music hearing the metronome click as beats 2 and 4 in a bar, i.e., the backbeat. Again, a good teacher should be able to direct you in doing this. The overall aim is to get you to reliably hear the backbeat of a song and be able to connect your playing to it. Rhythmical dyslexia is due to not keenly hearing the backbeat in popular music. It is a relatively rare phenomenon. The sufferer doesn’t hear the 4/4 bars as units which repeat. The rhythm for them is more a continuous string of notes without the organising factor of repetition. Those with rhythmical dyslexia are therefore more susceptible to losing their place in the rhythm and throwing the rest of the band into confusion. Very often, when a player comes in sideways or miscounts a bar and gets out of sync with the others, this causes a train wreck. The song comes to a sad and premature end, like a soldier being shot and limping on for a few more paces before finally keeling over. So, it is best to avoid inviting a rhythmically dyslexic player into your band. Chapter summary
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This is the second of a two-part post about drummers. In this post… Gaetan the knife-weilding percussionist. Drum machines? Another disastrous gig for the band Tambana. Ringo’s genius. Crazy drummers Drummers have a reputation of acting wild and crazy: getting drunk, trashing hotel rooms, throwing televisions out of windows, driving cars into swimming pools, etc... Rock mythology is full of such stories of drummers’ antics. Prime examples of madcap drummers from history would be Keith Moon of the Who, John Bonham of Led Zeppelin and Animal from The Muppet Show. In my experience, drummers, true to their stereotype, are often a breed apart from the regular musician. I don’t know why. Take for example, Gaetan, a talented percussionist. I once hired Gaetan to play a day-time corporate gig in one of the buildings of the E.U. Commission in Brussels. I told the band to come early as there was a security check at the entrance of the building. On the day of the gig, at the appointed time, the harmonica player, the bassist and myself were waiting inside the building. There was no sign of Gaetan. He wasn’t answering his phone either, so I made my way to the front lobby to see if I could see him. There he was having a heated discussion with two security guards. Eventually, they let him and his percussion instruments into the building. I asked Gaetan what had happened. He explained that the guards did not want him to bring in the knife he had with him. It was a large hunting knife. It may have even qualified as being a small sword. I said, “Why on earth did you bring a knife? I told you there would be a security check!”. He replied, “To protect myself!” Gaetan was 6 foot 4 and well built. The chances of him being attacked in the street in the middle of the day in a European city pre-migrant crisis were close to zero. However, the real crazy thing was not that Gaetan had brought a large hunting knife with him, but that security let him bring it into the building! He had told the guards that he needed it to cut his drum skins, which was obviously bulls**t. Drum machine Is it possible to do without a drummer altogether? My old band, Tambana, could not find a decent drummer for love nor money. And the date of our first ever gig was fast approaching. We were booked to play The Apsley House pub in Portsmouth on the south coast of England on New Year’s Eve, 1998. As time was running out, we made the radical decision to play the gig without a drummer. Instead, our plan was to use a drum machine supplemented by some real percussion instruments, such as maracas, which were to be played by our singer Tommy. We were inspired by Mick Jagger playing maracas at Rolling Stones gigs. We had already jammed along to some electronic drum beats supplied by Hammond Cheese’s Casio keyboard. (Hammond Cheese being the nickname of our keyboard player.) Surprisingly, these beats had sounded pretty good. The only problem was, these Casio keyboard drum beats could not be programmed. You just set the beat going and it would remain the same for the rest of the song. As luck would have it, our guitarist, Careless Santana, already owned a programmable drum machine. It was a model made by the manufacturer Boss. Since Careless had no idea how to programme his own machine (being a gearophobe), I ended up with the job of entering in all the drum parts for the songs we would play. I spent hours and hours in my bedroom fiddling around with the little buttons, squinting at the tiny LCD screen and consulting the manual. All this effort would be worth it to have some more sophisticated drum arrangements than the Casio keyboard could supply. Meanwhile, Tommy the singer was tasked with buying the percussion instruments. When he returned from the local music store he had with him one tambourine and, rather unexpectedly… one banana. The banana was made of plastic and filled with dried seeds. It was a novelty shaker designed to amuse a small child. Incidentally, our band name derived from these purchases: Tambourine + Banana = Tambana. A week later and I had finished programming the Boss drum machine. The band started practising in earnest. It took a while for us to fall in line with the unwavering, precise beat of the Boss, but we eventually got the hang of it. The evening of the gig finally arrived. The Apsley House was jam-packed with drunken New Year’s Eve revellers. We had to squeeze ourselves through the crowd to get to the stage. They were chanting “TAM-BA-NA! TAM-BA-NA!” Tommy, as well as being our singer, was the landlord of The Apsley House, so there was a lot of anticipation from the audience who all knew him. They had never heard him sing before. For our opening song, we had opted to use a drum beat from the Casio keyboard. This song went down great and ended to loud applause. Now it was time to unleash the real drum machine, the Boss. Here we go. I pressed play. I’m not sure what had happened since the sound-check earlier, but the Boss now sounded so pathetically weak that the audience spontaneously burst into laughter. They were all laughing! Hammond Cheese was laughing! And they all continued laughing while Tommy, Careless Santana and I scrambled around the stage frantically checking connections and trying to rectify the situation. All the low and middle frequencies had disappeared from the drum sound. We couldn’t figure out why. The Boss drum sound suddenly had all the tonal qualities of two stick insects having sex inside a Walker’s crisp packet. We ended up ditching the Boss and relied only on the Casio keyboard drum beats, the tambourine and the banana for percussion for the rest of the evening. All that wasted time programming the damn thing! Tommy later told me that his regular drinkers at the bar were still laughing about this incident months afterwards, which annoyed him no end. I imagine the Boss machine is currently decomposing at the bottom of a landfill somewhere near Portsmouth and polluting the ground water for generations to come. Drummers are underestimated As I mentioned at the start of this post, finding a good drummer is essential for your band. The drummer is often the determining factor in the quality of a band. In the words of Duke Ellington: "If you have a great band with a mediocre drummer, you have a mediocre band. If you have a mediocre band with a great drummer, you have a great band!" Despite this, I get the impression that casual listeners of music often fail to realise the value of a good drummer; the magic they can bring. When listeners “feel” the music is good, they attribute all of this good feeling to the superstars at the front of the stage: the musicians the cameras focus on most when recording live concerts and music videos. The singer and maybe the guitar player get the majority of the air time. The drummer gets the occasional two-second close up. The drummer is, along with the bassist, simply a side man in many listeners eyes. He or she can easily be replaced. They are non-essential. Take, for example, the drummer of the most revered of bands, The Beatles. Ringo Starr has been much maligned over the years as being the least talented of the Fab Four. He’s been regarded as hanging on the coat-tails of the other three’s stellar songwriting talents. Paul of course wrote such classics as Yesterday, Michelle, Hey Jude, Let it be, Paperback writer, Eleanor Rigby, Penny Lane… the list goes on and on. John wrote Help!, Strawberry fields forever, Lucy in the sky with diamonds, All you need is love, Revolution, Come together... to name but a few. George also wrote much-loved classics such as While my guitar gently weeps, Taxman, Something and Here comes the sun. In addition, Paul surely has a claim on being the greatest melody writer of the 20th century, regardless of genre. Ringo wrote Octopus’s Garden. So, I can see where Ringo’s critics are coming from. However, I consider Ringo to be an absolutely essential part of The Beatles. His great sense of groove provides the not-so-obvious magic that his band mates’ great compositions rest upon. The Beatles would not have achieved anything like the success they did without Ringo in my opinion. When John Lennon was asked in an interview whether Ringo is the best drummer in the world, he replied “He’s not even the best drummer in The Beatles.” He was joking of course. Paul McCartney tells of the hairs standing up on the back of his neck the first time the band played with Ringo. You only need to listen to The Beatles’ Hamburg recordings pre-Ringo to know the value of Ringo. All my life, I’ve heard stories of how Pete Best, the original drummer, was unfairly kicked out of The Beatles when they were just on the brink of stardom. John, Paul and George were jealous of Pete’s good looks, so the theory goes. They denied him his rightful place in rock history and all the adulation and money! The truth of the matter was that he was nowhere near as good a drummer as Ringo was. Ringo was special. Drummers know this. Casual listeners do not. When I was younger, I used to love certain guitar solos by Steve Howe of Yes, Jimmy Page of Led Zeppelin and Eric Clapton of Cream. In fact, I still love these solos, but I realise now how much of their magic was supplied by the great drumming that was underpinning them. Without the immense grooves of Bill Bruford, Alan White, John Bonham and Ginger Baker, these solos would have been much less impressive. Conclusions about drummers As we have seen, it can be difficult to find a good drummer for your amateur rock band: one who grooves, has good subdivision, plays at reasonable volume levels, turns up to at least some rehearsals and acts in a somewhat sane manner. Due to the difficulty of this task, you may consider paying a good drummer to play or even using a drum machine, despite these two options not being ideal.
Hopefully you have a good network of contacts within the community of musicians where you live, and you can draw on this network in order to find a decent drummer. (Some names of musicians have been changed in the above blog) Mark Baxter (c)2024 Names of some individual and bands have been changed In this post and the next… Good drummers. Henpecked drummers. The average amateur drummer. Loud drummers. Dave Headache, Ian Womb and Troy Alexander. Gaetan the knife-weilding percussionist. Drum machines? Another disastrous gig for the band Tambana. Ringo’s genius. Good drummersFinding a good drummer will be one of your most challenging tasks when forming an amateur rock band. Without a groovy, well-subdivided beat underpinning everything else, your band cannot hope to create magic. After all, rock is rhythmical music first and foremost. You must do all you can to woo a good drummer and get him or her to commit to your band. It’s critical. Good amateur drummers are in high demand. When you manage to entice one to join your band, you will probably have to share him or her with one or more other local bands. You will be competing for their time. This means you need to constantly check with your drummer when organising rehearsals and gigs, to see if they will be available. Henpecked drummers The Henpecked Drummer is a phenomenon I have come across several times over the years. He is a guy who plays the drums well and, in addition to playing with another band, is tasked with further duties by a domineering wife or girlfriend. The Henpecked Drummer is frightened of his partner, and he is not frightened of you. Her demands on his time take priority. He will be unable to attend most rehearsals as he will be busy clothes shopping, assembling an IKEA bookcase, visiting an art museum, hosting in-laws or some other non-important activity. (Not as important as playing in your band anyway.) A common phrase you will hear the Henpecked Drummer say is, “I’ll have to check with the missus first”. You may need this guy for the sake of the band. Thank God you are NOT this guy! He probably had to hand over his testicles to his partner when they first started dating, and she’s kept them under lock and key ever since. Good drumming skills and high levels of testosterone are not correlated. On the other hand... The Henpecked Drummer might not be henpecked at all. Perhaps he just uses his wife or girlfriend as a convenient excuse to get out of band rehearsals? Typical good drummer behaviour On the occasion when a good drummer actually makes it to a band rehearsal, it will immediately become clear that he has done zero homework for the rehearsal. You Whatsapped him links of songs to learn last week. He didn’t learn them. He didn’t even look at your message. But, not to worry, he simply pulls out his phone at the rehearsal, has a quick listen to the songs on Spotify and immediately nails the drum parts on the first play-through with the band. No problem. And he does so with great groove too. Because good drummers are in demand, they may receive an offer to play in another band at any moment. Your drummer may decide to take up this offer and drop your band. However, the drummer will generally not tell you this. In my experience, very few musicians say point blank, “I’m leaving the band. Sorry. Bye”. They don’t want the confrontation, the awkwardness. Instead they become less and less available for rehearsals. This is their way of edging out of their commitment to play in the band without being explicit. The popular internet meme of Homer Simpson perfectly encapsulates their method of quitting the band. In the meme, Homer slowly backs up into a hedge until he disappears completely from view, probably to avoid some tiresome social event, like a work colleague’s barbeque. After a while, you become aware that your drummer has similarly disappeared and has in fact left the band for good. Drummer for hire To save yourself a lot of hassle and uncertainty, consider paying a good drummer (a pro or semi-pro) to come in for a rehearsal or two and to play gigs. If you are an amateur musician with a decently-paid full-time job, playing gigs should not be about you earning money. You are not in it for the money. The money earned from playing gigs is only validation that you are doing well. Your band will probably only get paid £200 per bar gig anyway. So, why not reward a good drummer? Give him the full gig payment, perhaps some more too, and reap the benefits of all of his hard work and dedication to his craft. He’s spent countless hours behind the drum kit during his lifetime. His tidy subdivisions will allow you to play more easily. Guitar parts you couldn’t play with previous drummers will become effortless now. His great dynamics will add another dimension to the band. And, the payment will mean he is more likely to actually turn up. So, if you happen to know a good local drummer who would be willing, treat yourself. Hiring a pro/semi-pro drummer is not a long-term strategy as he may suddenly have to leave town to go on tour with a pro band if the opportunity arises. But you’ll have a great time in the meantime. The average amateur drummer The alternative to finding or hiring a good drummer is using the average amateur drummer. The upside of using the average amateur drummer is that they will be available for nearly every rehearsal and gig. The downsides may include the following:
Many amateur drummers seem to concentrate on texture first and foremost, i.e., the dynamics, subtle differences in volume, making the sound of the drums more 3D with some sounds at very low volume (ghost notes), some at medium volume and some loud and in your face. It takes skill to play with texture, so this is definitely a plus for a drummer. However, this skill often comes at the expense of playing with good timing. I will mention rhythmical deficiencies that amateur drummers (and other musicians) often suffer from in other blog posts titled Wonky Subdividers, The Rhythmically Dyslexic and Excessive Goosers. Ridiculously loud drummers Drums are loud. Unlike a guitar or a keyboard, there is no volume control on an acoustic drum set. However, some drummers have a subtle touch and, if the situation requires it, they can play quietly. Maybe they’ll use Rutes (a.k.a. Hot rods) occasionally. Rutes are quieter than regular drum sticks. Other drummers though, have one setting only, regardless of the situation. And this setting is: Ridiculously loud.
I’ve met three ridiculously loud drummers in my time: Dave Headache, Troy Alexander and Ian Womb. Dave Headache played for a while in the afore-mentioned Shiny Exciters band, with Colin Europe and myself. Dave tried, for our benefit in rehearsals, to play quietly. He could never manage to do it though. His time-keeping went out of the window as soon as he lightened up his touch. In spite of this inability to play at low volumes, he was actually a good drummer in the John Bonham style with a lot of technique and massive amounts of energy. He sounded good at gigs, but rehearsals in small practice rooms were uncomfortable for the band and ear plugs were needed. It’s always less enjoyable to play with ear plugs as you lose all the high end. The sound is muffled. And you have to keep taking them out to communicate with the others between songs. Another drummer I knew, Troy Alexander from the band Dad Bod Millionaires, was nearly an exact photocopy of Dave Headache. He also could not temper his loud drumming. Troy once asked me to sound engineer at a Dad Bod Millionaire gig. It was in a tiny bar. When I arrived at the bar, Troy handed me a complete set of microphones to mic up his drum kit and put it through the P.A. speakers for extra volume. Suffice to say, I did not use these. After the sound check, the owner of the bar approached me and said, “Please turn down the volume. It’s way too loud!” He then immediately turned around and walked off before I could respond. Little did he know that Troy’s drums were the factor that determined the volume level of the band. I had zero control over the volume of Troy’s drum kit. All I could do was adjust the other instruments to somewhat match Troy’s volume. And I had to do this otherwise the music would have been ridiculously unbalanced: it would have been mostly drums with a tiny voice singing and tiny instruments playing faintly in the background. I passed on the owner’s concerns to Troy. Troy shrugged his shoulders. Once the audience arrived and the band launched into their first number, it became immediately clear to me that the sound check had been a muted affair. Troy, and therefore the band, were playing much louder now! Troy had gotten excited by the presence of the audience. I saw the bar owner’s face drain. He had now lost his opportunity to negotiate over the volume level: the gig was under way and a room full of people were enjoying themselves (despite undergoing a degree of permanent hearing loss!) Near the end of the gig, I had to leave the mixing desk in the hands of someone else. I had to go and catch the last train home. As I ran to the station, I could still clearly hear the Dad Bods from two blocks away. Relations with the bar’s neighbours probably soured significantly that evening. When I walked past the bar in the subsequent months, I saw posters in the window advertising upcoming comedy nights and salsa dancing nights, but never another band night. So, Troy’s excessively loud playing probably reduced the area’s music scene by one venue that evening! Since this gig, Troy Alexander’s name and that of the Dad Bod Millionaires has come up in my conversations with other local musicians several times. Mention of Troy and his band is always followed by the comment, “Too loud!” or words to this effect. “Too loud” is the overriding impression that one is left with after attending a Dad Bod Millionaire gig. Ian Womb, yet another super loud drummer I’ve encountered, used to organise a local open mic night. He would often play drums for the different acts. Ian’s open mic night changed venue four times in about six years, due to neighbour complaints. Eventually, I saw a post on Ian’s Facebook page announcing that their would be no more open mic nights. I think Ian had run out of available venues in town. A less heavy-handed drummer would have been able to continue at each of these venues, I’m sure. (The names of some musicians and bands in the above post have been changed to protect identities) Mark Baxter (c)2024 In this blog post… Famous goosers in rock history. Good goosing versus goosing gone too far. Avocado Disappointment and Victor Movlove. Bob Marley and The Wailers, starring Family Man. How to cure a bad case of goosing. In his autobiography, jazz legend Miles Davis mentions a player who ‘gooses” the rhythm. Goosing is a slang term which means pinching another person’s buttock in order to hurry them up. The gooser, in a musical sense, is a musician or a singer who plays slightly ahead of the beat, and this has the effect of accelerating the tempo of the band as a whole. A gooser can be of two kinds: a player who occasionally plays notes too impatiently (e.g., due to getting overly excited at choruses or crescendos) or a player who consistently plays every note slightly early (a.k.a. playing on top of the beat). The other players in the band can try to ignore a gooser and maintain the original tempo, but the rhythm will then seem like it is slowly deflating. The music’s vitality will start to drain away. Realistically, once a musician plays even one note slightly ahead of the beat, the other band members must react. They have to follow the gooser and step up to the new, faster tempo he or she has set. The gooser may then goose again, and the other musicians will have to step up again, and so the cycle continues, with the song getting faster and faster... Having a gooser in the band is not necessarily a bad thing, especially when playing energetic rock music. Keith Richards of The Rolling Stones is a famous gooser of the tempo. Live and on studio recordings, you can hear him dragging the rest of the band along behind him. Charlie Watts, the band’s drummer, was a master of following Keith’s every acceleration. Take a listen to the original version of Honky Tonk Woman. The cowbell and drums start off the song at a steady 111bpm. Keith’s very first guitar lick is impatiently played and this immediately gooses the tempo up to 113bpm. Then the roller coaster ride begins... The song reaches 118bpm by the end of the first verse. A lot of acceleration then happens during the first chorus. By the end of the song, the band are playing at 126bpm. Quite an increase in tempo! (A 14% increase.) The song is a classic though. It has loads of energy because of the continual acceleration and it sounds great. Other great performances that are goosed and which accelerate considerably:
Goosing becomes a problem when it is excessive and when the other musicians have a hard time keeping up. An amateur musician or singer may get overly excited when they reach a chorus or a crescendo part in the song. Their intention is to give a boost of energy to the music at this moment. They hit harder, increase their volume (often a good thing) and push the tempo too fast in too short a space of time (NOT a good thing). The effect is the opposite of the one intended: the song’s energy is lost. Another way goosing can be a problem is when there is more than one gooser in the band. In this scenario, tempos can get out of hand quickly! Victor Movlove One excessive gooser I knew was a bassist called Victor Movlove. We briefly played in the band Avocado Disappointment together. Victor was a tall, joyful guy and renowned gooser (only in the musical sense, I hasten to add). At one Avocado Disappointment concert, I began to play the guitar intro to Chuck Berry’s Johnny B Goode at the regular tempo, which is already fast, only for Victor to push the tempo so fast, it was impossible for me to play the solo I had planned in the second half of the song. Abort! Abort! I had to improvise a much simpler solo on the spot; one that was possible to play at the now ridiculous tempo. The drummer was also dragged along. He dropped beats in order to catch up and messed up drum fills which were now impossible to play at this break-neck speed. This was probably the most punk rock version of Johnny B Goode ever played. On another occasion, Avocado Disappointment were recording a demo song in a recording studio. Victor Movlove laid down his bass line on top of a pre-recorded percussion track. The producer noticed Victor playing was on top of the beat and in the DAW (recording software) was able to move the bass back by a certain number of milliseconds relative to the percussion track. The track immediately sounded groovier. How to deal with an excessive gooser The gooser may not be aware they are pushing the beat, so it’s best to tell them: “Roger, you are f***ing up the rhythm!”, or words to that effect. You should probably sugar-coat the message a little. A fellow musician once told me that I was pushing the beat. His comment stung me. It hurt my feelings. After listening back to some of our recordings though, I knew he was right. I felt deflated. I then spent a month focusing on this aspect of my playing and I largely sorted it out. So, I urge you to tell it to the gooser straight, at the risk of offending him or her. It will be better for the band and for the gooser also (although, don’t expect to be thanked for delivering this message!) And, of course, make sure YOUR playing is on point before giving them the bad news! Things an Excessive Gooser can do to improve
Ultimately, if the excessive gooser doesn’t stop excessively goosing the tempo, it may be better that you let them go and find a replacement. Another related aside… While gradually goosing the rhythm can give a lot of energy to a song such as Honky Tonk Woman, other classic performances slow down during the song and sound great nonetheless. For example, Stir it up (live at The Old Grey Whistle Test, 1973) by Bob Marley and The Wailers. Family Man Barrett, the bassist, pulls on the rhythm (plays very slightly behind the beat of the drums) and this gradually decelerates the tempo of the band during the song. It is interesting to listen to the start of the song and then skip to the end, to hear just how much of a reduction in tempo has occurred. The effect of Family Man playing slightly behind the beat is a very grooving, relaxed rhythm; the opposite of the ‘rocking’, goosed rhythms of the songs mentioned earlier. And certainly the opposite of Victor Movlove. (Some musician and band names in this article have been changed to protect identities.) Mark Baxter (c) 2024 |
Blog: How to form a rock band. Also, how NOT to form a rock band.About this blog
These blog posts contain info I would like to pass on to my music students when they form their first bands and start to play live gigs. I explain more here in my first blog post.
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Mark Baxter, musician, music teacher, guitarist, bassist, drummer. English expat living in Belgium.
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