drums

My First Drum Cover

Jeromey Balderrama

January has been a month with not much free time, but for a glimpse of how I’ve been spending what little I’ve had, check out this video below:

Yes, I’ve finally recorded my first drum cover, using #41 by Dave Matthews Band. I’ve been excited to get into doing drum covers and open up a new chapter in my drumming.  Not only do I get a chance to apply my drumming towards some fun songs, but also this gives me a chance to learn about recording and video production.

For Christmas my family gifted me with a set of drum mics, along with the stands, mounts and cables necessary for recording.  I then got an audio interface (specifically a Tascam US-1800) to connect everything to my laptop via USB.  After getting a passable sound, I was eager to set out and record my first song. #41 is one I’ve always enjoyed playing and made a fun one out of the gate.  I set up a couple of mixes of the song: one with a click track identified, along with a mix with diminished drums – of which I found out was more difficult to make than thought. It turns out that it’s tough EQ’ing drums out of a mix without making the song sound empty.  Ultimately I tried to get the bass drum out of the mix, then diminish the rest. I think the results here were mixed.

I then set out to do some takes.  My goal here was to get something out quickly, so I did sacrifice a little bit of quality in terms of my playing and the ultimate mix.  If I were recording original music, contributing to a final drum mix, I would have spent a lot more time to do more compression and EQ’ing to get that perfect sound. For the purpose of these the video, I was pretty satisfied with the sound of my drums.

Next up was the video.  Using the Nikon D7000 that we bought for Clara last year, I mounted the camera on the tripod and used it as the primary camera. The video quality on the Nikon is pretty impressive, especially when stationary.  I then mounted a little web cam on a lamp to capture an overhead angle, outputting the video to another laptop. For my next video, I’m anxious to try some additional angles, as well as a different overhead angle. In this one, I didn’t like how my face was cut off half of the time.  I also learned the embarrassing lesson that I need to clean my room before recording again.

This process taught me a lot, and after doing some mental trail-blazing, I’m anxious to give another song a try.  I’d definitely welcome any suggestions or feedback.

Dave loves drums

Jeromey Balderrama

As a drummer, you get used to gigs like this: You play out of your mind during a set, take a break and pretty much disappear in the room because no one watches the drummer and were likely focusing on the singer.  Luckily there are a few out there – like David Letterman – who spend their time watching the drums (if not the drummer).  Check this out:

The reason he asks if the drums are theirs is because a band will likely rent the larger equipment like bass stacks and drums if they had to fly in for the performance.  In other cases, bands will add these performance dates to their tours, and likely bring their own equipment.  I love how he comments on pretty much everyone but the singers.

New Drumming Pet Peeve: Backline Sharing

Jeromey Balderrama

drumset

When it comes to drumming, I’ve had a busy couple of months.  At one time I was juggling four steady drumming gigs, and was looking at the possibility of adding another one.  Now with the baby coming, I’m taking a bit of a sabbatical from drumming – at least as far as gigging projects are concerned – to get ready for the new parent adventure.  Given that I’m going to have a little bit of musical downtime, I wanted to share some reflections from the road.

First and foremost, I’ve uncovered my new drumming pet peeve: backline sharing. Like most things on the road to Hell, this is based on the good intention (usually made by people who are not drummers).  For those that don’t know, backline sharing is when drummers, bass players (and any other instruments with bulky gear) are asked (or in my case, volun-told) to share their gear for a multi-band bill.  Whether you’re on the one doing the sharing, or taking part in someone’s shared gear – this is a lose-lose situation.  Like I said, this decision is usually made by someone who doesn’t play any of these instruments, thinking only of how they can cut corners and minimize the transition time between bands.

The bottom line is that as a drummer, I have spent a considerable amount of time and money to get the sounds that I feel best compliment my playing style, as well as the type of music that I’m playing that evening.  This was culminated from many hours spent in the drum shop finding that perfect cymbal or snare drum head, then going home and determining the exact placement of each part of your kit.  When you’re asking your drummer to backline share on someone else’s kit, you’re unknowingly saying a big “Efff you” to their musicianship and the time they spent to getting their instrument to sound the best for your music. 

I understand there are certain exceptions (like school drum sets) where you’re not playing on your own kit, but I often equate that to driving a car: I can drive someone else’s car and get around for the most part, but when it comes to understanding how the car corners, brakes and maneuver in tight spaces – you want your own vehicle. The same goes for drumming. If you’re asking me to give my best (often to help us earn money), let me cook with my own ingredients.

It’s bad enough to be asked to share someone else’s instrument, but when you’re asked to do the sharing: you’ve taken it to a completely worse level.  All that I said about putting in the time and effort to get the perfect sound out of your kit, is not a cheap process – and now you’re asking me to entrust my kit to someone who I’ve never met before and likely won’t see ever again?  Seriously? In one of my first bands, one of my band-mates was goofing around on my kit and busted up my brand new Pearl Eliminator pedal, with no offer to help rectifying the situation (luckily the pedal was under warranty and Pearl was great about fixing it), but from that point on I decided to go against the lessons my parents taught me – (when it comes to my drums,) NO SHARING!  Now while I’m watching the opening act, rather than mentally preparing for the music I’m going to play, I’m now fixated on the stranger playing my drums and cringing at the possible damage that’s being inflicted on a prized possession.

So memo to band-leaders: you’re thinking that you’re doing us a favor with us lugging less gear, but lugging gear is part of drumming – I’m more than happy to deal with it.

House Drumsets [why they suck]

Jeromey Balderrama

Last night Greenfoot played a show over at Herman’s Hideaway (for which I’ll offer some additional thoughts in a later post).  As part of the “New Talent Showcase”, one of the important stipulations were the two dreaded words drummers hate to hear “House Drumset”.

I cringed when I heard the news, and after playing the set last evening, my dread was justified.

I understand the reasons why venue owners and concert promoters want to use House Drumsets.  When you have multiple bands in one evening, you want to do everything to ensure bands get on and off the stage quickly.  Having a large piece of equipment remain stationary makes sense, especially when the drums have mics attached to them.  However, I can guaranteed that the person who made/promoted that decision is not a drummer.

When I’m asked what it’s like playing on a house drum set, I give the analogy of driving someone else’s car in a race: Yes, you’ll be able to drive the car and you know where the gas, brake & steering wheel are, but you don’t know the intricacies of this car. You don’t know how it accelerates, how it breaks, how it handles around curves.  The same things goes with drum sets.  It bothers me that people wouldn’t fathom telling guitar players to play on someone else’s guitar, yet have no problem telling drummers they have to play a drum set that gets pounded night in & night out.

This particular drum set appeared to have a 10″, 13″ & 16″ with Pinstripe heads torque’d pretty high.  What this means is that they were “ping-y” and “ring-“, a stark contrast from my darker ebony heads that produce a warmer tone that works with our music.  In addition, I had to grow used to 3 toms pretty quick, a departure from my 4 toms.  It doesn’t help that I flip the order of my two rack toms – the non-standard configuration probably a bad habit, but it’s what I’ve grown accustomed to.  In my bass drum I have a pillow, which produces a more muffled sound, while allowing a good bounce response.  The House Drumset had no such pillow, and it took an adjustment.

The policy allowed us to bring in our snare drum, pedals & cymbals. At this point, the only thing that was left of the drum set was the bass drum and three toms – which makes me wonder how much time was really saved. 

What owners/promoters don’t understand is that if you give them a staging area to set up their gear off-stage, a good drummer can get their drum on stage and ready to go in roughly the same time it takes a guitar player to set up their amp, pedals, and tune their guitars.

When I was in high school, I played on a foreign drum set each and every day – but school drum sets are different than House Drumsets.  With school drum sets you typically get a period of time to be acclimated to the kit before you play it at anything meaningful.  With the House Kit the sound check is the first chance you get to sit behind the kit.  To borrow a line from A.I., “We’re talking about practice, not the game”.  I’m all about rehearsing on another drum set to help save time – but when you’re essentially putting on an audition it’s pretty lofty to expect drummers to be in their elements in a kit they just started playing.

Like I said, I understand House Drum set may make sense to some, but it doesn’t make sense to drummers.

Why the "Stampede" tramples Bronco fans

Jeromey Balderrama

When the Broncos unveiled their own drum-line – the Stampede – for the 2004 season, I was ecstatic.  I love the marching band presence at football games, and for the Broncos to have the presence of a drum-line was a welcome addition.  However, over the years the Stampede concept hasn’t panned out to it’s potential, and has grown into an annoyance, ultimately drawing irritation and resentment at Broncos games.  As a drummer, I may be sensitive about this issue, the problems plaguing the Stampede are someday going to spill beyond annoying the musically-inclined at the games.

Among the Stampede’s struggles, many stem from the following dilemmas:

  • Their in-game repertoire is extremely limited.  As the Stampede enters it’s 4th year it still manages to play the same 3 cadences every game.  Based on my anecdotal observations the Stampede usually gets 5-6 opportunities to be featured throughout the game.  Rather than learning new cadences they’ve resorted to adding additional instruments (more on that later).  I realize that they may not have a lot of opportunity to rehearse, but the fact that they’ve played the same cadences for four years without any incorporation of new material is far-fetched for a high school drum-line, let alone a line made up of former Blue Knights. To be fair, they take part in pre-game festivities and may have parking-lot cadences they don’t play, but why haven’t they rotated those cadences into the game performances?
  • The expansion to non-percussion instruments.  Rather than learn new material, the drum-line incorporated a trumpet player.  The trumpet player increased the repertoire of the Stampede by a whopping 2 songs: Shakira’s “La Tortura”, and a popular jazz song that escapes me at the moment.  At this point the 16-member drum-line has relegated to “rock-band” mode: becoming a glorified drum-set.  The trumpet player takes center stage and defeats the purpose of having a drum-line out there.  The trumpet player is plagued with the same inability to learn new material, and still manages to to play the song with a poor tone and out of tune.  Two years ago they managed to put a guitar player out there with the drum-line, luckily someone came to their senses and we haven’t seen the guitar in over a season.  I had hoped we’d seen the last of the trumpet player when the season began with only the drum-line, but the Green Bay game squashed that hope.
  • Their lack of discipline while they perform.  The coolest part about a drum-line is when they play with a military-like precision, appearing uniform and focused.  In my drum-line days, we made it a point to appear serious (even intimidating), and locking it in: both visually and audibly.  The Stampede has thrown that concept out the window.  During performances the drummers take every opportunity to self-promote themselves, and often stop playing so they want wave at the camera or draw attention to themselves.  This results in their playing looking and sounding sloppy.
  • They’re a closed, nepotistic operation.  The Stampede is presented by the Blue Knights drum corp and due to that sponsorship are completely made up of Blue Knight alums.  This looks good on paper, but in reality turns out to be a bad arrangement.  Where the intention was to have personnel who understand the concept and work-ethic of drum corps, you turn out to have drummers with chops that aren’t what they used to be, as well as the perceived security in their position that gives way to an acceptance of mediocrity and the lack of desire to improve (hence the lack of repertoire and discipline).  You also have drummers who have corp-level ability and experience that are ignored, simply because they weren’t Blue Knights.

    I don’t mean to call out the work-ethic or qualifications of the drummers, but I do have to wonder how the quality could improve if there was a yearly, open audition for the drum-line – just like the cheerleaders.  The healthy competition would not only result in an improved drum-line, but could also be a good PR move for the Broncos organization – just like the Cheerleader auditions or the spring.

 

Obviously a change in attitude and work ethic regarding the drum-line could lead to improvement, but I have two alternatives as to how this could be fixed overnight:

  • Hold yearly auditions, open to all drummers in Colorado.  The Blue Knights could still have an active involvement in facilitating auditions, holding rehearsals.  This may be self-serving (as I would give my right sticks away to have the opportunity to represent the Broncos through drumming), but I can guarantee you that I’m not the only drummer that feels this way.  This would pave way for certain expectations, diversify the Stampede, as well as give the Blue Knights an opportunity to work with drummers over 21 or who maybe didn’t have the opportunity to devote their summer to a corp.
  • Do away with the “static-personnel” Stampede and have a “rotating” Stampede: in the form of high-school and college drum-lines that play for the home game that week.  Each drum-line has their own repertoire of cadences that they can feature.  With marching being in-season (or recently in-season) they would be in-form to give off an impressive performance at the Broncos game.  This would be a great opportunity to offer a unique experience for the drum-lines, as well as diversify the opportunity to participate in the Stampede.

With all the struggles the Broncos are having on the field this season, the Stampede may be the last thing on their mind.  Nonetheless, there is always opportunity to improve and I wanted to offer a few humble thoughts and suggestions on how the Broncos can have the best drum-line in the NFL.