Monday, May 23, 2005

"The Feeling" - you and a drummer approaching telepathy

The posts are coming out of me thick and fast today. I suppose I should adopt a less wordy style and start sticking buzzwords in like other less verbose bloggers...

bt i cnt b bthrd. :)

Dan the Drummer Dies Divinely Demented
Dan and I have started having those "moments" that drummers and bassists should have (and which I haven't really known for a long time, not having rehearsed extensively with one drummer for a long time now). I'll put a little background in.

This song, "funks me off", is a real funk blast, but it's the tune where we get a solo each with an intro spot from Jake. You know, the music hall number. The guitarists are big fans of rawk and/or roll and they've come up with an impressive harmonised twin guitar offensive for part of their solo spot. Dan (bless him and his slightly injured hand - another thing we have in common, my right, his left) plays much more driving bass drum parts during this stuff, so I decided to stop being quite so Flea and instead kept a tight low E to octave E with his bass drum.

When we finished working through that the first time Dan shot up from his kit, eyes blazing and proclaimed loudly that he was in love (bless) with that section of the track now, and could we play it again?

This we did. Dan's got a really solid right foot, he doesn't wander too much bar to bar and that's the real trick.

However, at one point we stopped as someone called time (they wanted to say something) and Dan ended the drums with a little fill across the whole kit, which I matched beat for beat by accident on the bass. Javier (keys man, and some player) was freaked and said we'd started to achieve some mental symbiosis of some kind :)

This, as any bass player knows, is exactly where you want to get to. And in perfect time for the gig on wednesday. Nice.

Dan gets the stitches out from his left hand today. With any luck this won't impede his progress at all... cross fingers. Me, not him.

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