Here's a video of Louis Myers & The Aces from 1970, playing harp here. Most people know Louis as a guitar player but here he is blowing harp covering the Little Walter classic Off The Wall and the band here, especially Fred Below is grooving here. This is a classic example of great blues drumming>
---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
Last Edited by barbequebob on Feb 17, 2015 1:11 PM
Louis was one of the baddest cats ever on harp. He had incredibly beautiful tone and phrasing. He could plays Little Walter's music and he could play all of the older stuff, too. The Aces were one of the baddest bands ever. There was a time when you could see stuff like this seven nights in a row and I did. Those were the days.
Fred Below is still THE DRUMMER every blues drummer is compared to and still the gold standard for blues drumming. He played not only on LW's recordings, but also Chuck Berry's (much of his biggest hits had Below on them), plus with a wide range of other sessions on Chess as well as for other labels and not just for blues. One of the first things to notice is how he uses the cymbols to drive the groove, which is FAR different than the way a rock drummer normally would be doing. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
Rock drummers are more likely to play ahead of the beat, which is never good for playing anything that swings. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
Yep Bob- thats why the great blues shuffle drummers came from jazz here is a great laid back New Orleans shuffle by Bob French ( NOLA jazz drummer) on an Earl King blues thing
Great shuffle drummers sometimes hit hard on the 2 and 4. Below in the opening video isn't doing that--he's doing what I always heard guys call a double shuffle--but I've heard some terrific shuffle drummers smack hard on 2 and 4, in a laid-back way. So that one thing alone is not what distinguishes a good shuffle drummer from, say, a mediocre shuffle drummer coming from rock.
Here's Steve Gadd doing the sort of shuffle I'm talking about:
Here's a somewhat different way of carrying a shuffle. It's not the 2/4 thing, though:
Here's a shuffle with the hits on 2 and 4.
Last Edited by kudzurunner on Feb 18, 2015 1:49 PM
In shuffles, too often what's often ignored is how the drummer uses he cymbols while holding the groove down. In a double shuffle, cymbols are very prominent and with most rock drummers, it's often not doing much of anything and how you use the cymbols can fool you into thinking a groove is faster than what it is or how much the groove swings. Listen how Fred Below uses the cymbols. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
a double shuffle is where the hand play the 1/8 notes in unison and the bass gives you 4 on the floor .
Blues and jazz guys usually use thinner cymbals or loosely closed hi hat which gives you that " sloshy" loose feel.
Rock tends to use heavier pingier cymbals or tightly closed hi hat to give a more defined " hard cymbal feel"
A lot of rock straightens out the triplets.
I know myself as a drummer- i really have to concentrate when playing rock to stop the swing-- too many years of jazz and blues drums make want to swing it
@bbq....It's not surprising that he is such a great drummer...just mute the sound on the first video and watch Fred's actions, you can tell that he both believes in what he's playing and is feeling the groove... I think that most drummers find blues boring and if they're not slamming every available crash, cymbal and drum, it's not appealing to them.
I wonder if any drummer will stumble across this thread and groan like I almost always do when I read a thread about harp on a non-harp-oriented bulletin board or Facebook group. ;-)
"I wonder if any drummer will stumble across this thread and groan like I almost always do when I read a thread about harp on a non-harp-oriented bulletin board or Facebook group. ;-)" Maybe. But not if they listen, which is music. I spend a lot (too much) time trying to steal phrasing tone (everything)from other instruments. I've found it's a lot of fun to do it via a player who is already doing it. One favorite example is T-Bone playing horn parts. Clapton listened to LW. A REAL drummer would appreciate this thread. caps for Bob
Speaking of T-Bone, an essential element for the drumming of his sound, especially in the the mid to uptempo stuff is the swinging flat tire groove (flat tire grooves are the one blues groove that is often hugely challenging for most drummers being they're the easiest ones to royally screw up in a hurry and most drummers will either speed up or slow down drastically) and that groove HAS to be played behind the beat, and the the upbeats are played on an extremely loose hi-hat while the snare locks down the 2 & the 4 and the bass drum locks down the 1 & the 3, and if you mess this up even a little bit, the groove ain't swinging any time soon and here's a classic example of that and the drumming here is by Oscar Lee Bradley:
---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
The equipment of the day helped too. There were no big pingy cymbals or tight tuned snare drums yet. that helps with the slosh and bit of delay on the rebound that makes for such a hip swing.
I always loosen the bass and snare heads and use smaller looser hi hat cymbals when I play that type of swing to get the feel .
I love that old jump blues sound
Smiley Lewis, Big Joe turner and Wynonie Harris all have some great shuffle drumming goin' on
I've played with a few drummers who learned the jump sound and one of the first things they told me that they did was to get an old Radio King drum kit, especially one with old school hardware that seemingly seemed to be "attached" to the drums and one had a really old kit that used the old calf skin heads on them and actually had a socket for a light bulb to heat up the the calf skin (original equipment on them) and the older Zildjian cymbols were thinner than what most rockers use and most rock drummers usually would play too hard and too loud on those kits. Many great West Coast blues drummers will hound you to death to sell that kit to them once they found out you had one. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
The jam I go to weekly (religiously, I should say, as I am a blues disciple) has a mix of good and bad blues drummers - more often good, however. There are a number of great blues drummers in town (Seattle) from Ricky Johnson to Chris Leighton to the very best, Russ Kammerer, who can play anything. He is a perfect example of a drummer who likes blues and doesn't get bored doing what he should. He also likes pulling my chain - the other day he told me I should take a look at Ted Reed's great drumming book from the 50s, "Syncopation" to get better at counting (my choir singing wife had asked him - not that I couldn't use it, too). It's a free download so I took a look. There is a one page intro with some explanation followed by 45 or so pages of drum notation. Heck, I barely can read music let alone drum notation! Last Tuesday, after the jam, I overheard two drummers (both very good and experienced pros) talking about a very slow blues that the jam band (with a great blues drummer) had performed. One of them who had played for years with a variety of band, but came up playing with big bands, remarked how much trouble he would have had with that. Not that he thought it boring or anything like that, just tough to keep the groove. The other guy, a lefty who plays cross handed and jumps all over the place but is a great, relaxed blues drummer, said to the other guy, that's what happens coming up in that way as opposed to starting in blues bands in the 70s as he did.
Last Edited by Rgsccr on Feb 19, 2015 12:28 PM
I'm not great with sight reading skills myself, but when a drummer friend of mine in the late 90's made me a photocopy of and article about blues drumming in Modern Drummer magazine, it also had examples written out in sheet music for drummers but also had a quick guide on how to read it and I actually found it easier to pick up than normal sheet music would be because where normally the "dot" represents a note on the scale for other instruments, only this time it represented the particular drum or cymbol and the rest represented how long (like if it was 1/4 note, 1/8 note, etc.) the hit was. One of the things that often made it hard for someone not familiar with playing blues on drums is the fact that there is LOTS of space needed and those not familiar with it will often try to put in too much stuff in it and wind up royally messing up the groove. BTW, one of my favorite blues drummers around lives not far from Seattle who has gigged with Rod Piazza and the T-Birds, and that's Jimi Bott. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
The old kits had less plies in the shells ( radio king as few as one steambent sheet , gretsch 3 plies etc.) This makes for a more resonant drum but not a loud and focused sound that rockers value ( except for Charlie Watts who uses old Gretsch)
I supply lots of vintage drums and cymbals to many of the recording studios and quite a bit of that stuff was wrecked by bangers over the years- so yeah its more expensive and tuffer to find in good condition. I just sold some great old Italian hand made cymbals to a West coast studio for some vintage movie music
Zildjian in recent years has put thinner cymbals into play for jazz and blues guys ( Constantanople and Kerope series), They are sweet but expensive like Fender reissues.
There is a great book called roots of rock drumming that has tons of good info on earlier drum styles for those inclined.
I have been fortunate to be a student of the drums for almost 50 years now ( player, tech and seller). And they are still my passion
I haven't seen Jim Bott, but have some songs that he and Paul deLay did. Here is youtube of my friend, Brian Lee's band, doing a new original song called "Bucket of Chicken Wings with Russ Kammerer on drums.
If you need to see Jimi Bott at his best, there's plenty of YT videos of him while he was with Rod Piazza and if you get your hands on the CD Rod Piazza Live At BB King's, that's a perfect representation of his work and he swings his butt off in a blend stylistically of Below, Chick Webb and Gene Krupa. ---------- Sincerely, Barbeque Bob Maglinte Boston, MA http://www.barbequebob.com CD available at http://www.cdbaby.com/cd/bbmaglinte
