Scott K Fish

Need to be convinced Ringo was a good drummer? Try playing Beatles music.
By John Kelly Columnist August 31 at 8:23 PM

I’m here to tell you that playing music is harder than it looks. Even playing the drums.

This was driven home recently when I was asked to play drums at a private party for an evening of Beatles music.

But until I tried to play the songs properly, I never realized just how tough it is to duplicate — approximate, even — Ringo’s drumming.

Sure, you know the signature drum figure in “Come Together” — bum bum biddley bop, tapita tapita tapita tap — but do you know how many times it’s played before you go to that bit with the organ/guitar solo? Or how many times in “Birthday” you play quarter notes on the snare after each guitar lick?

Or listen to something that seems fairly simple: “In My Life.” The drumming is so spare that it seems as if Ringo’s hardly doing anything. But get it wrong and the whole thing falls apart.

I survived my Beatles gig, even the fiendishly tricky “Eight Days a Week.” That’s the good thing about music as opposed to, say, brain surgery: Nobody dies if you get it wrong.

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Zappa Drum Legend Terry Bozzio on Touring the World’s Largest Tuned Kit
The Missing Persons/Fantômas/Korn pounder hitting 40 American dates playing giant, melodic kit

You can see the footage of you 40 years ago with Zappa, and the kits are big, but they’re not enormous. When did you fall in love with the idea of building this giant sculpture?

When I started to develop that electronic kit that I got the patents for in the Eighties and played on the second Missing Persons tour, I had 36 or 32 sounds in this one little three-foot bar in front of me. I got used to having all those things. And when I went back to playing acoustic, I started to add bells and some hi-hats and different things, but I was missing from the electronic kit.

Then someone called me and said, “Do you want to do clinics?” Ashamedly, I said yeah, OK ’cause I need the money and I kind of failed as a singer/pop artist and trying to be like Phil Collins. And during the time, I was depressed and started practicing. It was like a meditation, like a therapy for me. I kept thinking, “Why am I practicing? I’m already a good enough drummer that I’m almost alienating others in the music business by it. If I start practicing and getting better, nobody’s going to hire me.” So I began this thing of doing the clinics and working with the different companies, you find that, “Oh, Remo’s rototom castings, if you take them apart, you can use them as this really weird-sounding hi-hat” and I still use those. I had DW build me a take-off on the double pedal and I had them reverse the machinery so that the pedals was near me and the beater would be hitting a remote bass drum. And that stretched into using some big China hi-hats to kind of get a grancassa e piatti marching sound, you know? So I had remote hi-hats. Then when I went to the rack, you get rid of all these tripods and you put the drums on a rack and you go, “Man, I’ve got room for this and this and this under here.” And so before you know it, you just start adding whatever you can when you hear a sound in your head that you think would be a cool addition to some music that you’re trying to play. So it was really an evolution…

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CITY DIARY
That drumming noise during the mid-autumn festival in Vietnam
Stivi Cooke
Updated : 08/27/2014

We are nearing the [Vietnamese] mid-autumn festival – Tet Trung thu – which also includes the kids’ version: dressing up in dragon costumes, banging on big drums….

It’s impossible to ignore, you know it’s coming because every kid or at least most boys are busy practicing their drum beats on whatever is handy. Remember the corny jungle drums from King Kong? Well these drums are like that except there are only three notes – loud, mildly loud, and slightly loud…

Some kids get drums bigger than an adult and enlist a team of other kids to push them around on a wooden cart with the lucky drummer sitting on top.

As annoying as it is for me to listen to this for weeks, it’s also great that the kids have a project and a purpose and contribute to their culture. I just wish someone would introduce the idea of a guitar or ukulele or something! The beat is mind-numbing….

Still it could be worse. It’s not as loud as wedding music or construction truck horns.

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Scott K Fish: Life Beyond the Cymbals