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A gig tantrum, first ever

#21
I think you handled it well. No tantrum there.

My drummer is an excellent groove man and can keep time...except when he drinks too much at shows. Then all of a sudden, it's missed cues, problems keeping the beat or upper tom flourishes that do not fit the particular songs.

I think I need a tantrum!
 
#22
Drummer keeps the time, bass also helps keep time with simple bass lines. However, as it's been noted, we're not a babysitter for the drummer, and I've done the same thing before. Luckily, my drummer never went double speed on any track, or even close to that.
 
#24
49sfine said:
I would love more info on this visual metronone that was mentioned - would like to get one actually!
Click to expand...

this is the one I bought and the one my other band uses. the "needle" sweeps back and forth to tempo, its suprisingly easy to see from qoute a few feet away
 

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#25
JKos said:
You call that a tantrum? I think you handled it extremely well.
Click to expand...
another +1

I was expecting something like "... I took off my bass and threw it on the floor, mid-song, with the volume wide open, then grabbed the singer's mike and yelled to the crowd 'can anyone play the ******* drums in here?' "

Like the OP, and like most of us I suspect, I am annoyed by drummers who can't or won't keep a steady tempo. But, to paraphrase Donald Rumsfeld, you go to the gig with the band you have, not the one you wish you had. One way to handle it is to suggest, politley, that you have noticed the tempo picking up on certain songs and arrange a hand signal to give when it happens.

Good luck.
 
#27
I think you handled it well too. I have the same problem, always in performance, never at practice, and mostly when it's a song he puts some really cool fills in or that have a bridge with a lot of fills. Adrenaline gets the best of him I suppose. The worst one is a Clapton song "Let it Rain". It has a long instrumental at the end with real cool drum work, and I have to stand and look at him and smile EVERY time we make the transition or away he goes....
 
#28
Played a party Sat. nite with a new drummer - good chops, great vocals, having a pretty good time all around. Then, between songs in the last set, he wouldn't stop dinking around on the drums as we're trying to prepare for the next song.

After several futile attempts to get his attention, I ended up throwing a full cup of beer at him.

Not my finest moment but I apologized several times throughout the nite.
 
#29
Our guitarist forgets arrangments damned near every gig.

I usually cover his mistakes by quickly jumping to the incorrect part
he is playing. Every once and a while it just irritates the crap out
of me that he does this and I play the song correctly, which ends
up making him look like a dumbass.

When I cover for him you can tell he is totally unaware that he
has even screwed up. Especially since the drummer will catch
what I did and follow me too.

The guy's been playing for 30 years and should be far better than
he is about this. He's also a very defensive person, so it seems
like the only way he can be made aware that he's screwing up bad.
 
#31
Sometimes when our drummer starts speeding it up too much, I'll face him, then go into a slight crouch by bending my knees a bit. That's our little signal that he's rushing it and needs to slow it down a bit.
 
#32
Sometimes when drummers are supposed to play louder or more dynamic, they start actually playing faster.

I guess you handled it OK. Stuff like that doesn't really bother me, unless we start a song too fast or something, then it can be ruined from the get-go. I bet the crowd didn't even notice or care about the song speeding up, as IIRC, the tune has a pretty dynamic crescendo heavily throughout the song. did the rest of the band notice or care?

I suppose I'd be doing more dancing and rocking with the packed crowd that you said was having a blast out there than worrying about what my drummer was doing, but I've also never played for 4.5 hours either...
 
#33
I would be annoyed by a drummer that could double the tempo of a song too. I hate putting the "hand brakes" on too. I'm happy to help keep the tempo, but that's more like gentle guidance rather than trying to stop a locomotive. A few BPMs faster isn't always going to break a song but some songs need to be chill and slow, like Zombie.

I would think a talk with the band/drummer would be in order. If his tempo is really that bad, he needs some work on it before he can call himself a drummer.
 
#34
Something similar to that happened to my band this last weekend.

High profile gig (casino Grand Opening), we're playing one of our original tunes and for whatever reason our drummer (who's usually very dependable) counted it off way too fast. I mean like practically double time. To his credit (I think) he kept it at that tempo rather than slowing it down midstream (which would have been much more noticable) but seriously, it was all our singer could do to get the words out at that tempo. I turned around a few bars in and gave him a W-T-F look but he was off someplace else mentally.

Got to the end of the set and he just started apologizing all over himself. He's a good kid... young (25) and lacking live performing experience, but extremely conscientous and devoted to his craft. I know he has aspirations of being a full time pro musician so he took it extremely hard. I figured he was already beating himself up enough so I didn't pile on. Plus it was just one of those nights where everyone in the band was screwing up plenty so I figured there was no need to single him out.

Having a drummer that consistently sets (and holds) proper tempo is a rare gift and should always be treasured highly when you have it.
 
#35
It sounds like he already knows he sped up badly.
Maybe he'll work on that at home.
If not, you'll probably have to keep putting the brakes on him as usual.

When our drummer starts to sing backup, he usually slows down fairly noticeably, but I've tried at push him a little but he's not listening to me, just the vocals at this point in the song, so it doesn't help.

Now, I could actually push/pull the drummer when he sped up/slowed down slightly in the band before this one, he's my brother in law and a great guy, and usually wouldn't change tempo very much. The audience probably wouldn't even notice.

I used to play with a singer who started every song VERY slow. If someone else opened the tune, there was no problem until the end of the song when he'd complain that it was too fast.
The drummer even brought an electronic metronome with him to gigs and played exactly the original BPM of the song, and we were still supposedly 'too fast'.

As already said, good time keeping is a fairly rare talent.
It is also a skill that can be learned and practiced obviously (and well it should be!), but natural rythmic precision is rare.
 
#36
hrodbert696 said:
That doesn't sound like a tantrum, more like a sulk.

Sounds like you need a talk with the drummer. I had a couple of times when tempo ran out of control, but it was because of the guitarist playing the intro way too fast. When the drummer and I came in we tried to reel it back but guitar and vox were off and running and wouldn't follow the beat. It was either play at their ridiculously fast time or have a complete train wreck.
Click to expand...

Good point. The drummer is where tempos start and finish but honestly, tempo is everybody's job. I've played in plenty of bands where guitarists, singers and keyboardists just do not have a good sense of time (almost always rushing), and even if your drummer is rock solid there's only so much you can do in those settings.
 
#37
I completely lost my marbles at a show last year. The big band that I belong to had a big Halloween gig that was going to be our last show for several months. We were in the middle of replacing half of our rhythm section: the original drummer was on his way out and this was his last show. The bass player was brand new. We also had a guy on congas and marimba who had signed on as a sub a few sessions earlier. I was also on congas.

Everybody in the band showed up on time, in the elaborate stage gear that we had agreed upon: full body suits made out of black shirts and pants with skeletons painted on with house paint and make up or skull masks. The drummer decided he was going to opt out of dressing up at the last minute until I lightly berated him in private. I was like, "dude, don't be lazy... show everybody some respect." And so he put on a suit.

So at the very last minute, right as we are about to do our first number (in which all 15 members of the band parade in from the street, playing right through the crowd) the newish percussionist comes running in late, wearing a pink t-shirt and an inside-out orange hoodie and starts setting up his drum right at the front of the stage and I blew my stack. I got right in his face and told him to set up in the very back, behind every one who came in costume. It was the kind of thing I would rather have handled after a gig, but there was no way I was going to have him set up in front and there was no way I was going to have anyone make my rhythm section look shabby and unprepared without getting bit.
 
#38
Our old drummer would speed up or slow down songs, in mid song, if he thought they were fast or slow. He was almost always wrong. When I would say, "Hey that was a little too fast" etc.. he would get indignant and say, "Hey, I'm the timekeeper". I said "Fine, do your effing job then".

Our current drummer is right on time, all the time. ;)
 
#39
You should try playing with a drummer that plays a 3/4 waltz in 4/4 time.

....AND....

He NEVER got in time.

It was the first song of the night at a no expense spared New Year's Eve wedding.

That night was a train wreck from the git-go.
 

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