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strangle my second drummer!?

#21
jnuts1 said:
Oh man have i had enough of our 2nd drummer. he is constantly speeding up during fills, jumping on top of the beat, getting behind the beat and general overplaying. all while telling me i keep speeding up. drummer 1 and i have zero problems.

i did 3 sub gigs over the holidays and not one time did any of this happen so i know its not me.

just venting. i'm not quitting, we already have too many bookings for far too much money.
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I have a good drummer who also suffered from speed ups. I had a big talk with him and now he’s keenly aware of my needs. It mostly works out ok.
 
#25
jnuts1 said:
Oh man have i had enough of our 2nd drummer. he is constantly speeding up during fills, jumping on top of the beat, getting behind the beat and general overplaying. all while telling me i keep speeding up. drummer 1 and i have zero problems.

i did 3 sub gigs over the holidays and not one time did any of this happen so i know its not me.

just venting. i'm not quitting, we already have too many bookings for far too much money.
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(Sigh) drummers. So important, yet so not important. Hahahaha
 
#26
whero said:
1. I don't know what you mean by that bit I put in bold there.

2. What do the two drummers do? If they're doing the same thing, you only need one. Is #1 keeping the main beat (which is why he's easy to lock in with) while #2 is spicing it up with fills and frills? If so, where's he getting his drum parts from? Just making them up?

I've seen a few bands with two drummers on two kits. Even when it sounded OK I never thought it was actually necessary. One good one would have been fine.
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um they switch during sets? one plays percussion and one drums and they switch sometimes
 
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#29
Many of us are willing to fire our only drummer, without any real cause. You have cause, and a spare drummer. What are you waiting for?

Oh, and.....don't fire the drummer from your band while the band's gear is in his girlfriend's basement. While you think that would go without saying, somehow several relatively intelligent young people (this happened a while ago) missed that detail.
 
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#30
jnuts1 said:
we have 2 drummers/percussion. they switch off during sets. I have no problems with the other drummer. we lock hard but we have been playing together for a long time now. probably 9 years or so and we used to be a backing band for various songwriters before this band. but ive played with this drummer over 2 years so I feel like we should have clicked by now.
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Fire him from drumming and make him the percussionist. Then he will have to lock in with drummer #1 who is in time. Or, just fire him.
 
#32
As a drummer and bassist, I hear your frustration. I have been in so many situations the other way around where everyone in the band is pulling a song and I follow along, only to have one lone person say it's all my fault the song is speeding up. So what do I do? I grab my metronome, put it in my ear and say "ok, let's play it to a metronome". I've done this a few times over the years, and as soon as I do, everyone mumbles... "ok, so maybe I am pulling the song a little".... it becomes real clear when someone is dictating the rhythm from a metronome and the other players are forced NOT to speed up.

What usually happens after that is we all concede that, indeed, the song sounds better when we speed up, and let's just accept that. My current band member has notes all over his charts not to speed up - apparently all his previous drummers would run with him when he picked up the tempos. Yet he would start all the songs!! We finally realized that if we didn't speed up a little, it just wouldn't sound right, but what he REALLY wanted was to slow things back down in the verses before speeding them up again a little in the choruses.

The point? The drummer will always be the fall guy for speed indescrepencies. A lot of drummers take offense to this. I get it, who wants to be told they're not doing their job right. If this guy is really off, he's probably aware he has a problem. Perhaps at a practice suggest running through a problem song with the whole band playing to a metronome and see what happens. As someone else mentioned here, not everyone is right or wrong - it might be that the songs need to speed up a little. But at least playing to a metronome will force the guy to focus on the beat and not the fills..... it might be worth a try.
 
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#35
micguy said:
Many of us are willing to fire our only drummer, without any real cause. You have cause, and a spare drummer. What are you waiting for?
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00001.jpg


:laugh:
 
#36
Our drummer is all over the place tempo-wise. I downloaded an app called LiveBPM to measure his tempo. The app isn't a metronome, it measures the tempo of the song and charts it. Pretty frikkin cool, actually. So I showed it to the drummer and he said, "that's pretty frikkin cool. I'm gonna get it". Still waiting for that to happen.... :(

The app is a couple of dollars, but I think it is worth the investment. Show the graph of the drummer's tempo over the song. Let him see how much he deviates.
 
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#38
Core Creek said:
As a drummer and bassist, I hear your frustration. I have been in so many situations the other way around where everyone in the band is pulling a song and I follow along, only to have one lone person say it's all my fault the song is speeding up. So what do I do? I grab my metronome, put it in my ear and say "ok, let's play it to a metronome". I've done this a few times over the years, and as soon as I do, everyone mumbles... "ok, so maybe I am pulling the song a little".... it becomes real clear when someone is dictating the rhythm from a metronome and the other players are forced NOT to speed up.

What usually happens after that is we all concede that, indeed, the song sounds better when we speed up, and let's just accept that. My current band member has notes all over his charts not to speed up - apparently all his previous drummers would run with him when he picked up the tempos. Yet he would start all the songs!! We finally realized that if we didn't speed up a little, it just wouldn't sound right, but what he REALLY wanted was to slow things back down in the verses before speeding them up again a little in the choruses.

The point? The drummer will always be the fall guy for speed indescrepencies. A lot of drummers take offense to this. I get it, who wants to be told they're not doing their job right. If this guy is really off, he's probably aware he has a problem. Perhaps at a practice suggest running through a problem song with the whole band playing to a metronome and see what happens. As someone else mentioned here, not everyone is right or wrong - it might be that the songs need to speed up a little. But at least playing to a metronome will force the guy to focus on the beat and not the fills..... it might be worth a try.
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Pretty much. Haven't met many players that aren't Russians. Guess who gets blamed for the band's *collective* failure? One of the three to seven players who are *all* rushing. Sad thing is when they do fire the drummer it may start all over again with a new drummer. At a certain point the common denominator should become obvious, but the ego is powerful.

Everyone says "drums should keep time" and it's true. But if what they are really saying is *only* drums should keep time they are...in one of those bands that doesn't sound right.
 
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#39
jnuts1 said:
um they switch during sets? one plays percussion and one drums and they switch sometimes
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Oh, they switch during sets. When you said switch off I though maybe they had short attention spans and kinda forgot to keep drumming in the middle of a set. Or one of them is actually a drum machine and literally switches off during sets.
 
#40
I think you should demote him/her to 3rd drummer...unless you have 4 drummers(God forbid), then you should demote him/her to 4th drummer. Or just preemptively strangle the third drummer as a warning to the offensive 2nd drummer. I wonder what the 1st drummer thinks about it all. I imagine he/she is wondering why you have more than one drummer.
 

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