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the worst drummer you've ever worked with?

#61
I have currently been recording a drummer who has no concept of how loud he is playing, nor any respect for other people's belongings.

Situation 1:

Recording the drum track, he is wearing cans (mine, and expensive ones at that, because they were the only ones that would contain the sound of the click well enough not to be picked up on the mics, because he couldn't hear the click over his own playing), and ****s up in the same place for the 3rd time. I watch him rip the cans off, and throw them directly into the wall. And all I can say is "Dude, those are about £200 [$350) ***?!"

Situation 2:

Same as situation 1, but every time he breaks a stick (used to be about 1 per song, but that's improved a fair bit now, and I'll explain why in a sec) he hurls it across the room to where he thinks the bin is, straight past the guitarist and vocalists faces, and inches away from me and my Macbook Pro. Multiple times.

Oh and the whole playing whilst people are trying to talk, and stopping mid song because he's forgotten it, or trying to figure out a fill etc.

Anyway, the loudness is improving recently, after we filmed a rehearsal, and he saw how hard he actually was hitting the kit. His response was "Jesus, if I saw someone else playing my kit like that I would F**king punch them. How have my cymbals survived this long? ***, why do I play so hard?!"

Still have to remind him not to aim sticks at the guitarists amp/guitars though.
 
#62
I was told an auditioning drummer "drank a little". Guy shows up with two 40's in a plastic grocery bag and an empty Wendy's cup with lid & straw. Both 40's were gone within 45 minutes, I kid you not. He then asked if he could have a shot from our garage / rehearsal space bar. Not a good first impression.

Riis
 
#63
Zooberwerx said:
I was told an auditioning drummer "drank a little". Guy shows up with two 40's in a plastic grocery bag and an empty Wendy's cup with lid & straw. Both 40's were gone within 45 minutes, I kid you not. He then asked if he could have a shot from our garage / rehearsal space bar. Not a good first impression.

Riis
Click to expand...

Sounds like you just auditioned Barney from the Simpsons.

One of the first original bands I played in, we pretty much turned practice into an excuse to get merry. We still got work done, but I think we each went through a six pack of beer in just a few hours.

And why is it you can get stoned and play guitar fine, but on bass you just end up staring at the ceiling? Impossible to focus on the rhythm. How the hell did Flea do that all those years?

This is all about 10 years ago now. I make a point of staying tee total at gigs these days. Might sound a bit extreme, but I've made a serious tit of myself in the past.
 
#64
I don't mind when a drummer has a drink or two, in fact with a guy I used to work with, it might have kept him from adding 20 or 30 bpm to every song by the time we came out of the solos...

We had to rearrange songs and pick songs with limited lyrics because our singer/guitarist often times couldn't get all the lyrics in the last verses of the song because this guy would have sped up so much.
 
#66
Real early in my career I played in a prog rock band that ran through drummers, the last one who came in highly recommended and wrote quirky odd metered stuff that the keyboard player liked.

Timing issues began to plague the group and for some reason all eyes fell to me as the cause. During one particularly heated band meeting where everyone was pushing me to practice more to improve my timing, the drummer revealed that he played keyboards for most of his career and had been advised to take up the drums in order to improve his timing. Needless to say I left the group soon after......
 
#67
did a sub gig once....bad, bad, bad drummer. No tone, no meter, gear for crap....every once in a while the kick drum would just...go away.

I asked him about halfway through the night if he was having problems in the hope that I could help given that I tend to keep tools in my car.

He told me his leg got tired and he just stopped. He always just stopped using his leg when it got tired.

He seemed to think that was OK.
 
#69
In a Boston power-punk band I played in in the early 90s, we had a drummer who
A) had a bad rotator cuff, so we never knew what level of quality we'd be getting from one night to the next, and
B) was master of the "drumroll to nowhere." He just could not reliably come out of a roll and land solidly on the one.

To his credit, he was straight-edge, so always sober. He was intelligent and worldly, so we always had engaging conversations in the rehearsal space or van. And he quit before we could fire him.
 
#70
I can write a whole book on such topic matter, who would like to read a story from one the following tittles???

Transexual cluless drummer. (whatever it was????)
Smackhead fulls off drum stool.
Toothless paranoid coke feind. (Bloody good drummer!!!Just nuts)
Egotistical male drummer/model/socialite/groupie.
 
#72
I can't count the number of drummers I've dealt with that were unable to stop from speeding up tempos, but only once had the opposite problem.

I was with a couple of guitarists trying to start a sort of blues/classic rock band, and we were trying out drummers and getting the typical parade of inexperienced wonks that didn't realize how much harder it is to play with a bunch of real people than it is to play along with a CD. The one guy that stands out was in shape, average-looking, maybe mid-20s, decent gear, and (based on what he said) had a good resume with previous bands. We start playing - we're doing basic up-tempo 4/4 rock tunes - and he follows along just fine, but he plays so slow that he makes every song sound like a funeral dirge. At one point I ask him - in a polite way - if we can try a song again and if he can pick up the tempo a little bit. He gives me a look that is part confusion and part terror - like I just told him, I don't know, that he needs to take off all his clothes and do the rest of the audition naked - and says something like

"uh.. pick up the tempo???"

I reply "Yeah, you know, play a little faster, speed up the tempo. Your playing a little too slow for the songs."

We start the song again, and he manages to increase the tempo by about 2 bpm. It was the strangest thing - like his dad used to beat him if he played too fast. We played a few more songs, and when our time was up he packed up his stuff and ran out as fast as he could without saying anything.

-Y
 
#73
Rockmusician said:
Believe it or not, the worst was actually a guy who graduated from Berklee. The only way he could play was if he wrote out the drum charts. He would hang them on a clipboard on the side of my amp. He was fine as long as we didn't deviate from the way he wrote the charts. If the guitar player did a longer or shorter solo, or if the singer forgot a verse, the drummer was lost and had no idea what to do because what we played didn't follow the chart.
Click to expand...

Not to hijack the thread, but that reminds me of an experience I had years ago. I'm completely self taught, mainly from learning songs by ear, playing with others, and learning as much as I can from instructional books. I realized early on that most contemporary popular music follows a few basic patterns, and that once you figured out the root note of a melody, it's usually not too hard to figure out the rest. My roomate's girlfirend at the time was a classically-trained pianist, and was apparently very good - could sight-read anything, played major recitals, and I think she majored in piano at our college. One day we're watching TV, I'm noodling around on an unplugged electric guitar, and a commercial comes on with a catchy jingle that had a pretty simple melody. The melody was in E, I start to play along with it and it only took me about 2 bars to figure it out. As I'm playing, she turns and give me a funny look and says,

"How do you know how to play that song?"

I reply "I just figured it out."

She was completely flabbergasted by that, and couldn't believe that someone could just figure out a song - even a simply commercial jingle - by listening to it. I tried to explain to her (with my limited vocab of music) how I did it, and she just couldn't grasp it. Apparently, she can only play something if she has the sheet music in front of her; without that she can't do anything with a piano.

It unfortunately left me with a really negative view of music education at the time - I thought that music lessons just turns people into machines that respond to programming. I guess she just never had any ear training.

-Y
 
#74
Worst drummer I played with was in my previous band. He and I lived close so jam sessions would usually just be the two of us. Anyway, we would record our jams and covers (mostly just Zeppelin songs) but EVERY and I mean every time we played a song we would play at a different tempo and even change the length of the verses.

Now, fair enough he is a great drummer and it may sound like he's making the song unique, adding his own twist. But when you're playing the Lemon Song and you get right into 'that groove' the last thing you want is to have to compensate for a drummer doing his on thing.
 
#75
I could go on for days on this subject. The funniest was a drummer in a recent project. I actually stuck it out with him for a little too long. I had been playing with the guy in question for a while when I realized I could control certain aspects of his playing with what I played on bass. If I EVER played a little fill or something other than the normal progression of the song, the next measure would be a drum solo. I don't mean a little fill. I'm talking guitar center drum-off, Garth in Wayne's world wanker solo. The funniest thing about it was I honestly don't think he consciously did it. It was just a response he had. When I felt like causing trouble, I'd make him take a solo at the beginning of a chorus so he'd stomp all over the vocal. Worked every time. Just got a little annoying because it quickly got to the point that I wouldn't dream of playing a fill.....

He was a very "hey look at me!" type drummer.:scowl:
 
#76
had a rehearsal with an old blues guy friday for a saturday gig. drummer shows up an hour late. 30 seconds into the first tune he stops & asks the drumemr if he listened to any of the material, no. next tune he couldn't get a basic shuffle so the leader/guitar gets up there & shows him the groove, drummer destroys it. next tune he suggest just a jam, drummer destroys it. Leader stops the jam & ends up telling the drummer he wasted his time & money & he wasn't getting the gig. fortunately i DID learn the material & nailed it saturday. got the gig full time too.
 
#77
in a horrible pop rock teen gig I used to do the drummer would consistently play his fills one beat too long or too short. Hence what once was the backbeat is now either one or three and Im fantasizing about strangling him with an instrument cable. Why become a drummer if you have no concept of time. It wasn't that he had bad time, he didn't even know there was such a thing.
 
#79
I guess I'm fortunate. I've never played with a bad drummer. In fact, the drummer in the band that I used to play in was awesome! I would rank him as one of the 'Best Undiscovered Drummers'... And that was before I moved from that area 11 years ago. I can just imagine how incredible he's progressed since I last watched/heard him. He's rather modest about his skill. He still plays and teaches these days. He usually attends the annual Montreal Drum Fest and takes some of the Master Classes offered by the pros.
 
#80
We have a texting drummer( 34 years old) in our band thats might be the best drummer in our area in my opinion. He is one of the most selfish people you will ever meet. If there is not a girl to impress at practice or a free dinner you can't find him, never a thank you either. Me and the rest of the band been looking for another good drummer but they are few and far in between and he knows it. Can't wait till we replace his ass!!!!!!
 

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