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Hey, it's Alan and I just wanted to let you know that you can now listen to the ongoing history of new music, early and ad free on Amazon, music included with Prime. Ever spend all day fishing and catch nothing? That's what happens to hackers when Cisco Duo's on watch every login, every device, every user protected. Cisco Duo fishing season is over.
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Okay, I'm going to warn you that we are going to talk about drummers on this show. I just want you to know right from the start, just in case you want to roll your eyes and go, really? Do we have to? It's kind of like an episode of Family Guy where the focus of the episode is Meg. Well, yeah, we have to. There have been countless stories about great guitarists and great singers and keyboardists. But drummers? Not so much. Unless your name is Dave Grohl. And we will get to him. Don't worry. So this was going to be a profile of my favorite drummers in alt rock. But then I got to thinking, how much do we know about what drummers play? How many histories of the electric guitar have been written? Monographs, coffee table books, books on collectible guitars. Now think about all the books written about keyboards. There's about three linear feet of bookshelf in my office that's taken up just by books on the history of synthesizers. But what about the drums that today's drummers play? Don't tell me that you go to a tool show and don't stare at what Danny Carey is playing or marvel at what Chad Smith does with those roundy things behind Flea and Anthony at a Chili Peppers gig. No, I think it's time that we not only talked about drummers, but but also about drums. Now think about this. How did the modern drum kit come into being? There's a pretty standard sort of setup. But how did that come about? Why do we play drums the way we do? And who should we thank for making drums into what they are today? Cymbals and foot pedals and snares. Where did all that come from? See? Yeah, you're curious now, aren't you? Well, stand by. The history of the modern drum kit is coming up. This is stuff that even most drummers don't know. This is the ongoing History of New Music podcast with Alan Cross. Hello again, I'm Alan Cross and full disclosure here. I play the drums. I've been a drummer for decades. In fact, I used to teach drums at a long gone place in the north end of Winnipeg called Drums Unlimited. I have an 11 piece double bass tama kit in my basement adorned with a vast array of Piesty 2002 cymbals. And although I don't play as often as I used to, it really annoys the dogs. I can never see me divesting myself of my precious, precious drums. I was really, really deep into the whole drumming scene for the longest time. I would hang around music stores, I'd attend clinics and go to gigs. Not because necessarily I like the band, but just because I wanted to see the drummer's kit. One of the coolest things that's ever happened to me was a personal tour of Neil Peart's drum sets on the Rush 40 tour conducted by Neil's longtime drum drum tech. I trembled the entire time. But until I started working on a museum project called the Science of Rock and Roll a few years ago, I never really gave much thought into all the individual components that make up a standard drum kit. I'd read and written about guitars and pickups, amplifiers, effects pedals, synthesizers, PA systems, but almost nothing about how today's drum kits came to be. Why is that? Well, I think it's time to remedy the situation. So what we're going to do over the next hour is trace the development of the modern drum kit. Something that's only really been around for about a hundred years. We're going to look at how it was created and then how it changed and grew over the last century. And along the way we're going to hear from some of my favorite alt rock drummers of all time. I won't call them the best, too subjective. But I will say that I like these guys because they're good. Really, really good. And I will try to justify my choices where I see necessary. Let's start with some drumming. Stewart Copeland is the only American member of the Police when they came along in 1977. He immediately stood out from all the other new wave drummers of the era. And the first thing you noticed about his sound was the snare drum, which was tuned very, very tight, giving it an incredibly sharp high pitched crack. Second, he had a distinctly reggae and dub feel to his playing. Something often expressed with liberal use of rim shots. Then there was a slight Middle Eastern infusion crossed with jazz. You can hear that with how he used the small high pitched cymbals called splash cymbals. He was one of the first modern rock drummers to use splashes and then listen to what he does with the hi hat. He is amazing at creating syncopated beats leading from the hi hat. His rhythms were made all the more complicated because Stewart is left handed, yet he plays a kit set up for right handers. This makes him a lot like Ringo Starr. A lot of what Ringo played with the Beatles flummoxed drummers until they realized that although he played right handed, he almost always led with his left hand for fills and flourishes. And because the Police were a three piece, this opened up a lot of space for Stewart to fill. Taking a listen to this. As a drum teacher, I used to play this for some students and say, if you can figure out what's going on here, you don't need me anymore. The Police featuring Stewart Copland on drums. Damn, he's good. Okay, let's go through our history of drums. So starting at the very beginning. Technically drums are known as membranophones and are probably humankind's oldest instrument. Doesn't take much brain power to bang out a rhythm with a stick on a rock. The first proper drums appeared about 6000 BC. They were used for rituals, religious ceremonies, marching armies into war and making music. Drums consist of a membrane, a skin which is stretched over an open ended cylinder, the shell and it struck with the hand or a stick. Now I said that some drums had an open ended shell, but some also have a skin covering the bottom of the shell. Whatever the case, in modern parlance these are called tom toms and they can be mounted on stands or on the floor. There's a special drum called the snare which first appeared sometime in the 14th century as a way to keep time for flute players. A snare has two heads, a top and a bottom. And a series of metal wires run along the bottom head. They give the snare its distinct staccato crack every time it's hit. This makes the snare very good for military use. From there, the snare became the de facto rhythm keeping machine. Today's snares are 14 inches in diameter, but can range in depth from 4 inches to more than 8 deeper if we're talking about marching bands, but we're not. Before the modern era, the various drum related percussion instruments were played by different people. For example, the bass drum was played by one person. Cymbals would be the domain of someone else. And the snare drum had its own player or players. We still see this in today's marching bands. In fact, the biggest form of popular music in the US in the 1890s was marching music. John Philip Sousa and all that sort of thing. Marching bands, an offshoot of military music, required people to keep strict time. But it was expensive to hire and maintain a marching band because of all those drummers. What if you could get just one guy to play multiple drum and percussion parts? It was time to downsize and consolidate. Now, this wasn't entirely new. By the end of the US Civil War, bandleaders began experimenting with ways for one person to play more than one drum related instrument. For example, why couldn't one person play both the bass drum and the snare drum? Well, it was possible, but unwieldy. Some innovation was required. The first significant innovation was a dedicated stand for the snare drum that appeared about 1898. The second invention was the foot pedal. It allowed a drummer to hold a beat on the bass drum with a foot, leaving two hands free for other things. The first foot pedals appeared in the 1890s. But it wasn't until 1909 that the foot operated bass drum pedal was patented by Ludwig and Ludwig out of Chicago. This was a big breakthrough and it's basically the same design that we see on drum kits today. We're going to talk about some other components in just a second, but I want to get another drummer in here. There were many things that set Jane's Addiction apart, but being a drummer, I immediately glommed onto Stephen Perkins. He got his first set of drums for his bar mitzvah. His influences were big band drummers like Buddy Rich and Gene Krupa. And this explains why Stephen likes to play with a bit of swing, giving his playing a looser feel. And I think you'll see what I mean in this track called Ted Just Admit it from Jane's Addiction's 1986 debut album, Nothing Shocking, Jane's addiction and Ted just admitted from 1986 featuring Stephen Perkins on drums. Alright, back to our history of the modern drum kit. At about the same time as Ludwig patented the foot pedal, another important development came with the waves and waves and waves of immigrants to North America, many of whom brought their traditional instruments with them. This is where things began to get interesting with cymbals. Cymbals are thin, round pieces of metal that don't produce a distinct note when they're hit, but they do have a distinctive sound. The sound is created by its diameter, the thickness and the shape of the cymbal. But the most important factor are the metals and alloys that go into making it. There are many different types of crash, splash, ride, hi hat, china type, sizzle, all with different histories. As far as I know, the oldest manufacturer of cymbals is a company called Avitis Zildjian, which can trace their roots to Constantinople in 1623. The founder of the company spent years trying to turn base metals into gold, and eventually he gave up on alchemy and got into symbol making. Zildjian remains the largest maker of cymbals on the planet. Alright to the years before World War I. Once the foot pedal and cymbals became available, all sorts of guys, and they were pretty much always guys, started putting together drums and cymbals of various sizes into kits or sets. There wasn't a standard setup. Guys just arranged things in ways that made sense to them. A guy who played a lot of percussion instruments at the same time was attractive to band leaders. Instead of paying four or five people to keep time, he only had to pay one. And so we started seeing drummers and their kids appear on ragtime records. A big breakthrough came with the original Dixieland jazz band around 1917. Their new recordings of this thing called jazz proved to be pretty popular in and around New Orleans. And an admirer named Baby Dodds headed north taking a playing style built around a bass snare cymbal setup with him. When Prohibition came into effect, the speakeasies needed entertainment. This is where a lot of jazz bands found work. Drummers developed compact kits that could be transported easily into these clubs and out when the cops showed up to raid things. Alright, time for more drumming. Chad Smith is one of the hardest hitting drummers in the world. Guy is rock solid. He's from St. Paul, Minnesota. Started playing when he was 7, and at first he was a straight ahead rock guy, following the lead of Black Sabbath and the Stones and the Beatles, the who and Led Zeppel. But then he was given instruction by a funk drummer named Larry Frantangelo. After that, everything changed. Chad says that this is when he stopped being a drummer and began being a musician. Now, the best way to give you an idea of Chad's chops is to play one of his solos. Now, come on, don't roll your eyes. A drum solo properly executed can be a thing of beauty. And this Chad Smith performance from 1997 is definitely beautiful. Chad Smith of the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Take it from me or anybody else who plays drums, this guy is good. When we come back, more on the history of the modern drum kit. Picking up things at the end of the 1920s, when movies messed everything up for drummers.
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This episode is all about the history of the modern drum kit. And along the way, we're hearing samples of my favorite alt rock drummers. We've made it. Up to the end of the 1920s, drummers had started putting together various combinations of drums with a snare and cymbals. Some copied others, but there was no real standard setup. A flood of drummers came into the music market after 1927 when talking movies were introduced. These guys, and again, they were pretty much exclusively guys, had jobs providing sound effects in theaters that showed silent movies. When movies acquired sound, theaters didn't need resident musicians anymore, and that included drummers. But when these guys went searching for work in bands and orchestras, they brought some of their movie percussion effects with them, and that added some new sounds and setups to the drum kit. A new development was the hi hat. These are two cymbals facing each other and sitting on top of each other. They're mounted on a hi hat stand, which allows the two cymbals to be moved apart or clanged together using a foot pedal. You can also hit hi hats with your sticks, and they can be open or closed or a combination of open and closed. When you Hit them. And if all that still doesn't help, the hi hats are the things that make that TSS sound in a song. The guy who invented the modern hi hat seems to be a dude named Barney Wahlberg. This was 1926, when he was working with a small company that made drum accessories. These new timekeeping noisemakers proved to be very popular very quickly and were adopted by jazz players. The sound of hi hats became a very important part of the swing and big band era of the 1930s. Hi Hat cymbals were soon standardized at 14 inches in diameter. You can get them in a bunch of different sizes today, but 14 inches still seems to be about the most common. This is a nice segue to another one of my favorite alt rock drummers, Jimmy Chamberlain, who is best known for his work in the Smashing Pumpkins. His dad and his older brother were both heavy into playing with jazz bands. So that's what Jimmy grew up on. Starting at age 9, he started taking lessons, focusing mainly on jazz styles. Weird point of trivia. His most important teacher was a guy named Charlie Adams, and he would later go on to work for Yanny, you know, the new age guy with the stache and long hair. Little Jimmy was really, really good. And he began working in touring big bands from the age of 15. His main gig was with a group called JP and the Cats. Lots of standards by Benny Goodman and Count Basie and Tommy Dorsey, Gene Krupa and many other legends of the 30s and 40s. Now that you know that, listen to Jimmy's playing in this song from The Smashing Pumpkins 1993 album Cherub Rock. Pay attention to the slight swing in Jimmy's rhy and how he uses the hi hats to anchor everything that he and the band does. The Smashing Pumpkins with ex swing and big band drummer Jimmy chamberlain. By the middle 30s, swing was the most popular form of music in North America. And because such an emphasis was placed on rhythm for dancing, drummers started getting more attention and more respect. The very first drum superstar was probably Gene Krupa. He had his own orchestra and his kit was set up on a big riser high above all the other musicians. And he played with a lot of energy and flamboyance. People loved it. It was primal and it was powerful. One of his most popular gigs was the drum battle, where he would challenge someone to see who was the best. His most frequent competitor was his friend Buddy Rich. They held many of these drum battles on stage, on TV and on record. They went a long way towards making playing drums a really, really cool thing. Also, Koopa and Rich did a lot to standardize how drum kits were constructed and set up. By 1948, Koopa's kit had evolved to a point where it would be recognizable and playable by a drummer of today. At the time, his favorite drum manufacturer was Slingerland, a company that started making drums in 1913. Krupa's 1948 kit featured a 24 inch bass drum played with a Ludwig style pedal, a 14 inch snare, a 13 inch tom tom mounted on a stand and a 16 inch tom with legs that stood on the floor. He had 13 inch hi hats on a hi hat stand and two cymbals mounted on their own stands. Now, if you know anything about drums, you know that any drummer today could sit down and play that with no trouble at all. Buddy Rich developed something very similar. And then there was another drummer named Louis Belson, who in 1952 made the first recording using a kit with double bass drums. Alright, back up just a bit to the 40s. A new form of rhythmic popular music called bebop was being born. Bebop evolved because big bands were too big and too expensive to maintain, especially after World War II. No more big horn sections. Well, maybe a saxophone player or two, but that's about it. More volume and more power was required from fewer people. And a smaller band meant that the music had to adapt to these new performance requirements. Bandleader Louis Jordan pioneered bebop, insisting on heavy shuffle rhythms. This evolved into what became known as rhythm and blues. And this is key. One of the characteristics of rhythm and blues is a very heavy backbeat with the snare all through the song. Now, as crazy as it sounds, something that simple was a big innovation. A basic 4:4 rhythm became the foundation for everything that came after that. We'll pick that up in a sec. Time for more drumming. And it was just a matter of time before we got to Dave Grohl. Right. Now, Dave did not start as a drummer. His first instrument was the guitar, something he first picked up at age 12. When he got into high school, he played in a series of bands. And in one of those, a group called Freak Baby, he switched from guitars to drums. And that's where he stayed mostly right until the end of Nirvana. Dave plays really, really hard. That's because his drumming idol is Led Zeppelin's John Bonham, another really heavy hitter. This is a great example of the Bonham influence being channeled by DAV. Nirvana with of course, Dave Grohl, a very powerful player from the middle 50s. Innovation in drum hardware began to level off with most attention focused on making the now standard setup better. The four piece, snare, bass, mounted tom and a floor tom became a five piece with two mounted toms. Some added a second floor tom Symbol selection and arrangements of the cymbals changed. A bigger change came in the way that people played these setups. With the rise of rock and roll, rhythms became even more important. The backbeat, the bass drum. As rock and roll grew in popularity, manufacturers began chasing these new customers. A big market grew for drumsticks. One of the biggest companies was Vic Firth, which was founded in Boston in 1963. The firm came up with the idea of not just cranking out generic sticks, but sticks with a variety of consistent weights and balances and feels across a series of models, all carefully matched together. And this revolutionized the way drumsticks were made. It also changed the way drummers selected drumsticks. They became as personal as golf clubs and hockey sticks. One guy who uses his own signature set of sticks made exclusively for him by Vic Firth is Danny Carey of Tools. He's another one of my favorite players. He started playing at 10 and like a lot of the other guys that we've talked about, he studied jazz. He went to college at the University of Missouri in Kansas because he knew the city had a great jazz scene and he got to watch and perform with some pretty good musicians. He then worked as a studio drummer in la, something that requires very serious chops. And Danny has taken drums to places where few have gone before. Tool fans know he's deep into the occult and sacred geometry and metaphysics and science and the mystical, magical arts of the masons. It is said. And remember, we are talking about Tool here, so it's hard to separate fact from fiction. It is said that Danny's drum kit is set up according to strict mathematical principles. The circle theory, the golden proportion, the theory of the equator. And if you look closely, you might be able to see the outline of a pentagram in its construction. One of his kits isn't made of wood. The shells are all cast from bronze taken from recycled symbols. I heard the whole thing cost $70,000, but is too heavy for Tool to take on tour. Here's another drum solo. It's Danny Carey accompanying himself with some drum friendly electronics. Tools. Danny Carey doing his thing with Tool. One more segment to go wherein we will talk about the final evolution of the modern drum kit. And we'll have to talk about electronic drums, at least for a bit. Amadeus. Yeah, that Amadeus shows up in Vienna at 25. He's jobless, totally free from his dad and ready to make some noise. He finds love in an amazing partner, Constanze Weber, and suddenly he's dropping beats that nobody can ignore. Salieri was convinced that Amadeus was God's chosen one, so he had to be silenced. Tune in to the story of history's most infamous musical rivalry. AMADEUS premieres Monday, January 5th on Showcase Stream on STACK TV.
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This episode is brought to you by State Farm. Listening to this podcast Smart move Being financially savvy Smart move Another smart move having State Farm help you create a competitive price when you choose to bundle home and auto bundling. Just another way to save with a personal price plan. Like a good neighbor, State Farm is there. Prices are based on rating plans that vary by state. Coverage options are selected by the customer. Availability, amount of discounts and savings and eligibility vary by state.
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Right now get up to 20% off select online storage solutions put heavy duty HDX totes to good use, protecting what's important to you. The solid impact resistant design prevents cracking and the clear base and sides make items easy to find even when the totes are stacked. Find select online shelving and tote storage up to 20% off at the Home Depot. To organize every room in your home from your garage to your attic, visit homedepot.com how doers get More Done the biggest thing that ever happened to drums and rock n roll was Ringo Starr. When the Beatles first burst into the mainstream in 1964, so many kids gravitated to the fun and slightly odd looking Ringo. He played a standard four piece Ludwig kit with an oyster gray finish. My first set of drums was exactly like his mom bought them for me for 300 bucks. Ringo made playing the drums look fun and easy. And it was fun. But easy? Hardly. Ringo got this bad rap of not only being an average drummer but but also being a below average musician. But both those accusations are not only unfair, but wrong. Any drummer who has studied the Beatles knows exactly how innovative and tasteful a player Ringo was back then. One of the things that Ringo helped ingrain in new drummers was the way he held his sticks. Now traditionally drummers used the jazz grip where one stick was held like a club and the other was held from underneath with the palm facing upward. Ringo favored the matched grip where both sticks were held like clubs. This allowed the drummer to attack their instrument like they were beating the drums with clubs. Power, energy, primal, that kind of thing. After seeing Ringo and Ed Sullivan and in movies and Elsewhere in the middle 60s, almost every rock Drummer that came later went with the matched grip. There's one more thing I want to tackle, but that will come after Another one of my favorite drummers, and that's Pete Salisbury of the Verve. Richard Ashcroft and guitarist Nick McCabe received a lot of credit for the Verve sound, but in my opinion, they would not have sounded anywhere near as good as they did if Pete wasn't laying down some really cool out of the box rhythms, not all simple four, four beats from him. To illustrate what I'm talking about, I want to play you a song from the Verve's 1997 album Urban Hymns. Okay. Pete could have just laid single snare shots down on the two and the four in this song, but he didn't listen carefully for the interplay between his left hand on the snare and his right foot on the bass drum. Lots of rhythm from what I'm sure was just a four piece kit. And using the nearly ubiquitous matched grip. The Verve with Pete Salisbury on drums. I don't know if it's open anymore, but he used to run a drum shop in Stockport, England. This pretty much brings us to the end of the evolution of the modern drum kit. Everything that's happened since the mid-60s has been incremental in the way drums are made and played. Changes have been cosmetic, have involved new materials and new ways of arranging the standard pieces. Now the sizes of kits have changed. They've gone up, they've gone down. Some rockabilly bands in the early 80s had drummers that used little more than a stand up snare and a single cymbal. At the other end of the spectrum, you have guys that play kits the size of small houses. But in between that is a vast number of players who use a four or five piece kit. That's barely changed from the Ludwig set that Ringo played on ed Sullivan in 1964. But we're not entirely done. Most drums are acoustic instruments, but not all of them. We do have electronic drums. These aren't drum machines. They're drumselectronic things, pads that you hit with a stick. As far as history records, the first electronic drums were used by Graham Edge of the Moody Blues when he collaborated with a professor at Sussex University. Maybe, maybe not. The first commercially marketed electronic drum was released by a company called Pollard in 1976. They called it the syndrome. Two years later, another company called Simmons released their own models. They were embraced by a bunch of new wave and synth pop bands who immediately began to set them to sound like, well, lightsabers. It was all so futuristic. But they couldn't store sounds and needed to be programmed and reprogrammed. And all this was fun for a while, but this drum sound soon went out of style. Like big hair, shoulder pads and white sport coats. Nothing dates a song like an 80s style electronic drum sound. But that did not mean the death of electronic drums. By the end of the 90s, companies like Roland and Yamaha were making electronic kits with emphasis on making them feel and sound indistinguishable from acoustic kits. Even the hi hats and the cymbals went electronic and they all sounded pretty real. They make great practice sets for people who live in condos and apartments. Today's electronic drums have been embraced by players such as Danny Carey, Neil Peart, Will Champion of Coldplay, Rob Borden of Linkin park and many, many others. They use them to trigger sounds and tones and patterns and samples. Whatever they need. They're definitely electronic drums. It's just that they don't sound like drum this anymore. Thank God there is not a single acoustic drum sound on this record and everything is played on a Simmons electronic kit.
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Send Me an Angel Send me an.
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Angel right now.
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Right now.
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From 1983. That's Australia's reality. Real life with Send Me An Angel. All electronic drums in that one played by a guy named Danny Simcic. We don't play drums that sound like that anymore. At least not much. Maybe ironically, but certainly not seriously. I don't think so. That wasn't so bad, was it? A comprehensive history of how the modern drum kit came to be. I didn't touch on drum machines because I wanted to keep things that were hit by real people. We will come back to drum machines at another time. It's a good topic to talk about if you want to go deeper into the whole subject of drums and the history of drums. I highly recommend a DVD called the Century Project, which was created by drummer and drum historian Daniel Glass. He takes you through a hundred years of drum kit evolution in a very fascinating way. Please check it out if you're into this sort of thing. The Century Project by Daniel Glass. Meanwhile, should you wish to connect with me anytime before the next show, I encourage that. Use my email alanalancross ca and I also invite to visit my website ajournalofmusicalthings.com that's updated every single day. I want you also to have the free newsletter that will end up in your inbox by 10am Eastern every weekday. You should really have that. It's good. Technical productions by Rob Johnston I'm Alan Cross Curious about the future of energy and how batteries and storage are powering everything from our phones to smart cities? Join in on the conversation and tune into the Battery and Storage podcast hosted by me Bill Durasmo, energy partner at Troutman Pepper Lock. Each episode explores the latest trends and features conversations with leading experts to answer your burning questions about batteries, renewables and the future of the grid. Listen to the Battery and Storage podcast on all major platforms.