A quick observation about drum machine practice

[Ace]

OK, my band got a new bass player about two months ago. He is a guitar teacher, avid Buckethead fan, and something of a "shredder". This is however, his first "real" band. He practices hours a day with a drum machine to get his timing right on all of our parts. He's got me doing it now too. It's a great tool for cleaning up our chops and tightening up the riffs and whatnot. However, I have noticed in band practice, when the drummer goes off and improvises or kicks it into high gear, which he often does, the bass player just gets totally lost while I keep right up with the drummer and we finish the song together come hell or high water. Granted Alex(my drummer) and I certainly have put in a LOT of hours(and shows) playing together, and we've been tight from Day 1. However, I think that in a way the drum machine has been a bit of a crutch for the bass player. At the end of the song he will be like "You guys played that too fast." You know what? THERE IS NO SUCH THING IN GRINDCORE!!!

[Inearthed]

I don't think its a crutch for the bass player, he's just used to playing the song at a consistant tempo (in terms of it being controlled and not abruptly changing) and a specific way versus a more improvised / on the fly way. He's interpreting your drummer improvising and varying his tempo as him being inconsistant / not playing the song as it is intended to be played. Playing with a drum machine, or just a really consistant drummer, trains you that everything is played the same way every time. When he's saying that you're playing something too fast, he's probably saying "There was a big tempo change that shouldn't have been there."

To me it sounds like he just wants to be tight with the drummer but the changes from the practiced material are confusing him / making him feel that the music is out of control.

Just some thoughts.

[Boxcar Willie 84]

I've been thinking about getting one of these just to work on song ideas with, cuz I kind of tend to slow things down a bit. Maybe I should join a doom band.

[Ace]

Doom bands kick ass, but believe me, it's WAY harder to count slow than fast. Listen to the intro to Dopesmoker. Matt's guitar playing is WAY off time. I have a song that opens with unaccompanied whole notes at 60 bpm. That's four seconds between notes. EXACTLY four seconds.

I can feel where he is coming from, but our songs are not at a set tempo. They've all got progressively faster(or in some cases slower) over the past year. There are songs that pass 300 bpm. We intentionally change the songs up, we get bored playing the same dozen songs over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over and over...

[MadJack]

300 bpm?! Holy shit dude! "Can you score me some?".........Jesus frickin' sheep shankers........I can't even imagine.........my brain went numb trying to think of what to say.......gimme some gimme some........where can I listen to it?.............post some tab........or hit me with a hammer...!@#$%^&(.........!@#$%^&*(.............!@ #$%^&*()))(*#$%^&* thats fast!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

[paige]

I believe it to be true about the drum machine. That is all I've ever played to, up until about a month ago. When I was playing with the machine and people would listen and compliment my timing and such. Well one day I got a call from a local drummer who had heard me playing against the drum machine, to jam with him. No problem, Loaded up and headed over to his house. 5 minutes into it I was lost like a little kid in a big park. Fills would fuck me up and the worst part was playing along to something less 150 bpm was fucking hard to do. We've jammed quite a bit since and I'm getting better but the machine sure did have me screwed up for awhile.

[Fragle]

nothing worse than an inconsistant drummer really....been there done that.
right now my drummer tends to be quite consitant as far as keeping the tempo throughout the song is concerned (except for 2 or 3 fills which often end up slightly off time, esp. live, but that's minor), but he just cannot repeat the same piece at the same tempo. we had our fair share of fights due to this, esp. the other guitar player. one day he'd play the song too fast/faster than on CD, and on the next day he'd play it too slow.

anyways, i like playing through a drum machine/programmed drums. when writing riffs i try to come up with the basic drum pattern, too, so i can program it and record the idea to the drum track. greatly helps with your timing and understanding of rhythms, but limiting the "drum practice" to songwriting kinda keeps you from becoming too dependent on it like your new bass player.

btw, don't be so hard on the bass player. think about it, it's always better to have a bass player who's keeping his timing TOO well rather than having an inconsistant one. it's easier to teach him how to compensate for timing fluctuations than to teach another bass player how to play in time in the first place

[skorb]

my home practice is usually playing along to albums and cd's, and somehow when I do practice with a drummer and a full band I have no problem keeping time and keeping with the jam, however it goes. ya just gotta feel it and look at each other too.
I've never used a drum machine for practice.

[Oogadee Boogadee]

it's not the drum machine's fault. it's the drummer's. clicks don't lie.

but to be fair, it's gotta be established first whether or not you want a song to have varying tempos between different parts of the songs. Hopefully not varying tempos within a single part of a song.

X bpm verse into an Y bpm chorus is ok. X bpm verse with a fill in the middle at Y bpm is not, IMO.

In Division, I rehearse and play live to click tracks I mapped out in midi, recorded to wma, then exported to a portable mp3 player. It feels sooooo good to not have to worry about time any more. I wasn't horrible at it before, but I wasn't solid either. I wouldn't say the band was on egg-shells before my clicking, not knowing what tempo I was going to hit or shift into (you'll have to ask Mike or Matt about that - by the time Dave joined, I was clicking full-time), however, shifts in time were apparent if you were paying attention. My ego hopes they were minimal enough to be considered the 'norm' as far as drummers go.

Also, Division has some songs with multiple parts that no relation in feel. I could feel each part, independently, but the feels were so different that going from one part into the next was a nightmare when it came to keeping the tempo constant. having the click pound loudly through the transition helped to really identify how both parts fit onto the same pulse. Our song Masquerade is a good example of this.

anyway, now I click. I play the same tempos each rehearsal and each gig. There is no second guessing. If a song feels slow or fast on a given performance, for anybody, that person know's that it's only their perception - how they happen to be feeling that day (sluggish vs jacked up). Knowing that, they can relax and know that the tempo is the same as it ever was and not have to worry about second guessing things.

Consequently, I think we've become really tight.

Also, if somebody wants to do at-home practice for a part at a certain bpm, they know what bpm i'm using.

Knowing what I know now, it's my opinion that anybody who refuses to address tempo issues and solutions is ignorant.

Finally, I need to do some rehearsing w/o the click to see if I can feel the time better now, and so that I can be prepared for the day that my mp3 player decides to end up MIA or broken at a gig.

[tseegert]

I never noticed just how badly my drummer (and this guy is locally considered a great drummer... he's no slouch) could use a click track until I started praticing with a metronome/drum machine. I'm not sure he realizes to this day how wildly his tempo swings sometimes.

Theres something to be said about practicing with a drummer, and a metronome. You can track an unsteady drummer after doing it for a while, but say you only have practice with a less than perfect drummer, and find yourself playing with a metronome @ 120 bpm (yah, not the fastest beat in the world) 16th note riff, and try to break into a triplet feel, it can be harder than expected to transition smoothly until you learn "true" steady tempo.

Probably best to practice both ways I guess is what I'm getting at, as unless youre jamming with Mike Portnoy, you might find alot of drummers dont realize just how unsteady they are when it comes to tempo.

[mm2002]

Perfect timing is great on paper, and for "mechanical music", but a little "swing" adds some human feel to the mix. A tight group of musicians can hang together no matter how bad one of them gets out of time. It's constant compensation. At least that's the way I think of it. I love misic with kind of a "loose" feel. Perfect timing is boring.

[SoCal]

Ace,
I`d Record the rehearsals and let him listen to it and tell him to work on those sections.

[Fragle]

"Perfect timing is great on paper, and for "mechanical music", but a little "swing" adds some human feel to the mix. A tight group of musicians can hang together no matter how bad one of them gets out of time. It's constant compensation. At least that's the way I think of it. I love misic with kind of a "loose" feel. Perfect timing is boring."
we just had that discussion at the andy sneap forum...bottom line is that sloppy timing won't keep me from e.g. listening to iron maiden, but honestly, i would prefer the iron maiden stuff to be perfectly in time. there's nothing wrong with e.g. speeding up the chorus a little, but it's gotta be spot on nevertheless, not all over the place like some of the old stuff...*cough* early megadeth *cough*