Drum Lesson 5
Living and teaching in LA exposes me to many drum students in original bands. Often, they bring in music and need help with what to play. By focusing on the melody, you can always figure out what to play. Specifically, by "Skeletolizing the Melody", you can get a sense of where to place the kick and snare.
Step 1: Determine the Parts
You need to "look" at the song and decipher how many different parts there are, with different melodies (i.e. intro, verse, chorus, bridge, etc.) For every different part, with a different melody, you'll need to "skelotize". Many times, certain song parts will be identical throughout the song (i.e. verse 2 melody is identical to verse 1).
Step 2: "Skeletolizing"...How to
I need to first define what "skeletolizing the Melody" means. You make a non-melodic rhythm from the melody. In other words, the rhythm is the skeleton; the melody is the "flesh". As an example, I'll use the intro to "Smoke on the Water" by Deep Purple. The intro is a 4 bar phrase in 4/4 time. Below, I've "skeletolized" the melody.
Step 3: Kick and Snare
Once you have a basic rhythm, you can now decide where to place the kick and snare. You should be aware that in a lot of music, there will be a snare on the 2nd and 4th quarter notes (i.e. the "back beat"). Also, there is usually a kick on (at least) the first beat of the first bar of the phrase (this is not a rule, only a guideline). Using the "Smoke on the Water" intro, I've applied kick's and snare's below.
Step 4: Add the Ostinato
Now that you've placed all your kick's and snare's-implying the melody-you can decide what cymbal ostinato to play. To keep things simple, I'll place 1/8 notes on the Hi-Hat (aka Ostinato #1). It looks like this:
To conclude, "Skeletolizing the Melody" is a great way to insure that you are being musical; that your drum beat is constantly "implying" the melody that creates a phrase, makes up an individual part-that when played together-create the song. Hopefully, this will give you a guideline of what to play when exposed (and creating) original music!
See ya next Month, Rick Steel..