Historical Overview

Technical Characteristics

Conclusion

The influence of Brazilian drum kit drumming on global popular music has been immense and cannot be underestimated. It has been especially evident in the popularity of samba and bossa nova, as genres popular in their own right, but even more so in the influence of those genres on contemporary drumming in jazz and popular music throughout the world. Therefore, Brazilian drum kit drumming has been essential in the cultural flows that informed the development of the drum kit. As much as Brazilian musicians look for references within jazz and rock, the rhythms that emerged from Brazil are nowadays deemed to be a core part of the skillset for jazz drummers and players of other genres.

The fine details of what makes Brazilian drum kit drumming unique and special are yet to be explored thoroughly. Definitely the concept of ginga is a distinguishing element, in which musicians play around the rhythmic fluctuations and characteristics of the music. The verb gingar is also related to body movement and is used to describe the motions in capoeira, another cultural manifestation that vividly represents the essence of Brazilian people. In other words, gingar intrinsically means the expression of being Brazilian both musically and in the way dancers move. That idea resonates with ‘the fact that different microrhythmic designs appeal to (and signify differently for) different audiences’.⁵³ Even though any rhythm may be deconstructed and mathematically analysed, that remains an ineffable and ethereal trait of all the drummers mentioned in this chapter.

Besides this intangible quality of ginga, Brazilian drum kit drumming comes from adaptations of percussion instruments, opening singular pathways for musical creativity. Drummers might emulate the sound of a pandeiro on the hi-hat and then make the snare drum have earmarks of a repinique; they might use the floor tom like a zabumba or bring tamborim patterns into life on the ride cymbal bell. They also often weave colours from assorted rhythms of the Brazilian plate, forging new combinations of ideas. Thus the ‘Brazilian feel’ keeps evolving, well grounded in its roots but open for innovation, establishing a fertile field for new music and for scientific investigation.

Introduction

The drum kit, an instrument deeply rooted in popular music traditions, is a defining element of many popular music styles. Since the early twentieth century, generations of drummers have explored new musical and technical possibilities of the instrument and, recent years, the drum kit has emerged in contemporary classical music settings as a solo instrument with prescribed notation. In this chapter, contemporary classical music refers to music being written now, or in the past few decades by composers operating within the framework of Western classical music notational traditions. While there is a growing interest in this repertoire today, composers have drawn inspiration from the drum kit since the early developmental stages of the instrument in the early twentieth century. I will present an overview of composed works starting with Darius Milhuad’s La Créations du Monde from 1923 and ending with Nicole Lizée’s Ringer from 2009. I will show that early approaches to drum kit composition began as an assimilation of existing popular music styles with little progression in performance techniques and expression for the instrument. In recent years, many composers have approached drum kit composition by balancing contemporary classical music techniques with the drum kit’s rich traditions, grooves, and styles to make something progressive and new. Through my own commissioning, performances, and research I have contemplated the elements that led to this confluence in contemporary classical drum kit music.

Personal Background

In 1988, I began taking drum kit lessons in my hometown of Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. Thanks to the exceptional drum instruction of my teacher David Schneider, I embraced a wide range of styles and playing traditions. I went on to play in a variety of bands ranging from punk, progressive rock, and reggae styles. After highschool I decided to pursue a music degree, but I chose to focus on orchestral and concert percussion instead of drum kit. I received a Bachelor of Music degree from McGill University in Montréal and a Master of Music degree from the State University of New York in Stony Brook, both in contemporary classical percussion performance. No longer receiving drum kit instruction, and with little time for playing in bands, I was quickly distinguishing myself as a classical percussionist rather than a drummer.

After my Master’s degree, I returned to Manitoba where I began teaching percussion at Brandon University and playing regularly with the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Around this time, I began to consider if the drum kit could have a greater role in my life of contemporary classical performance. I knew of a few composed works for drum kit such as Frank Zappa’s ‘The Black Page’ and Louis Cauberghs’s ‘Halasana’, and I wanted to expand on what I saw as a limited amount of repertoire. In 2006, I sought out and was successfully awarded my first commission of the solo Train Set by composer Eliot Britton.

In 2007, I met composer Nicole Lizée while performing her chamber work This Will Not Be Televised with members of the Winnipeg Symphony Orchestra. Pleased with my performance, Lizée invited me to play drum kit for various works on her debut album This Will Not Be Televised, released by Centrediscs in 2008. That same year, with the support of the Canada Council for the Arts, I commissioned Lizée’s first solo for drum kit, Ringer. Encouraged by these new experiences, in 2010 I returned to McGill University in Montréal to complete a Doctor in Music degree where I wrote my dissertation ‘Defining the Role of Drumset Performance in Contemporary Music’. As of today, through collaborations with composers from around the world I have premiered an extensive collection of contemporary classical drum kit solos, chamber works and concertos. My solo drum kit album Katana of Choice – Music for Drumset Soloist was called ‘a modern classic’ by I Care If You Listen and the title track by Nicole Lizée was nominated for a JUNO (Canadian music award) for best classical composition in 2019. When I consider my broad range of musical training and performance experience it seems natural that I am drawn to an artistic practice that crosses between genres. I draw from this personal experience to articulate broader points about the place of the drum kit in the classical world and the unique skill sets required when approaching the drum kit in contemporary classical music.

Drummer or Multiple Percussionist?

In contemporary classical music practice, the term ‘multiple percussion’ is associated with a body of repertoire for the solo percussionist, which incorporates several instruments played by a single performer. As drum kit repertoire appears increasingly alongside works for multiple percussion, there is a tendency to place such performers and repertoire in the same categories. Drummer Max Roach was said to have brought ‘dignity to an instrument long misunderstood and assaulted by the ignorant’ and set a precedent by referring to himself as a multiple percussionist in album liner notes.¹ At the time, this reflected his elevation of drum kit performance and the desire to be considered equal to the other instrumentalists.

As solo drum kit repertoire in contemporary classical music has increased, the discussion of its inclusion in college percussion pedagogy has led some authors to still justify its existence and continue the comparison to multiple percussion. The 2012 dissertation by Kevin Nichols called ‘Important Works for Drum Set as a Multiple Percussion Instrument’ provided an introduction and unique performance perspective to composed drum kit solos such as The Sky is Waiting … (1977) by Robert Cucinotta, One for Solo Drummer (1990) by John Cage, Brush (2001) by Stuart Saunders Smith and others. He noted the lack of studies or method books which ‘investigate the literature for drum set as a multi-percussion instrument’ and expressed his ‘desire to encourage solo drum set performance and composition by making this music and these concepts more widely known and understood’.² Murray Houllif’s ‘Benefits of Written-Out Drum Set Solos’ encouraged solo repertoire for students as ‘an effective means to learning improvisation’.³ In ‘Drum Set’s Struggle for Legitimacy’, Dennis Rogers argued that written recital pieces can demonstrate that the ‘drum set is a legitimate instrument that is quite acceptable in the percussion curriculum’.⁴

In this chapter, I use the term drum kit without association to multiple percussion. I do so to distinguish the drum kit as an instrument worthy of its own legitimate considerations, apart from earlier efforts to elevate the instrument’s status. The label of multiple percussion places an unwanted shadow over the popular music styles and the associated players, techniques, and instruments that are the foundation of the instrument.

What, then, clearly distinguishes drum kit from other contemporary or multiple percussion performance? The Encyclopedia of Percussion says that the drum kit is ‘a set of drums, usually bass drum, snare drum, tom-toms, hi-hat, and cymbals’.⁵ James Blades describes drum kit performance as ‘the advancement of counter rhythms and independence’.⁶ Jazz drummer Kenny Clarke described his use of multiple limbs as ‘coordinated independence’.⁷ Combining these ideas, I suggest that the definition of drum kit performance is: the use of coordinated independence of multiple limbs on a collection of drums and cymbals, including but not limited to, bass drum with pedal, snare drum and hi-hat, set up for convenient playing by one person.

Early Drum Kit Composition Via Jazz Assimilation

Drum Kit Composition as Homage

Genre Cross-Over in Drum Kit Composition

Complexity in Drum Kit Composition

Ti.re-Ti.ke-Dha (1979) by James Dillon

James Dillon was born in Glasgow, Scotland in 1950, and spent considerable time living in London. As a teenager in the sixties, he was drawn to rock and played in a rhythm and blues band called Influx.²⁶ Dillon eventually pursued post-modern composition, but he did so on his own terms, receiving formal education at a university level for only two years before leaving disillusioned. Even so, by the mid-seventies Dillon was considered a part of the New Complexity school of composition and his music was described as ‘close to if not beyond the limits of performability, justified by reference to the fearsome intellectual discourse which is said to lie behind those torrents of notes’.²⁷ While this style of composition often held a reputation of being elitist or overtly formalist, Dillon said that composing in the seventies was a time ‘to claw my way back to where music still has meaning and not present some kind of second-hand experience’.²⁸

In 1979, Dillon wrote Ti.re-Ti.ke-Dha in celebration of the ‘International Year of the Child’.²⁹ It was premiered by percussionist Simon Limbrick in South Bank, London, 1982.³⁰ The complete list of instruments in Ti.re-Ti.ke-Dha extended beyond the common drum kit to form a massive setup with additional suspended cymbals (one screwed tightly and struck only at the dome), cowbells, hi-hat (with a collection of sleigh-bells attached to top), log drums, snare drum, three timbales, five tom-toms, bass drum with pedal, tam-tam and a bellstick (Figure 6.1). Balancing efficiency and playability with the unusual instrumentation and complex polyrhythmic material resulted in one of the most challenging works in contemporary drum kit repertoire. How each individual interpreted and solved these challenges is part of what made a performance unique. To illustrate, the following section presents two examples of setup challenges and recommended solutions.

Figure 6.1 Recommended Ti.re-Ti.ke-Dha setup with bongos, conga and purpleheart.

Image created by the author.

The timbales had a far greater involvement in the music than the traditional tom-toms (which only enter at measure 82). Dillon’s recommended layout in the score recognized that they needed to be easily reached, placing them directly in front of the player with the tom-toms to the right. The timbales’ size and inability to be mounted on traditional drum kit hardware posed logistical issues. Also, the timbales had similar timbres to the tom-toms causing some difficulty in making a distinction between the two voices. As shown in Figure 6.1, replacing the timbales with a set of bongos and a travel conga offered a bright, short attack, distinct from the thunderous, resonant tom-toms. Not only sonically effective, they were compact and fit efficiently onto the drum kit.

Dillon also specified two log drums, each producing a single pitch. Generally placed on a flat surface, such as a trap table, the log drums did not attach to any type of hardware. Balance was also a problem since the log drum characteristically featured a ‘warm sonority with limited carrying power’.³¹ Since Dillon specified the use of snare drumsticks throughout the piece the sound produced from attacking the log drum was lacking in tone and volume. Shown in Figure 6.1, the solution was to attach a piece of ‘purpleheart’ wood onto, and extending beyond, each log drum to allow for a resonant attack area and mount each on a snare drum stand. A thoughtfully chosen setup improved efficiency of motion around the drum kit and clarified some of the dense layers of complexity which Dillon placed into his work.

Dillon employed three common hi-hat practices: loud foot attacks that splashed the cymbals together, dryer foot closing ‘chick’ sounds and playing the hi-hat with sticks. Traditionally used as a time keeping device or for accentuating the pulse, Dillon extended these techniques to be part of the upper layers of thematic material and linear movement (Figure 6.2). The constant execution of these complex foot techniques combined with polyrhythms was an exercise in multiple limb independence, polyrhythmic proficiency and physical balance. A drummer relies on a basic balance when performing and as Grammy-award winning drummer Paul Wertico stated, ‘it’s usually easier to feel balanced when playing simpler exercises. Grooves that require complex counterlines and polyrhythms can sometimes make you feel as if you’re going to fall over’.³²

Figure 6.2 Foot techniques: closed HH with foot (𝆯); open HH with foot (𝆮); HH struck with stick (𝆜); repeating bass drum pulse, mm. 1 and 2. James Dillon: Ti.re-Ti.ke-Dha. Edition Peters No.7242 © 1982 by Peters Edition Limited, London.

Reproduced by kind permission of the publishers. J. Dillon. Ti.Re-Ti.Ke-Dha, 2nd ed. (London: Hinrichsen Edition, Peters Edition Ltd., 1979, 1982)

While large drum kits, foot variations and polyrhythmic playing were all common tools of the modern drummer, James Dillon put these elements to the extreme in Ti.re-Ti.ke-Dha. Challenges with the setup, notational complexity and even basic balance demanded a unique combination of performance skill, much like The Black Page did a few years prior. Also similar is Dillon’s ability to combine New-Complexity style notation (more common with contemporary percussion performance practice than drum kit) with advanced drum kit techniques and fundamentals.

Recontextualization in Drum Kit Composition

Ringer (2009) by Nicole Lizée

Canadian composer Nicole Lizée has been commissioned by a wide range of artists such as Kronos Quartet, So Percussion, and BBC Proms. Her music has often involved unorthodox instruments such as the Atari 2600 video game console, omnichords, stylophone, and karaoke tapes. Lizée’s music has shown her pervasive interest in the drum kit and its connection to time, groove, popular music styles, and iconic performers. In her works for drum kit, she has expanded upon traditional performance practices through what she called recontextualization:

Referring to the past (or other contexts) but twisting, manipulating to create something new, vital, and meaningful to me (and to the ‘now’), without losing trace of its origins, place in history, functions, etc. but reinterpreting, filtering and distorting all of these – and placing it in a new context.³³

I commissioned and premiered the drum kit solo Ringer by Nicole Lizée in 2009. It was recorded for my album Katana of Choice – Music for Drumset Soloist in 2017 and has been performed by other contemporary drum kit players around the world. Lizée referred to iconic drum kit grooves (such as John Bonham’s in ‘When the Levee Breaks’) as ‘classic drumset paradigms’.³⁴ The solo Ringer for drum kit was a recontextualization of such paradigms in which ‘the end result is intended to be at once familiar and alien’.³⁵ This involved the emulations of drum machines and samplers behaving erratically, fragments of classic grooves characteristic of electronica and dance music warped and iconic drummer Steve Gadd’s paradiddle grooves reimagined as rhythmic and melodic themes.

The drum kit in Ringer included kick drum with double pedals, hi-hat and remote hi-hat with pedal (placed to the right of the main kick drum pedal), snare drum, cabasa, cymbals (ride, splash and sizzle) and glockenspiel (Figure 6.3). The arrangement came from personal discussions with Lizée while trying samples of the material during the composers writing of the work and during preparation of the premiere.

Figure 6.3 Drum kit setup for Ringer.

Image created by the author.

The glockenspiel was placed where the snare drum typically is on a drum kit. By doing so ‘the glockenspiel overtakes or replaces … the snare. In place of what would usually be pitchless accents and articulations, melodic fragments are formed’.³⁶ This was most obvious in the section constructed around drummer Steve Gadd’s paradiddle grooves. Since the seventies, Steve Gadd has been considered one of the greatest drummers of all time, and he has changed how players approach the drum kit and even how the instrument was made. Endorsed by Yamaha since 1976, Gadd’s Yamaha Recording Custom drum kit defined the drum sound of the eighties.³⁷ Gadd also established a signature groove commonly referred to as the ‘Gadd Paradiddle’ based around the sticking of the paradiddle rudiment (R-L-R-R, L-R-L-L) and its multiple variations. In Ringer, the Gadd Paradiddle was morphed and extended around the drum kit, most notably the glockenspiel. Ringer required advanced double bass pedal technique and double hi-hat pedal technique in rhythmic unison with hands (Example 6.2) or completely independent (Example 6.3). Example 6.1 shows ‘melodic fragments’ that were formed on the glockenspiel in replace of snare drum.

Example 6.1 The Steve Gadd paradiddle in Ringer, m. 145–46.

Image made available by Nicole Lizée

Example 6.2 Unison feet and hands in Ringer, m. 1.

Image made available by Nicole Lizée.

Example 6.3 Independent feet and hands in Ringer, m. 202.

Image made available by Nicole Lizée.

Just as James Dillon merged contemporary percussion complexity with drum kit techniques, in Ringer Nicole Lizée showed a confluence between various influences, or a ‘fusing of roles’ where ‘groove and melody synthesize and become one’.³⁸ The inclusion of advanced melodic and rhythmic patterns on the glockenspiel emphasized the performance traditions of a classical percussionist. Typically, such player would have the most experience navigating this instrument since it has appeared most commonly in symphony orchestra repertoire and contemporary classical ensemble settings. Fused into the framework of the drum kit, the performer must be equally experienced in advanced foot techniques and other common drum kit techniques. The presence of rock icon paradigms such as Steve Gadd’s paradiddle required a deep appreciation and understanding of where the material came from and how it was originally played. Then when recontextualized into the new setting for which Ringer presents, the performance still has feeling and groove.

Conclusion

By studying this broad range of works together, I see consistent elements that are required when approaching the drum kit in contemporary classical composition. These are original thought, meaningfulness, and the knowledge of history. Of course, placing the drum kit in the context of the concert hall or within a string orchestra is an exciting premise, but without meaningfully connecting purpose with concepts that move drum kit performance to new places musically, technically, and artistically, the result, as discovered by Milhaud, will be ‘frivolous’.

Today, the drum kit has become a more common addition to ensembles such as Bang On A Can, So Percussion, Alarm Will Sound, my own quartet Architek Percussion, and many others who are performing and commissioning works which blur the boundaries between popular and contemporary classical music. Composers of the past few decades have had a greater opportunity through publications, recordings, online tutorials, and performance footage to learn about the rich history of the drum kit. Since I premiered Ringer in 2009, I have collaborated with a multitude of composers interested in writing for the drum kit. These collaborations have resulted in drum kit performances and recordings by such composers as Lukas Ligeti, John Psathas, Vincent Ho, Rand Steiger, Nicole Lizée, Eliot Britton, John Luther Adams, and many others. Performing this music links an individual to iconic players, grooves, and musical styles that should remain at the core of interpretation, appreciation and, ultimately, performance. It celebrates the evolution of the drum kit, the expressive potential that is possible today, and suggests that new ideas are still to come. I currently teach percussion at McGill University and I am seeing a new generation of players versatile in drum kit and classical percussion performance. I am regularly being introduced to players from around the world promoting the growing interest in this repertoire.

Introduction

Music-theoretical writing about the drum kit often stresses the instrument’s role in shaping listener experiences of musical time. Much of this work concerns the backbeat, whether establishing its prevalence in specific rock and pop genres,¹ detailing a range of expressive microtiming feels,² or contrasting the pattern with other characteristic rhythms.³ Study of the drum kit offers an effective point of contact between the sort of syntactic concerns central to much music-analytical writing and the experiential world occupied by performers and listeners.⁴ Inquiry into the explanatory potency of the drum kit – what it tells the listener, how it communicates, and how to best interpret its intimations – is still rapidly evolving.

One question that remains to be explored in detail concerns the role of the drums within metrically irregular grooves, which are incompatible with the paradigmatic backbeat pattern often heard in Euro-American popular music. I argue that listener understanding of such grooves is acutely reliant on the guidance of the drums. To investigate this claim, I have analysed the drumbeats of grooves with large irregular cycles, ranging from ten to over sixty beats or pulses. In this chapter, I theorize a typology of additive successions well suited to the analysis of such cycles – I classify patterns as either punctuated or split. Punctuated grooves arise when an established meter is interrupted at regular intervals by isolated measures in another meter. Split grooves comprise cycles with two or more subsections of approximately balanced lengths. My research forges connections between drum-kit practice, theories of rhythm and meter, and cognitive models of listener entrainment.⁵

In comparing irregular drumbeats with cycles of different durations, an important distinction must be drawn between two types of listener engagement. Listeners can easily entrain to shorter repeating cycles, developing an immediate, intuitive connection to a groove. With progressively longer temporal spans, the ability to entrain is attenuated.⁶ I posit that, as entrainment loses its efficacy, some listeners may choose to track irregularity through different means – either by counting, or by chunking and shifting between metric expectations.⁷ Where the entrainment model is colloquially described as feeling the groove, the other strategies could be described as thinking the groove. The boundary between the two modes of attending is fluid and will vary for each listener; differences in tempo complicate matters further.⁸

Moreover, in transcribing grooves with larger repeating cycles, there is often more than one viable arrangement of measures and time signatures.⁹ Whereas much music with a drum kit (rock, jazz, hip-hop, electronic, etc.) fits unproblematically into a 4/4 meter, even grooves with modest irregularities confound the straightforward mapping between meter and time signature that is often taken for granted in score-based musical traditions. Indeed, even the distinction between compound duple (6/8) and simple triple (3/4) meters can be difficult in the absence of a score.¹⁰ The transcriptions in what follows are all my own; most could be re-barred and some admit alternative beat-levels (e.g. my 11/4 may be another listener’s 11/8 or vice versa). My use of traditional European notation follows the practice of commercially available transcriptions of this music and that seen in private instruction common to neighbourhood lesson studios and institutions of higher education. Nevertheless, it remains a coarse shorthand for representing the sonic texts in question – not (as in the case of the classical score) the text itself. The best way to engage with my analysis involves finding and listening to the songs; this work is based on the original, studio-recorded album versions of each song, almost all of which can be found and heard online.

Regarding the repeating cycles under consideration, my criteria are as inclusive as possible: a groove is understood as any pattern of musical sounds that establishes a cyclic structure, and the cycles in question may be long enough to demand multiple meter changes. For example, I include a repeating pattern of sixty-one eighth notes in Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’ (1997), but I would never transcribe the passage in 61/8 time – I hear four measures of 4/4, three of 7/8, and one of 4/4. In what follows, I often employ nested brackets to represent the subdivision structures of complex spans.¹¹ The ‘Paranoid Android’ groove would be ((8,8)(8,8))((7,7)(7,8)). This method has the advantage of leaving certain potentially ambiguous features of the groove (e.g. beat level or time signature) open to interpretation.

In the songs analysed – mostly rock but admitting several outliers – the snare backbeat is often the most salient drumbeat cue and its metric role is the most codified of any drum-kit function, indeed, perhaps of any musical utterance. In 4/4 grooves, I hear the backbeat as exemplifying what Christopher Hasty calls ‘metric continuation’: an articulation that simultaneously extends the duration of an earlier counterpart, while itself demarcating a point of metric salience.¹² In metrically irregular grooves, the snare retains this metric-functional role, aiding listeners in parsing the unfamiliar structure. Often this happens by imitating the familiar 4/4 backbeat as closely as possible within the irregular metric context. Less frequently the alternation of ‘forebeat’ (commonly articulated by the kick drum) and snare backbeat is more radically reimagined, or else the drumbeat abandons the backbeat trope altogether. I found one other common drumbeat option: undifferentiated articulation (i.e. using the same drum) of the beat or pulse level, or of a salient rhythmic pattern.

Punctuated Irregular Cycles

I refer to patterns in which one meter predominates, interrupted at regular intervals by measures in a second meter, as punctuated irregular cycles. Without exception, the interrupting change of meter comes at the end of the repeating cycle (or, put differently, exceptions to this trend are so rare that they foster ambiguity). The language that Scott Murphy uses in his discussion of Platonic-Trochaic successions is well suited to my analysis: both projects concern cycles made up of a run (a stable repeating pattern) and a comma (an interruption that punctuates that pattern).¹³ A heavy 11/4 groove in Tool’s ‘Right in Two’ (see Example 7.1) demonstrates a relatively simple punctuated structure, in which a single two-beat group punctuates an otherwise triple metric fabric (i.e. 3+3+3+2). In Murphy’s terms, the run comprises three groups of three, and the comma is the final two-unit group. I have transcribed the groove as comprising alternating measures of 6/4 and 5/4 time, approximating the measure lengths found in a familiar 4/4 backbeat, but there are other plausible alternatives. A transcription showing three measures of 3/4 and one of 2/4 would highlight the punctuated nature of the cycle, while a consistent 11/4 meter would reflect the regular patterning at the deeper hierarchical level of the phrase.

Example 7.1 A punctuated 11/4 groove in Tool’s ‘Right in Two’ (2006): 5:20

The drums are crucial in expressing the structure of this groove: an alternation of kick and snare stretches the standard backbeat to accommodate the three-beat spans, delaying the snare until every third beat. When the more familiar, two-beat backbeat alternation arrives at the end of the cycle, it expresses power and confidence, propelling the groove forward. The cymbals also participate in distinguishing the two-beat punctuation, switching from hi-hat eighths to emphatic quarter-note crashes.

Table 7.1 lists forty-one grooves with punctuated irregular cycles, organized according to drumbeat. Some songs contain more than one such groove. In the column that gives the cardinality of each cycle, I use an Asterix (*) to denote a sub-tactus pulse (i.e. at the eighth-note level or the quarter note in a double-time groove) and a double-sword (‡) to denote the level below that (usually that of the sixteenth note).

The most common subdivision structure for punctuated patterns retains the intuitive preference for quadruple hypermeter observed in most Euro-American music, rock and otherwise. Large-cardinality irregular grooves that follow this trend often comprise three measures in the initial meter followed by one in a new meter. Two variants of this three-plus-one hypermetric configuration are (1) a seven-plus-one patterning, as in Tool’s ‘Forty Six & 2’, and (2) cases in which the comma is better expressed by two measures, as in Muse’s ‘Animals’.

Thirty-three of the grooves analysed are based on a backbeat or a modified version of it, with the snare drum expressing metric continuation. In twenty-one of these, a 4/4 groove with a traditional backbeat serves as the primary meter. The punctuated elements of such grooves are sometimes based on the same backbeat, admitting subtle metric deletions or expansions to fit the punctuating meter. In the verse groove of Metallica’s ‘Master of Puppets’, every fourth measure can be heard as a distorted 4/4 with metric deletions within the first and third beats (i.e. the snare articulations retain their full quarter-note durations). Although the band’s practice of never recording to a click track makes it difficult to say with certainty, I hear an internal structure of (2,4)(1,4) at the sixteenth-note level. While commas that vary the backbeat are not uncommon, the prevailing strategy is to mirror the structural interruption to the meter with a stylistic interruption in the drumbeat – a fill. In the second verse of Dream Theater’s ‘Metropolis Part 1: The Miracle and the Sleeper’ (around 2:35), every third measure is abbreviated by an eighth note; drummer Mike Portnoy uses subtle fills to drive across these metric deletions to the downbeats of the following 4/4 measures. In this groove, the 4/4 backbeat is also modified in a way that prepares the recurring 7/8 measures. The second snare of every 4/4 measure is delayed by an eighth note, placing them in the final eighth-note position of those measures, recalling the placement of the final snare in many 7/8 backbeat variants.¹⁴

When 4/4 is not the primary meter, drummers usually retain the backbeat as much as possible within the metrically irregular context. Cycles that modify a compound quadruple (e.g. 12/8) feel, with the drummer marking the dotted eighth note with alternating kick and snare, account for five examples. Tori Amos is especially fond of stretching compound beats to form novel grooves. Larger cyclic patterns are found in ‘Carbon’, ‘Spark’, and ‘Virginia’ (see also ‘Datura’ in Table 7.2).¹⁵ Drumbeat patterns such as that seen in ‘Right in Two’, in which the alternation of kick and snare is played out every three beats, as opposed to the slower (five-, six-, and seven-beat) spans just described, suggest triple meter more readily than compound meter. The Allman Brothers’ ‘Whipping Post’ is another such example.

Other primary meter options typically modify simple-time (4/4) backbeats trough deletion, as in 7/8 measures, or expansion. An example of the latter is the outro groove of TTNG’s ‘26 is Dancier than 4’, with a run comprising four repetitions of a 5/8 pattern followed by a six-pulse comma. The internal articulation of each subsection in the run is a quarter-note kick followed by three snares – a sixteenth, an eighth, and a dotted eighth. The first and third snare articulations are structural, resulting in a (4,3,3) pattern for each 5/8 measure.

Only eight of the punctuated grooves I surveyed eschew the backbeat possibilities just detailed, instead supporting a prominent rhythmic pattern with an undifferentiated articulation (i.e. playing the entire pattern on the same drum). The snare drum is the most common in this role, paralleling its importance in modified backbeat grooves. Many of the rhythmic succession represented in this category likewise have counterparts with modified-backbeat drum patterns (see e.g. Hail the Sun, ‘Eight-Ball, Coroner’s Pocket’, and Egg, ‘I Will Be Absorbed’); however, some successions are limited to this category. An instrumental near the three-quarters point in Dream Theater’s ‘A Nightmare to Remember’ has a pattern of (3,2,3,2,2,2), which I parse as a run of ten pulses (5,5) and a comma of four. In a recurring instrumental passage in OSI’s ‘Memory Daydream Lapses’ the ride cymbal subdivides a twenty-five-pulse cycle as (4,4,4,4,4,2,3) – a run of twenty and a comma of five. The initially even pulse is in a comfortable quarter note, making the five-sixteenth note comma especially jarring on early hearings. Some listeners may also entrain at the half-note level, parsing the pattern as (8,8,9).

Before moving on to split cycles, I consider a case where punctuated, large-cardinality groupings occupy regular metric frameworks. The rhythmic acrobatics of Swedish metal group Meshuggah are theorized by Jonathan Pieslak and Olivia Lucas, both of whom note the band’s penchant for cyclic irregular riffs, punctuated to fit phrase and formal boundaries based on 4/4 meter and foursquare hypermeter.¹⁶ What is remarkable about the band’s handling of these grooves is the functional promiscuity of the snare drum. Whereas the irregular cycle is almost always given by the guitars and bass, supported by the kick drum, and whereas the cymbals are almost always responsible for maintaining a steady quarter-note beat, allowing entrainment to the overarching foursquare organization of the groove, the snare is free to ally itself to either stratum. In my habit of hearing the snare as the leading metric cue in this music, the patterning of this drum has a decisive influence on my interpretation of Meshuggah’s various grooves. Thus, in the opening groove from ‘Stengah’ (Pieslak’s Example 7.3), where the snare supports an 11/8 riff on the third and sixth articulations in a (3,4,3)(3,4,5) sixteenth-note structure (until five repetitions lead to a 9/8 comma), that irregular organization is the dominant metric structure in my hearing. Conversely, in the opening of ‘Lethargica’ (Lucas’s Example 7.2), where the snare marks a slow half-time backbeat against the displaced 23/4 riff, I find it easier to move with the available underlying 4/4.

Example 7.2 A split fifteen-beat cycle in the verse of Soundgarden’s ‘Spoonman’ (1994): 0:18

Example 7.3 A combination of punctuated and split structures in the instrumental in Frank Zappa’s ‘Catholic Girls’ (1979): 1:38

Split Irregular Cycles

Grooves of the split type are based on a cycle with two or more subsections, the lengths of which are approximately balanced. In the clearest split patterns, subsections are easily differentiated by a change in pulse grouping (e.g. shifting from 2s to 3s). Radiohead’s ‘Go to Sleep (Little Man Being Erased)’ exemplifies this strategy, alternating measures of 4/4 and 12/8.¹⁷ The change in meter is reinforced by a change in drumbeat, from standard backbeat in the 4/4 measures to a snare on every third eighth note in 12/8. Split patterns of this sort invite the listener to keep two metric schemas available at all times, shuttling between them as necessary.

When no change of grouping occurs, cues in phrasing or arrangement are typically required to support a split interpretation. This is the case in Soundgarden’s ‘Spoonman’ (see Example 7.2). The repeating pattern of fifteen beats could be parsed as (4,4)(4,3) – suggesting a punctuated logic – but two features of the arrangement contradict this analysis. The first is the long instrumental pause through the second measure. In the absence of a continuous groove in any part of the rhythm section, the re-entry in the cycle’s third measure is marked as a new beginning, paralleling the first measure. Such parallelisms often indicate a split pattern, though they are seldom so clear. The second feature of ‘Spoonman’ that supports a split structure is the (3,2,3) grouping of the first half: the short drum fill marks beat three as closing a measure and the vocal phrasing establishes a more local parallelism between the first and sixth beats of the pattern (a transcription in 5/4 + 3/4 would better reflect the structure of the vocals, while my version prioritizes the drums). Without the stability of an ongoing 4/4 meter to connect the first two measures with the third, the punctuated possibility is untenable.

Table 7.2 catalogues fifty-nine split cycles. The most consistent trend within these grooves is the prevalence of two-part organization at the highest level, though three-and four-part structures are not uncommon. As with punctuated cycles, drumbeats derived from the backbeat predominate, accounting for forty-three groves. Twelve of the other sixteen use undifferentiated articulations, and the remaining four combine the two approaches.

Within split cycles with a backbeat-variant drumbeat, more than half (twenty-six grooves) are directly based on the 4/4 archetype; a further ten modify a compound- or triple-meter framework; and in the remaining seven irregularity is pervasive enough that comparison to a regular meter is less useful than simply considering the particulars at hand. With those rooted in the 4/4 backbeat model, the most common approach is a two-part split alternating between a septuple group and a quadruple one (the latter may require two measures, depending on hierarchical level). The first part invariably ends with a metric deletion, balanced by a second part without deletion. Examples include ‘Tattooed Love Boys’ by the Pretenders and ‘Make Yourself’ by Incubus. Fu Manchu’s ‘Pick-Up Summer’ expands the pattern, using a septuple sub-cycle as the base meter with only occasional 4/4 measures to begin the second part of the split: (7,7)(8,7) or (4,3)(4,3)|(4,4)(4,3) at the beat level. Björk’s ‘Crystalline’ demonstrates a related but distinct situation, leading with a measure of 4/4 and expanding the second part by an eighth note: (8,9) or (4,4)(4,5) in eighth notes.

Examples based on a compound-meter archetype include some of the longest, most complex cycles I have found. In an extended instrumental in the introduction of Dream Theater’s ‘The Count of Tuscany’, a four-part structure arises through the alternation of compound duple measures and larger compound options – triple in the first part, quadruple in the second. The structure is (6,9)(6,12) or a compound (2,3)(2,4). The drums enter after the cycle is established by other instruments, at first with long fills through the triple and quadruple measures, marking these spans as independent units and driving towards the downbeats of the more stable duple measures. Portnoy then shifts to a modified backbeat, alternating kick and snare in the first two compound beats of each measure, retaining shorter fills through the remaining beats of the longer measures: Kick – Snare | Kick – Snare – [fill] | Kick – Snare | Kick – Snare – [fill] – [fill].

Not all compound-meter grooves are restricted to pure compound beat divisions. Eleven- and thirteen-pulse options are often used to vary an otherwise 6/8 or 12/8 metric fabric. Not surprisingly, Amos is responsible for some of the most involved manipulations of this sort. At its most complex, ‘Datura’ is based on a process of metric alternation that extends upward through three hierarchical levels. The measure level comprises an alternation of 6/8 and larger measures, the two-bar level alternates between thirteen (6,7) and larger cardinalities, and the four-bar level alternates between twenty-eight (13,15) and twenty-seven (13,14). The drums are an indispensable aid for any listener wishing to hear their way through these complexities, consistently marking the fourth pulse of every measure with a snare backbeat. Drum fills stretch the metric fabric to accommodate the longer measures. Another notable example is a recurring instrumental in Tool’s ‘Intolerance’ that expertly balances elements of compound and 4/4 meters. The two-part (13,16) structure juxtaposes what seems like an expanded 12/8 (or 12/16) measure against a double tresillo (3,3,3,3,2,2), most commonly understood as a syncopated expression of a 4/4 meter. By marking the fourth sixteenth note of each measure with the snare, the drumbeat only weakly directs the listener towards a compound hearing, leaving interpretation open.

Ambiguous and Mixed Cases

While the structures of most of the larger patterns I have identified are best described as either punctuated or split, there exist several ambiguous cases as well as some cycles large enough to employ both strategies at different hierarchical levels. Table 7.3 summarizes eight relevant examples. The ((8,8)(8,8))((7,7)(7,8)) groove in Radiohead’s ‘Paranoid Android’, noted in my introduction, exemplifies the mixture of punctuated and split strategies. At a high level, the cycle is a two-part split. The first part remains consistently in 4/4 time, while the second punctuates a 7/8 run with a single 4/4 measure. The drums maintain a backbeat or close variant, peppered with fills that do not destabilize the established meter. Frank Zappa’s ‘Catholic Girls’ contains a more complex instrumental – more changes of meter, using meters that are less common (see Example 7.3). Nevertheless, apart from the inversion of the hierarchical relationship between split and punctuated strategies, the structural principles at work in ‘Catholic Girls’ are essentially the same as in ‘Paranoid Android’. As the example shows, the better part of the groove alternates between pairs of measures in 9/16 (2,2)(2,3) and 7/16 (4,3), establishing a split cycle of four duple measures. At a deeper (fourteen-measure) level, a run comprising three repetitions of this split cycle is punctuated by two measures of 11/16, modeled on a triple meter with a deletion of the final sixteenth note (4,4,3). The full cycle is thus ((9,9)(7,7))((9,9)(7,7))((9,9)(7,7))(11,11). The drums are confined to undifferentiated tom and cymbal work through much of the groove, reinforcing the surface-level subdivisions of the melodic line. However, a few emphatic snare articulations are definitive in directing listener attention. For example, a backbeat articulation in the first 7/16 measure clarifies the duple nature of that measure and confirms the irregularity of the overall passage (otherwise, it might be possible to hear the (9,9)(7,7) span as a syncopated 4/4 groove). The snare drum also renders the triple structure of the 11/16 measures unambiguous.

Unlike the complex but clear metric structures just discussed, other examples listed in Table 7.3 are less well defined, often due in part to the absence of a backbeat variant in the drums. I consider one example in detail to highlight some relevant considerations when analysing ambiguous cases. The opening groove of TTNG’s ‘Baboon’ presents a mild conflict between an undifferentiated quarter-note snare rim knock through the first two thirds of the cycle and a dotted rhythm in the guitar through the last two thirds (see Example 7.4(a)). The twenty-three eighth notes are most likely grouped as (8,6,9), and the first and last groups almost certainly recommend simple and compound subdivision, respectively. What is less clear is the subdivision of the six-pulse group: when I follow the snare, I hear a measure of simple triple meter, whereas the guitar suggests compound duple time, anticipating the following compound triple group. The compound-meter interpretation is reinforced by vocal articulations throughout the first verse, likely leading first-time listeners to hear an alternation of 4/4 and 15/8 measures – a clear split structure.

Example 7.4 Two drumbeats suggest different interpretations of the same guitar riff in TTNG’s ‘Baboon’ (2012): (a) 0:00, (b) 0:47

New complications arise in the second verse, despite the shift to a traditional backbeat through the first two measures of the cycle (see Example 7.4(b)). The same two conflicting metric layers remain present but, because of the emphatic nature of the backbeat, I find that it requires a concerted effort to entrain to the compound-meter option as early in the cycle as in verse one. Moreover, the final seven pulses do not group together to punctuate a straightforward run of two 4/4 measures. Rather, the compound feel in the final beats is supported by the drums beginning with the final snare backbeat of the second measure, suggesting either an extension followed by a compound duple measure (8,9,6) or an elision of 4/4 and 9/8. This latter interpretation is reflected in my transcription through my use of the 3/4 time signature, which does not denote a true measure of simple triple time (most often articulated with snares on beats two and three) but rather an abbreviated 4/4 measure.

The drumbeat changes again in the third verse, now articulating a half-time backbeat for the first seven beats of the cycle. This option undercuts the early compound grouping even more decisively than the standard backbeat in the second verse. The shift to compound time is clarified through its contrast to the initial half-time feel: the drums support an unambiguous 9/8 measure, interrupting the second would-be 4/4 measure. But what is the logic of the resulting (4,4)(4,2)(3,3,3) structure? Is it split – either in two parts with differing subdivisions, seven duple and three triple units, or in three parts like the first verse (8,6,9) – or is it a simple-meter run punctuated by a compound-meter comma? One issue concerns the relative proportions of the groups involved: eight, six, and nine are about as well balanced as fourteen and nine, making it difficult to intuitively hear either grouping structure as preferable. Put differently, while the nine-pulse group is undoubtedly small enough to satisfy the definition of a comma, it is not so small as to compel that interpretation (unlike, for example, a three- or even a six-pulse group). The same question of balance characterizes the ambiguous grooves in Dream Theater’s ‘The Count of Tuscany’ and Tool’s ‘Schism’.

Conclusions

The drum kit shapes listener interpretations of metric structures in several ways. The perceptual salience of most drum-kit articulations lends the instrument a welcome clarity within demanding musical soundscapes such as those presented above. At the musical surface, this clarity aids in the task of beat identification. Changes in sub-tactus grouping (below the level of the quarter note), for instance, are often open to multiple interpretations, or would be without some direction from the drums. At the measure level, backbeat variants are by far the most common approach taken by drummers when navigating irregular grooves. For listeners, these drumbeats afford ready analogy to the archetypal 4/4 backbeat, clarifying which beats and sub-beats serve the role of metric continuation within an irregular cycle. Also following their use in regular meters, drum fills in irregular metric contexts are typically deployed at phrase boundaries. In punctuated cycles the comma is often marked by a fill – sometimes modifying the drumbeat only modestly, to accommodate the change of meter, other times employing more assertive means to draw listener attention away from the metric irregularity and refocus it towards the impending downbeat. In split cycles fills may indicate subgroup boundaries, most commonly with larger cycles.

In this chapter, analysis of the drum kit has revealed a great deal of syntactic detail within the recordings analysed. Attending to the syntax of drum-kit performances decodes irregular metric patterns, which in turn shape the temporal experience of grooves. While this syntactic treatment of the music has been my primary focus, I hope to have drawn attention to the importance of performance practice in shaping recorded music, and to the ultimate subjectivity endemic to listener interpretation. Regarding performance practice, this study would have been impossible without understanding the backbeat and its role in rock drumming. Further investigation of drumming performance (e.g. sticking patterns or teacher lineages) would enhance my analysis. Regarding listener interpretation, these analyses are limited insofar as they remain my own. To fully understand the interaction of drumming and meter at an intersubjective level will require cognitive studies pooling hundreds of listeners’ metric interpretations. Ultimately, the theory of punctuated and split metric structures that I have sketched here demonstrates the centrality of drum-kit syntax to the performance, perception, and analysis of metrically irregular rock music.

Drumming Americana, Accompanying the Folk

Sometimes criticized as the symbolic encroachment of commercial, mass-produced, or popular music styles, the drum kit rarely signifies ‘tradition’ in ways that would resonate with many folk musicians and fans. Debates surrounding the appropriateness and integrity of adding drums to various folk musics continues to circulate online, though it is certainly not new. This includes the bluegrass music scene⁶ – a genre that is often unaccompanied by the drums and whose rhythmic texture (i.e. its characteristic ‘boom-chick’ backbeat) is already achieved between the upright bass, mandolin, acoustic guitar, or ‘chop’ of the fiddle. For instance, editor of Bluegrass Today John Loveless recently published an April Fool’s article detailing how the International Bluegrass Music Awards (IBMA) will have a new ‘Drummer of the Year Award’. It noted how Ringo Starr celebrated the announcement since The Beatles always wanted to be recognized as a bluegrass band (but stuck to rock and roll because of their controversial use of the kit). Continuing, Loveless described other IBMA events, such as a ‘round-the-clock Will the Drum Circle Be Unbroken jam to run in the lobby of the Marriott City Center in Raleigh from 9:00 a.m. Tuesday morning through Sunday morning 9:00 a.m.’⁷ While such hackneyed jokes have been around for centuries, they repeat longstanding controversies surrounding the use of drums in more traditionally-coded musical contexts.⁸

Similarly, online drum forums share advice about achieving ideal Americana sounds, pinpointing records with vintage kits, analogue recording equipment, preferences for simplified or ‘appropriate’ drum parts, and often emphasizing the importance of ‘tone over attack’.⁹ According to one blogger, ‘every song needs a “rhythm beat” of some sort, but it doesn’t always have to come from a five-piece drum-kit’, recommending that other drummers should emphasize ‘pulses, not beats’ to support Americana compositions.¹⁰ Session drummer Stephen Belans also describes a simple ‘heartbeat’ as the foundational groove in most Americana contexts, since ‘there’s only so much space you can take up as a drummer in this kind of music and have it work out’. While admitting that there isn’t one type of Roots/Americana sound, Belans describes it as a ‘natural sound’ on record: ‘It doesn’t sound gated, it doesn’t sound crazy squished, it doesn’t have some ridiculous false reverb’. Instead, recorded Americana drums are meant to sound as if ‘you’re standing in the room’ with the drummer.¹¹ As with many styles of drumming, the acoustic parameter of timbre – the ‘multidimensional attribute of perceived sound comprising everything that is not pitch or loudness’ – remains a critical factor in the sound profile and description of Americana drumming among practitioners;¹² articulating the profound impact of learning from recordings and the enmeshed interaction that occurs between aural emulation and applied techniques.

Americana’s Fluidity: Mapping a Rhythmic Legacy

According to the Americana Music Association, the genre is defined as:

Reflective of the broad scope of the association’s definition, there are a number of inter-related genre streams and industry trajectories that helped collectively lead to the formation of Americana. For better or worse, many of these terms are used interchangeably, or have become consolidated under the Americana banner. This includes alt.country, Outlaw Country, Hard Country, and Roots music¹⁴ – the latter being one of the more ambiguous terms, applied as a qualifier for alt.country music scenes outside the United States (such as the ‘Calgary Roots’ community in Alberta, Canada),¹⁵ or as a World Music marketing strategy for diverse folk and traditional musics that problematically ‘resemble the source from which it sprang’.¹⁶ There are also several other sub-genre categories and artists that have been folded into the Americana discourse, speaking to a legacy of ‘alternative’ folk and country artistry, including southern rock, country rock, folk rock, and neo-traditional country.¹⁷ Many of these categories were defined largely in opposition to mainstream country and popular music, positioning artists as outsiders, firebrands, or forgotten icons working outside the Nashville music industry (in some cases, emplacing a Roots or Americana sound onto other cities, such as Austin, Texas).¹⁸ Interestingly, Fabian Holt distinguishes American Roots music from Americana along the lines of institutional support, noting how films and initiatives sponsored by PBS, the Smithsonian Institute, and others positioned Roots music as ‘an essentialist metaphor of timeless authenticity in the context of a common cultural history’.¹⁹ Since Holt’s publication, however, I would argue that distinctions between the two categories have overlapped further: blurring the lines between Americana’s once youthful, hip ‘citybilly’ punk rock, or ‘rock influenced country’ marketability with Roots music’s shared revivalism, the collapsing distinctions between folk and popular music, and the recontextualization of blues, gospel, and bluegrass as ‘old and stable components of the national canon’.²⁰

Accordingly, the catalogue of Americana artists and influential figures seems to grow with each passing year. Several ‘best-of’ album lists tend to distinguish alt.country albums from Roots, Outlaw, or Americana categories, but they often share many of the same names. Paste Magazine’s alt.country overview included Gillian Welch, Wilco, Ryan Adams, Lucinda Williams, Uncle Tupelo, Johnny Cash, The Carolina Chocolate Drops, Lyle Lovett, k.d. lang, and Sturgill Simpson.²¹ In their ‘Story of Outlaw Country in 33 Songs’ article, Pitchfork included contemporary acts such as Miranda Lambert, as well as early icons beginning with Willie Nelson, Kris Kristofferson, Townes Van Zandt, and Waylon Jennings.²² No Depression’s compilation albums and ‘bookzines’ include Johnny Cash’s ‘The Time of the Preacher’ (featuring Members of Soundgarden, Nirvana, and Alice in Chains), tracks from Whiskeytown (Ryan Adams’ early band), Neko Case, The Carter Family’s original ‘No Depression in Heaven’,²³ country stars Patty Loveless and Keiran Kane,²⁴ and the chamber/folk music project Abigail Washburn and the Sparrow Quartet (featuring Bela Fleck).²⁵

But what about the drums? From full-volume, rock-oriented rhythm sections to minimalist kick drum, snare, and/or tambourine set-ups (i.e. early Mumford and Sons, Shakey Graves, the Lumineers); the ‘barnyard and junkyard’ sounds of Tom Waits; or the subtle percussive accompaniment on Gillian Welch’s recordings (Revival, 1996; featuring Jim Keltner and Buddy Harman), drums in the Americana genre have not coalesced into a definitive sound or approach.²⁶ There are, however, key precedents and signposts. Perhaps more than any other figure, Levon Helm’s work with The Band is cited as the pioneering example of early Americana.²⁷ His drumming was characterized by a tasteful blend of R&B, soul, early rock and roll, country, second line, and gospel grooves, often on deadened tom-toms and muted cymbals (using tape or towels) using a ‘lighter’ cymbal articulation with the tip of the drumstick. Helm was, of course, famous for seamlessly incorporating vocals with his drumming, but he was also described as possessing a ‘less is more’ approach that ‘play[ed] for the song’.²⁸ This created space for the other instruments, while also managing to produce an incredible in-between straight and swung time feel. Retrospective tributes to the late drummer described Helm as the centre of a ‘ramshackle’ Band sound that was a ‘hybrid of blues shuffle and street-march, with a fat, whomping back beat that sat so far “behind” … that it nearly steps into the next bar’.²⁹ Modern Drummer magazine even described the seminal album Big Pink as ‘the soundtrack of the American collective unconscious’, focusing on ‘the deep traditions of rural America, from mountain music to gospel to R&B, rockabilly, and especially the sounds of the deep South and folk music’.³⁰ In these contexts, Helm’s straight/swung feel, vintage drum tones, Southern identification (a native of Arkansas), and The Band’s hybrid folk, soul, and rock and roll endure in contemporary discussions of ideal Americana drumming.

On the other end of the spectrum, however, there exists a more timbrally complex and esoteric stream of drumming performance in Americana – one that gestures towards the sound and minimal instrumentation of early folkloric field recordings, even evoking the percussive sound worlds of Tom Waits (a progenitor of the genre). Waits’ ‘visionary chronicles of derelict America’ have long exploited the narrative potential of timbre, including his use of ‘non-instruments’ (brake drums, chest drawers, rooster crows) and ‘unusual textures, sounds, percussion, rhythms, and recording techniques’.³¹ Taken together, these rhythmic and textural undercurrents reflect a shared ‘sonic aesthetic’ in Americana, one that ‘emphasizes the humanity and materiality of music-making’. Here, Christine Steinbock writes how several Americana artists exploit the ‘anomalies of human-made music and the unique sonic qualities that machines cannot replicate’, such as ‘the hand clap, knee slap body percussion in Gillian Welch’s “Six White Horses”’ or ‘the abrasive attack in Justin Townes Earle’s guitar playing’.³² Focusing on the music of Welch and her collaborator Dave Rawlings, Steinbock explores how the artists ‘disintermediate their relationship with listeners and express Americana’s human-centred sonic aesthetic by providing a space for the anomalies of humanmade music to flourish’, noting their penchant for recording live off the floor, as well as a ‘general eschewing’ of digital editing.³³ These ‘anomalies’ become authenticated, reflecting themes in Americana as off-beat, misunderstood, imperfect, and ultimately, humanized. While such concepts are linguistically tied to ideas about the more ambiguous dimensions of timbre, they lend themselves to drumming material culture and applied practice where metaphor translates into sonic palettes and performance techniques.³⁴ For drummers, what would be an otherwise straightforward backbeat groove can be texturally enriched by the addition (or substitution) of alternative percussive elements, generating a more ‘sloshy’ and complex time-feel. This sound is indicative of the characteristic grooves of Jim Keltner (John Lennon, The Travelling Wilbury’s, T Bone Burnett, Ry Cooder), who often simultaneously performs with a variety of shakers and tambourines while on the kit. Today, several session drummers in the Roots and Americana scenes perform in this manner using prepared kits, bells, beads, tambourines, auxiliary percussion, and shakers, including Marco Giovino (Norah Jones, Robert Plant and the Band of Joy), Butch Norton (Lucinda Williams), among many others. This approach can sonically obfuscate the more conventional drum kit ‘trinity’ (i.e. the kick, snare, and hi-hat) through using alternate sound sources, revitalizing both the ‘contraption’ element that distinguished the design of early trap drum kits, as well as diverging from more conventional drum sounds and raucous volumes.

From a marketing standpoint, these atypical percussive sounds and textures often accompany a ‘refined’ and mature artist narrative, particularly among repackaged legacy artists who were originally marketed as rock, blues, or mainstream country, but have since been included in the Roots and Americana fold (such as Robert Plant, BB King, Elvis Costello, Johnny Cash). The sound and production value of these recordings reveal a unique discourse of aging, memory, and what Gillian Turnbull describes as ‘the aesthetic of history’.³⁵ Here, an aching beauty resides under a worn and weathered patina, expressing notes of redemption, loss, mortality, and nostalgia, often through its use of acoustic instrumental timbres and references to multiple styles of American popular music. Though problematically re-articulating the fetish of ‘liveness’ in rock ideology where acoustic performance functions as a ‘sign of the real’, it is here where Joseph Kortarba considers Americana as providing ‘musical experiences that are contemporary but not pop;³⁶ meaningful but in a way relevant to aging folks; and accessible to folks who do not like their music over-amplified and or directed to some other – younger – audience’.³⁷ A prime example is Johnny Cash’s later work with producer Rick Rubin in the 1990s, which engaged in a creative discourse of genre temporality. In particular, Cash’s posthumous release Ain’t No Grave (2010) sonically bookended his career by providing an almost tongue-and-cheek ‘necro-marketing’ of his voice from the grave,³⁸ and the song’s overdubbed ‘percussive chains and footsteps’ reiterated the singer’s longtime associations with outlaws and prisoners.³⁹ In this sense, Americana recordings can re-situate legacy performers at the confluence of old and new, producing a sense of temporality – what Georgina Born writes as the ‘outer time of cultural history’ – by engaging with a humanized (and percussive) sonic aesthetic.⁴⁰

Case Study: Jay Bellerose

One of the most prolific session drummers today, Jay Bellerose has collaborated with a who’s who of contemporary artists (Ray Lamontagne, Rihannon Giddens, Alison Krauss, The Punch Brothers) and various legacy acts in the Americana genre (including Robert Plant, BB King, Ramblin’ Jack Elliot, and Alain Toussaint). Far from suggesting that Bellerose’s output can provide a stand-in for all forms of drumming in Americana, his work and ongoing collaborations with key tastemakers – most notably, producers T Bone Burnett and Joe Henry – situates him at the forefront of progressive folk and roots music in the United States. In recent interviews and magazine articles, the drummer has shared stories about his upbringing, key influences, as well as a fateful incident that happened while he was studying at the Berklee College of Music. The most distilled version of this narrative appears in his bio on Alison Krauss’ website:

The stolen drum kit narrative is intriguing for its way of connecting Bellerose’s playing to earlier (i.e. ‘arcane’) popular styles, coupling his drumming with the material and cultural histories of the kit, as well as symbolically shedding the weight of modern set-ups, timbres, and conventions in contemporary music. The event was significant (and potentially ruinous) for a session drummer in the 1980s, who, according to Bellerose, was expected to ‘mute the drums as much as you can and hit them as hard as you can’.⁴² The story was expanded upon in a podcast interview with Nashville-based songwriter and producer Steve Dawson. As Bellerose explained, his stolen kit was replaced by a friend’s simple, beat up Ludwig bass drum, snare, and cymbal: ‘This thing taught me so much about how many more sounds are in the few pieces of a drum set that a lot of people just overlook. I was using the whole animal, I was ringing it all out’.⁴³ Interestingly, Bellerose connected his newfound set-up with memories from his childhood, likening it to his early interests in ‘pulling sound’ out of household items, including tapping on boxes, washing machines, pots, and pans.⁴⁴ This self-styled mythology about his intuitive interests in everyday objects positions Bellerose as somewhat of an outsider, drumming against the grain of mainstream conventions, very much like the Roots and Americana musicians he often performs with. He experimented with various kit set-ups in his early career, even playing on what appears to be a djembe in place of a snare with Paula Cole in the 1990s.⁴⁵

Kit Culture: On Gear

So much interest and attention has been placed on Jay Bellerose’s collection of vintage kits that many descriptions of his playing seem to erase any boundaries between the man and the instrument. Inspired by the artistry and sounds of big band drummers such as Buddy Rich, Sonny Green, and Gene Krupa, Bellerose often uses larger drum sizes from the era. Not only does this allow him to project without playing as hard, but it coincides with a certain ‘touch’ he developed with wooden sticks that allows him to ‘keep the energy, and play quiet, and still rock’ (citing Charlie Watts as an influential example of a drummer ‘pulling sound’ from the kit without hitting too hard).⁴⁶ Bellerose is famously known for performing without a hi-hat, opting instead for a fistful of maracas, mounted tambourines, or tying bells and shakers to his left leg. His cymbal use is often sparse, leaving considerable room for the drum’s bottom end to ring out prominently. While Bellerose’s patterns are not necessarily complicated (especially when transcribed on paper), they are complex: nuanced with selective fill placements and grooves that evoke early jazz records, second-line drumming, Dixieland, as well as soul, R&B, and early rock and roll. And yet, his recordings achieve something else entirely, as if providing snapshots of drum kit performance through the aperture of its weathered and gnarled history; conveying a mood with a ‘subliminal kind of tone’ with rhythmic phrasing that is ‘something you feel more than hear’.⁴⁷ Live, Bellerose shakes his kit in ways that exploit its jangly artifacts, including squeaky hardware; some of his calf skin drumheads are even patched together with pieces of leather. Fans of Bellerose are often surprised when they witness him perform, as a post from Steve Krugman on the Hollywood Drum website describes:

Krugman goes on to discuss the various maracas, mounted and shaken tambourines used during Bellerose’s set at an LA venue with Jennifer Condos and guitarist Molly Miller (see Figure 8.1), noting his effortless brushwork, constantly switching out mallets and sticks, and ‘blur[ring] the lines between conventional drumset and ensemble percussion, improvisation and orchestration’. Such observations are found elsewhere, primarily on Robert Plant and Allison Krauss’ Raising Sand recording (2007), which received considerable attention for Bellerose’s ‘slinky grooves’, unique drum sounds, vintage kit set-ups, and ‘shakers strapped to his ankles’.⁴⁹ Fans the world over have fawned Bellerose ‘loose and jangly’, ‘deep-but-dead’ Americana drum sound, which collectively accounts for both time-feel and copious vintage set-ups.⁵⁰

Figure 8.1 Jay Bellerose performing at The York in Los Angeles with Molly Miller (guitar) and Jennifer Condos (bass) in September 2019.

Image credit: Lawrence Buccat (screen shot of YouTube video, used with permission)

Source: L. Buccat. Molly Miller Trio, YouTube (2 May 2019), available from: www.youtube.com/watch?v=qpvFpTk7psY (accessed 15 April 2020)

In particular, Bellerose’s 1940s-era Slingerland ‘Rolling Bomber’ kit has achieved legendary status among collectors and fans. Known for its all-wood construction (including rosewood lugs and rims) due to metal rationing throughout WWII, the drums confer a strong sense of cultural capital, coinciding with an ‘obsessive preference for “vintage” musical technology’ among Americana and alternative country fans, both young and old.⁵¹ Described as having a ‘natural resonance’ because of their construction, Bellerose’s use of the kit has inspired several others to seek them out, including Norwegian jazz drummer Erland Dahlen and Modern Drummer writer Patrick Berkery, who interviewed Bellerose in 2008.⁵² At the same time, widespread interest in the Rolling Bomber kit also points to an underlying trope of Pax Americana nostalgia: a sentiment for when the United States was truly ‘great’, which persisted in country music during the Gulf War and remained throughout the Americana genre post-9/11.⁵³

Developing (and Producing) a Characteristic Drum Sound

According to Bellerose, the Rolling Bomber kit represents his broader interests in a more uncontrolled tuning aesthetic, as well as a willingness to adapt to changes in humidity, among other factors that affect the drums while on the road.⁵⁴ Admitting that he’d rather ‘just change the drum’ instead of tuning it, he claims that it is ‘more about the character of the note and less about the pitch of the note. I love dissonance and overtones. Sometimes I like when things rub a little bit, and it doesn’t sound perfect’.⁵⁵ Bellerose apparently developed this unconventional aesthetic from a process of listening to rare and discontinued vinyl (what he calls ‘sonically-odd stuff’). This includes emulating Alan Lomax’s field recordings and finding drums that similarly sounded as if they were ‘distorted or … like they have reverb on them’, comparing Lomax’s recordings to ‘a Tom Wait’s record’.⁵⁶ Given his unique drum sound, vintage collection, and approach to the kit, one could read Bellerose’s drumming at the primordial intersection of American popular music: a reimagined drumscape⁵⁷ that blends roots music from the pre-rock era (the ‘legends of country music, blues, and the folk revival’) with the sonic imprint of technological artifacts heard on early field recording devices.⁵⁸

Of course, Bellerose’s characteristic drum sound developed through collaborating with a long list of personnel, including record producers, engineers, mixing and mastering technicians. Eschewing the belief that he alone can recreate the ‘T Bone’ or ‘Joe Henry’ drum sound in the studio, Bellerose explains that it is ‘more complex than just hiring one person from that camp, or hiring me to play drums. I mean, yeah, you’re going to get shades of it. But there’s a team’.⁵⁹ A key figure in this development is T Bone Burnett – leading authority and arbiter of American roots music, and whose work in film helped revive international interests in old time, bluegrass, and Americana (in particular, O Brother Where Art Thou? (2000)). In many ways, Burnett’s approach to recording drums and percussion resonates with multiple facets of Bellerose’s aesthetic, including his fondness for playing at quieter volumes. Burnett’s interests in ‘minimizing attack and maximizing tone’,⁶⁰ for instance, focuses on room sound, reflective surfaces, and placing ‘microphones so that they hear all of the tone and the overtones of the drums’.⁶¹ There is also a diminished reliance on compression in Burnett’s productions, which is achieved instead by playing very quietly, using calf skin drumheads, and tapping on the skins softly ‘to get a much fuller sound’.⁶² At the level of applied practice, Bellerose’s atypical approach can even be connected to specific Burnett productions. For instance, the drummer recorded alongside Jim Keltner on BB King’s 2008 album One Kind Favor, as well as on Burnett’s solo record True False Identity (2006) with both Keltner and Carla Azar. These multi-drummer sessions encouraged Bellerose to situate himself amongst the other rhythms, perhaps guiding his solo-drumming effort on Raising Sand (another Burnett production) with its prominent auxiliary percussive sounds and warm, deadened drum sounds – a ‘third voice’, perhaps, stepping out and taking centre stage. Furthermore, both Burnett and Bellerose like to challenge preconceptions about the ‘imposed role on drummers’ as timekeepers (Bellerose),⁶³ critiquing how conventionalized parts of the kit (such as the hi-hat) dictate ‘proscribed time’ in a way that ‘can make the beat stiff’ (Burnett).⁶⁴ Here, Burnett describes why they did not use hi-hats during the One Kind Favor sessions, opting instead for ‘these big shakers … like 10 or 15 different gourds with beads in them or nuts … So it expands and broadens the beat’.⁶⁵ This affinity for alternative percussive textures coincides with Burnett’s broader conception that all instruments are a drum of some sort,⁶⁶ articulating the possibility for any sound source to function as a type of percussion. In this context, backbeats do not have to necessarily occur on a snare drum (or any other conventionalized part of the kit), just ‘as long as it’s getting hit in the right place with the right meaning’ – generating a low-end and esoteric sound world through instrumental substitution that sets up the rhythms and beats ‘in the overtone structure, which creates a lot of mystery and a real sense of place’.⁶⁷

Conclusions

This chapter investigated some of the aesthetic discourses surrounding drums and percussion in the Americana genre, including material cultures, performance techniques, collaborations, and key figures. Taken collectively, these dynamics ‘make sense through their interrelatedness, not as isolated events’ because ‘genre can be viewed as a culture with the characteristics of a system or systemic functions’.⁶⁸ Rather than trying to define Americana drumming as a clear set of techniques and approaches, I highlighted how the realms of timbre and texture give rise to complex forms of percussive musicking; generating a discourse where vintage drums, ‘warm’ tones, and behind-the-beat time feels mutually convey at least a rhythmic understanding of something as ambiguous as Americana.

Introduction: Setting Up, Counting In

The following chapter locates the social, spatial, and technological experiences of popular music drummers by ‘tracking’ their involvement in the creative processes of recording studio work. The kick drum or the snare drum might become the most prominent part of a finished recording but where the drummer belongs in the process of making a record is not always at the forefront. From a drummer’s perspective, interactions with the rest of the band, and the various personnel involved in the recording process, can be alienating and foreign, as ‘Derek’ (age 46) described:

This opening description begins to illustrate some of the social, spatial, and technological relations and occlusions for drummers in recordings studios, as viewed from a drummer’s perspective.

Recording studios are often closed worlds of privileged access, and most notably in commercial record production, can be hierarchical with established divisions of labour, power, and agency.¹ Although the drums are typically the first element to be captured during the production process, drummers’ experiences in the studio are often characterised by the need to get tracks done quickly and efficiently, then to get out of the way for the rest of the band or group to record, overdub and experiment with their takes.² If they are acknowledged as part of creative studio processes at all, drummers are commonly seen as less musical than other participants within the process and largely supplemental to the successive creative practices of producing music in studios as their role is often ‘functional’.³ Smith argued that drummers are ‘a part, and yet apart’ in marginal positions within bands, groups or musical ensembles.⁴ Brennan listed longstanding pejorative characterisations of drummers, widely circulated through ‘drummer jokes’ as non-musicians: dumb, noisy, illiterate, uncreative, broke, and replaceable.⁵ Accepted belief systems have been described by Bourdieu as ‘doxa’, which is a universe of common opinions, popular ideas and undisputed beliefs that exist within a field of cultural production. Doxa appear as natural and self-evident; doxa ‘goes without saying because it comes without saying’.⁶ One example of doxa within the recording studio is the superficial division between art and craft. Bourdieu labels this division the autonomous and heteronomous poles of an art world, which can be seen in the depiction of ‘art’ based or autonomous practitioners, such as the vocalists or guitarists, and more ‘craft’ oriented or heteronomous musicians such as drummers (or studio personnel such as the engineer).⁷ All are needed in the studio to create a recording, but from certain viewpoints, or the doxa of the field, some appear to be considered more artistic and creative than others (i.e. more than drummers).

Researchers have begun to deconstruct and contest the accepted beliefs about drummers.⁸ Through our ongoing ethnographic research in studios,⁹ this chapter draws from observational fieldnotes from sessions when both authors were acting as ethnographers and drummers (‘drummer-as-ethnographer’) and – in Paul’s fieldwork – also as session engineer.¹⁰ We also conducted semi-structured interviews with eight drummers. In our analyses, we identify and critique prevailing doxa by (re)centring the views and experiences of drummers in creative studio practices. In overview, we highlight (or count in): (1) the spaces of drummers in studios (i.e. where drummers ‘belong’, or not); (2) the production of social identities in studios (i.e. who drummers are in relation to power hierarchies of recording processes); and (3) the knowledge and involvement of drummers in creative processes (i.e. what drummers ‘know’ and are able to do with their knowledge in studios). These thematic sections are presented as ‘takes’ to intone the tracking and layering involved in studio production.

First Take: Drummers, Spaces, and Studio Practices

Our first analytical theme explores the social production of space for drummers in recording studios.¹¹ For Lefebvre, ‘if space is a product, our knowledge of it must be expected to reproduce and expound the process of production. The “object” of interest must be expected to shift from things in space to the actual production of space’.¹² Lefebvre was interested in the ways that space both shapes, and is shaped by, social relations, and sought ‘to consider struggles over the organization and meaning of space’.¹³ The spatiality of recording studios – i.e. who is able to do what, and where – is revelatory in view of drummers’ roles, agency, and identities. For example, in fieldnotes made during sessions with an Americana band, Brett repeatedly noted his peripherality as the drummer, especially after the band finished tracking: e.g. in the control room, ‘I’m sat again in the seats farthest from the mixing desk’ or ‘I’m not involved in discussions of others’ tracks, but the guitarist was very involved in critique during tracking the drums’ and ‘I stayed in the live room for almost the entire night, only popping into the control room at the end of the session to listen to a rough mix’.¹⁴ These fieldnotes illustrate that studio sessions involve more than the production of music; it also involves the production of spaces: ‘The production of social space is a process … social space incorporates social actions’.¹⁵

This spatialisation emerged in our interviews, where staying ‘where they belong’, spatially, was not only a part of where drummers were in the studio, physically, but also where they belonged in view of making contributions to the music being recorded – that is, within the doxa of studio practices. One drummer (Mike, age 20) commented on his ‘place’ in creative songwriting processes in the studio:

A similar view was shared by Jess (age 27), who enjoyed the efficient atmosphere of a professional recording studio but drew a clear line between her performance in the live room and the activities in the control room. As a hired session player, she was used to and preferred a degree of distance from the production processes beyond performing her parts:

Jess’s view illustrates the doxa of drummers as efficient labourers best placed in the live room, but not entering into more artistic or technical spaces (i.e. the control room), or like Mike, staying out of broader involvement – ‘social actions’ – in the arts of the recording studio, and thus productive of drummer’s spaces in creative studio practices.

Another drummer, Keith (early 30s) described the drummer’s contributions to song creation:

Note that in this view the drummer is not a painter or part of the painting, but rather the one who frames the creative work of others. This effectively positions drummers outside the creative processes, despite – we would argue – being an integral contributor inside songwriting and recording processes.

While most of the drummers spatialised – and marginalised – their involvement through phrases such as being the ‘backbeat in the backseat’, some drummers were assertive about claiming space: ‘it has always been a battle; you have to fight your corner. Saying “I need to re-track that” or “before we move on, we need to edit this”; everyone groans when I say that, but giving me an extra take or an edit now will make them all happier later [when they track]’ (Derek, age 46). Another drummer (Paul, age 37) recounted an experience where other session players weren’t used to playing to a click track while working on a song that started with a bassline: ‘Everybody rushed when the bass came in [following the bass] and it made me look like I couldn’t play to the click track. They decided not to follow me either! Who’s in the driver’s seat?’ These comments illustrate the active social production of space within studios: popular music drummers are positioned in social spaces that are seen as hierarchically lower in status, less artistic and less powerful in the relations that suffuse popular music recording; we read this positioning as manifest in the physical locations that drummers occupy.

Another part of this hierarchical ‘backseat’ positioning involves the broader relations between drummers and other studio personnel, such as engineers and producers, in the spatiality of studios. Echoing the experiences of Derek in the chapter’s opening extract, Paul offered: ‘engineers really don’t understand what it feels like on the other side of the glass. They think it’s really easy and it’s not. It’s a really pressured situation’. Against this, most drummers commented that it was not easy to act – against the grain, or counter to the doxa – to become involved in production using the technological affordances of the studio. Paul added:

In sum, our fieldnotes and interviews alerted us to the spatial circulation of power relations in recording studios: the production of music was also the production of space in which the doxa of drummers was also (re)produced. This spatialisation was manifest in the role of drummers in songwriting, in the physical spaces where drummers ‘belonged’ in studios, and in the contributions that drummers felt they could make to creative studio practices and production. We extend the idea of ‘positioning’ in relation to drummer’s identities in our next take.

Second Take: Playing for the Song? Identities, Positionalities, and Habitus

One phrase repeated across our interviews was ‘playing for the song’; this is a common trope in discourse about drummers: e.g. Ringo Starr was recently celebrated in Drum! Magazine for ‘playing for the song’, arguing he did so in a way that was more than ‘just some thankless, mundane task’.¹⁶ In this take, we critique ‘playing for the song’ as an insight into the doxa surrounding drummers’ identities. For Stuart Hall, identities are ‘always constructed through memory, fantasy, narrative and myth. Cultural identities are … not an essence, but a positioning’.¹⁷ Drummers are not naturally or biologically predisposed to be wild or ‘uncreative’,¹⁸ but rather these are ‘points of identification that are made within the discourses of history and culture’.¹⁹ That is to say, drummers’ identity positions are produced, and drummers often assume stereotypical subject positions. One crucial arena where this production and positioning takes place – where its mythification occurs – is the recording studio. ‘Playing for the song’ is much a part of the mythification of drummers as ‘simple’ subjects.

Most of the drummers we interviewed shared views of ‘playing for the song’ by ‘keeping things simple’ and ‘not over playing’ or, as one respondent noted, ‘creating a space to allow the other musicians to shine’. One interviewee offered: ‘I’m the type of drummer who would rather hear another drummer play parts and grooves, parts for the song … I love the person off the street who serves the song’. Beyond an appeal to simplicity, this comment infers that popular music drumming is easy (and perhaps it is), but the critical point here is that these beliefs are already in circulation and are part and parcel of ‘who drummers are’ and ‘what they are expected to do’ in songwriting and recording.

When asked about his earliest experiences of recording, one drummer spoke about his home studio, and having to be the drummer, rhythm guitarist, and recording engineer. These multiple roles in formative experiences provide ‘the reason why I’m not a very good drummer technically … because of my route into playing drums, it’s always been about a collective thing for me. It’s about playing with a band, rather than being amazing’. This inference that drummers are somehow rather less ‘amazing’ than other band members was echoed also by Jess: ‘In the group, I felt like the drums are always the ones that need to sit back a little bit in the correct situations and let the people that are standing up at the front be front’.

The positioning of the drummer to ‘sit back’ raises questions of ‘how far back’? in view of ‘playing for the song’. Invited to a session to record a medley in homage to the late Americana musician Jason Molina, Brett’s fieldnotes recount a process of repeatedly being told to simplify his drum lines to barest minimums, stripping out accents, fills and ‘softening’ his playing with each successive take. While this barebones aesthetic was in keeping with Molina’s spare songwriting, for Brett it also felt like an exercise in which the other musicians in the session policed the notion of what it meant to ‘play for the song’ – a phrase Brett heard throughout the session. Returning to the studio for a second day to track one more song, he recounted:

While perhaps an unusual example, Brett’s fieldnotes raise further questions about the idea of ‘playing for the song’. For Paul, it meant offering ‘something slightly different or subtle, [or] interesting’ in each part of a song. Yet, the doxa of ‘playing for the song’ often positions drummers as so simple (in Brett’s fieldnotes) as to be ‘replaceable’, when (in Paul’s words) playing ‘just to facilitate the song’.²¹

These perceptions have indelible effects on the dispositions of drummers towards their bodies, behaviours, and identities. In Bourdieu’s terms, what emerged from our fieldwork is a view of drumming ‘habitus’: the dispositions towards the body and the behaviours, actions and thoughts to which an individual (i.e. drummer) is habituated, through socialisation in families, schools, and – in popular music – in groups, bands, and in the social spaces of studios.²² For Bourdieu, the habitus ‘is a socialised body … which has incorporated the immanent structures of a world or of a particular sector of that world – a field – and which structures the perception of that world as well as action in that world’.²³ As Reay put it, habitus is both the body in the social world and the social world made manifest in the body.²⁴ For drummers, these bodily dispositions are revealed in comments about studio sessions. Derek recounted:

Here Derek hints at a drumming habitus expressed through ways ‘of standing, speaking, walking, and thereby of feeling and thinking’ about drumming.²⁵ Habitus is made manifest in everyday actions and, for drummers, through all of the thoughts, actions, and gestures that encompass drumming. The myth of playing for the song, therefore, is part of the habitus of drummers’ identities, as well as part of the positioning of drummers within the ‘the discourses of history and culture’ that are part of the doxa of drummers’ worlds.²⁶ As Paul intoned in Take One, becoming involved in a wider world of creative studio practices also required engagement with a range of studio knowledge and personnel. We explore this expanded world and body of studio knowledge in our final take.

Third Take: Agency, Creative Practice, and Studio Knowledge

The third analytical theme that arose from interviews with drummers was that of agency within the recording or production process. Agency is a crucial element of creative activity because it is located within a drummer’s ability to make choices, take actions or exercise their free will.²⁷ Giddens, for example, argues that: ‘agency concerns events of which an individual is the perpetrator, in the sense that the individual could, at any phase in a given sequence of conduct, have acted differently’.²⁸ Agents are considered to be knowledgeable subjects who ‘know how to act … know the rules of behaviour, and … know the sequences of actions’.²⁹ Giddens also asserts that: ‘it is always the case that the day-to-day activity of social actors draws upon and reproduces structural features of wider social systems’.³⁰ This can be seen in the previous two takes where the activities of drummers inside the recording studio draw upon and reproduce existing hierarchies within studios and the art world of popular music production more broadly. In this sense drummers can be seen as constrained by the structures of the recording studio and the record production process but it is vital to underline that they are also enabled by these structures too.³¹ Giddens labels this interdependence between agency and structure as ‘structuration’, which is ‘an attempt to resolve the tension which exists between individual and society’.³² Structuration acknowledges that ‘all action, including creative and innovative action, arises in the complex conjunction of numerous structural determinants and conditions’.³³

A drummer’s ability to make particular choices in the recording studio and exercise agency is both enabled and constrained by the institutional boundaries of the cultural field in which they work. These boundaries include studio technologies, studio practices that implement that technology, and the limits that the current institution can assimilate.³⁴ A studio drum recording can be viewed as the complex result of economic and conceptual influences, which have been ‘mediated through the formal structures of the text (literary or other), and owing its existence to the particular practice of the located individual’.³⁵ Our drummer-interviewees noted that their ability to exercise agency was most limited at the beginning of their career and in sessions where they were hired to perform on record. Tony (age 57) began drumming professionally in studios in 1982, working for a producer recording drums for jingles and advertisements. As in previous takes in this chapter, Tony was expected to record his parts and then get out of the way. However, two years later after joining a band signed to a record label, he began to have more agency in the recording process. He recounted recording sessions in Trident Studios:

This involvement wasn’t without constraints, as Tony explained:

Drummers must balance the expectations of the multiple participants involved and exercising the agency they have within studio processes. A drummer’s status within the cultural unit of a band is often related to the amount of agency they have in the recording studio. For example, Keith explained:

Session drummer Jess also acknowledged this:

Across our interviews, drummers noted that as they became more experienced and developed their status – or in Bourdieu’s terms accumulated cultural and symbolic capital – their abilities to exercise agency also changed. Some drummers were able to exercise greater agency inside the recording studio because of their knowledge and experience with recording technologies. As Tony was asked increasingly to work with click-tracks in the studio, he became determined to gain a greater understanding of technologies such as drum machines to the point where he thought of them ‘as his friends’. His first experience of these technologies was when his original drum part was removed and replaced with a sampled, programmed part. Instead of viewing this as an imposition upon his agency, Tony appreciated the way in which it contributed to the overall production of the song, stating: ‘Because of that, the band actually bought an SP-12 Sampler and I learned how to use it. The next album we did, there’s no live drums on it; they’re all programmed’.

Other drummers noted that developing experience and knowledge with recording technologies was linked to their agency as a drummer inside the recording studio too. Emre, an engineer, producer, and drummer, noted:

The interviewees also highlighted that working closely with other studio personnel was a crucial part of exercising agency over the ways in which their drums were captured on record as Paul explained: ‘Because of my experience of engineering I was able to work with the engineer to set up the mics, get particular sounds, then also play the performances which were all done to a click, and then edit them myself’.

Mike reported a close working, creative relationship with the studio engineer during his first studio recording session at age sixteen. He described this relationship as ‘the most immediate’, with the engineer the ‘pivotal person’ in the creative process:

Recording a take, isolating and chopping up its components, and reconstructing a new track (similar to vocal ‘comping’, or creating an aggregated ‘composite’ track from a number of takes) shows a luxury of time and production not often afforded to drummers and drum takes. This example also evinces a high degree of alteration, and thus creative control, through editing and reconfiguring an overall track. Yet, by reducing the track and making it ‘simplistic’, like a ‘classic rock track’, this again demonstrates the doxa of workmanship and the identity positioning of ‘playing for the song’ as discussed in Take Two. It also highlights the ways in which agency operates inside the structures of the recording studio with the expectations of the social field (the fans, the media, the recording) always present within the decision-making process. The examples highlight the interrelationship between agency and structure in which both are necessary in order for drummers (and engineers and producers) to operate inside the recording studio.³⁶ Agency, or freedom, is therefore bound by the constraints, or the structures, that facilitate its operation. These constraints may include musical style, pre-written musical parts of a song, the technologies used, and the status of the drummer within the recording studio context. Drummers must navigate these multiple, competing concerns in exercising agency inside the recording studio.

Final Take: Concluding Thoughts

In conclusion, we offer a handful of take-aways as contributions to the growing body of knowledge about drummers and drumming. First, through sociological lenses, we have called for greater attention to drummers in the social worlds of recording studios. Here we echo Reay: ‘the goal of sociological research is to uncover the most deeply buried structures of the different social worlds that make up the social universe, as well as the “mechanisms” that tend to ensure their reproduction or transformation’.³⁷ Second, the chapter contributes to the conceptualisations of the ‘work’ of drummers in creative recording environments across its central conceptual axes, or ‘takes’: spaces, identities, and agencies. Third, through ethnographic fieldwork and qualitative interviews, the chapter has sought to enhance the methodological richness of research about, and with, drummers, offering finer-textured and more deeply contextualised accounts of musicians’ experiences – in this case, drummers – in recording studios.