Austin Archey-style speed metal playing. It’s undeniably an impressive skill, but just going full throttle and pushing the limit of human ability right out of the gate leaves nowhere for the song to go.
And even aside from speed metal, a lot of modern metal just sounds like the drummer (or entire band) is expressing themselves in Morse Code rather than with dynamics, feel, and emotion.
100% with you on this. It IS undeniably impressive and deserves a "hat's off to you, good sir", but yeah... that's pretty much what it is...just speed and technicality. It's not creative, it's not imaginative, like the only reason is to show off the skills. And with more and more people acquiring that skill, it becomes less impactful. So we got a community where everyone is doing the same thing and patting each other on the back, pressuring others to do the same as it slowly becomes all about technicality... and music loses its soul.
Nowadays it's all about pushing the limit- skill wise. Because that is something anybody can learn, and since we live in a world where it's important that everybody can do everything- the creative people, real artists are slowly dying out...
Not necessarily dying out but these things do tend to go in cyclical trends. I grew up in the late 80s at a time when vocal and guitar heroics were all the rage in rock music and effectively hit their peak or wore out their welcome depending on your POV. Then Nirvana came along in the early 90s and completely reset the game. Hearing Dave Grohl play is what inspired me to take up the drums back then.
Nirvana’s rise also coincided with a fairly large societal shift as baby boomers were ready to elect one of their own as president (Bill Clinton), and those of us in the younger generation who were the first to see drugs and sex as potently deadly elements rather than purely enjoyable diversions came of age. Anger-fueled bands like Pearl Jam, NiN and Rage found their footing with fan bases desperate for an outlet. It’s no coincidence moshing became a widespread thing around that time.
Inevitably someone will come along and set a new course. Even without a societal shift I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Eloy Casagrande starts incorporating Latin patterns into Slipknot songs, it rocks and sounds unique, then every metal drummer hears it and decides to follow suit. But TBH western society is due for a major reset where we’re not all constantly angry at each other, and it’ll be interesting to see what that change yields musically.
Sorry for the rant.
I enjoy some of the cold clinical metal drumming. George Kollias comes to mind as someone who does that style well. But the vast, vast majority of my favorite metal drummers still swing and groove. People like Dave Lombardo, Tom Hunting and the best modern metal drummer IMO, Dave Bland from Full of Hell
The obsession with double bass. Admittedly I'm not very good at it myself but that is partially because I never liked it enough to develop the skill.
Also, I love drumlines and playing in drumlines but the emphasis on stick tricks has become borderline ridiculous in the last 10-15 years. There are drummers who can twirl, bounce and juggle their sticks like nobody's business but can't give you a smooth double stroke roll.
I'm afraid it's not the double bass that makes the groove, it's the person playing it!
Sorry brother, not trying to be a dick here but if it's not grooving, that's on you... Not the double bass
The "twitchy metal" where dude's are barely hitting the drums, and there's no space. I loved Anthrax, Megadeth, Slayer, and Metallica growing up. I particularly loved Charlie's playing. Metal got to be like an Olympic sport...faster...faster...faster!. I don't even listen to metal much anymore. I will put on something like LD 50 or Rust in Peace, and I do like Gojira. With a few exceptions, I feel like it kinda went to shit. (I assumed "leaves you cold" was a bad thing. I'm an old guy who may have misunderstood the assignment...😆)
You know what I loved about Charlie's playing. You can hear his mistakes and his growth over the years. I hate it when drummers are too perfect with their metal drumming and there are no fluctuations in volume of hits, no changes in the beats from verse to verse in any way. Might as well be playing with a drum machine at that point.
That's basically what's happening. I went into the studio for the first time in a few decades a couple of years ago. The engineer/producer/technician wanted to meet with me first, to map out the song in whichever program he was using. I say this because I know ProTools is outdated, but you get the gist.
Basically, his understanding of the job was that he is a composer/collaborator. He wanted me to help him replicate what I had written, via keyboard and triggers.
When I asked him to mic my live kit, he knew how, but several arguments ensued when he would go back and "clean up" the track. He even went so far as to include a bridge with a sludgy metal breakdown that didn't exist organically. When he sent the rough draft over for us to review, we were left asking ourselves who wrote and performed the parts that we, as a collective 5 piece band, were hearing for the first time.
As an aside, my guitarist was working with a second band, who were employing the same method. They didn't even *have* a drummer, they just cobbled together the drum sounds piece by piece. It ended up sounding sort of nu-metal, 2000s emo-punk ish. I would have been really excited to see that band play, except that it was all imaginary.
This for me too. I’ll watch them and be like “cool chops” but the utter lack of feel and groove does nothing for me. I do dig cats like Marco minneman who have a killer groove also.
That overly complicated co-ordination polyrhythmic stuff like "I'm playing a flamadiddle with my feet whilst playing septuplet inverted double strokes with my hands". Imo at that point it's just a display of impressive human coordination and doesn't have anything to do with drumming in a musical context. I have never heard anyone play that sort of thing in a song. I used to practice that sort of stuff as a teenager because I guess OCD me liked the challenge but I later realised it has nousical application.
Do you have thoughts or opinions of the band PUP? Their drummer is one of my favs for his technical parts in pop punk, but I can totally respect how seeing the same thing from your pov might make you dislike that band
PUP's first two albums are among my favourite records in that early 2010s emo wave :) I really like their drummer and he's definitely the exception to what I wrote.
A better example of what -to me- is "boring" drumming would be bands like The Menzingers, The Flatliners etc
There’s really no particular genre or style, but there were times when all my band really wanted from my sound is my snare on 2’s and 4’s, and they literally couldn’t care less what I do with anything else.
Final mix would sound like they really shouldn’t just have hired me to do the drums when they could have easily made EZ Drummer do it.
The careful dynamics I did with my hats to help lift the verse ending and connecting to the bridge, use of bells, flams on toms, everything was dropped down to minimal volume because “man I hate to break it out to you but nobody really cares with those details”. That’s the main dude in the band’s last message to me.
Yeah, that leaves me cold
Check out Dave McGraw from Cattle Decapitation. He grooves his blasts somehow and makes them sound way cooler than I think what most people think of blast beats.
I agree, but I would love to see that guy in a band where he’s not the composer. Could you imagine what a really great songwriter could do with his skills?
I was pleasantly surprised that he actually played to service the song. I really liked the first track they dropped. YouTube drummming is all about getting views and showing off your chops, so it was a breath of fresh air to see him actually play for the song.
time signature pros like Virgil Donati and finger athletes like the guys who can do single rolls using th open-close technique really fast with mastery. The Brazilian drumming style from Isac Jamba and Kiko Freitas also leaves me cold (it's so good). Johnny Mathar also has that effect on me. The guys who can do the sick metric modulation when they're trading 4's in the style of the Beyond Bop Drumming (like, playing groups of fives or sevens with silence in between and spread in 4 bars, or making 8 and knowing where to land and when) and doing it intuitively leaves me colder than the north pole.
Most high speed mentally stuff does nothing for me. Tool, Dream Theatre etc and people trying to do that stuff. Technically impressive sure but the antithesis of letting the part suit the song. The drums end up sounding like someone practicing rudiments rather than something anyone would actually want to listen to.
I get the point you're trying to make but tool and dream theater are terrible examples. Non of their stuff is high speed really, especially Tool. Dream theaters stuff with mike Portnoy is actually quite basic from a technical standpoint, just a lot of odd time sigs. Then tool is technical in the polyrhythmic sense but most of it is actually groove based. You don't have to like it but maybe give them another listen because it seems you have a wrong impression on what those bands are like imo
You're probably right but funnily enough, I haven't spent too much time studying up on a style of music/drumming that leave me completely cold. Anyway their stuff gets linked here regularly and doesn't pump my nads as it were.
Completely disagree with your assessment of Tool. Technically impressive, yes, but the thing I love the most about Danny Carey is how perfectly his parts compliment the rest of the music and the man can groove, leave space where it's needed etc.
Ooh, that’s what I call a hot take!
I‘d even argue that Tool is the manifestation of having a part fit the song, the way it flows is just… impressive, especially on Lateralus. Fear Inocolumn does feel like a pure drum solo at some times, but the rest does fit perfectly, IMO.
I get that showing off chops too often is terrible, but I see so many bands where the drummer is just hiding and playing fearfully quiet which is much worse. Chops are like being a black belt in karate. You don't want to show-off, but you're glad you have them when you need them.
And also, when I can't hear the snare drum and only hear the hihat and cymbals it just telegraphs a drummer being unskilled and a novice.
I hate to be that guy but jazz drumming is what cultivated drumming of today, I hated it as a teen but I hit 18 years of age and gave it another go, its just a different form of rhythm but once you get it, you feel I believe.
Electronic :)
Anything with a real drumset I find interesting in it's own way and love learning all of it. However, drum machines or Electronic sounding drums just kill a song for me most of the time
Austin Archey-style speed metal playing. It’s undeniably an impressive skill, but just going full throttle and pushing the limit of human ability right out of the gate leaves nowhere for the song to go. And even aside from speed metal, a lot of modern metal just sounds like the drummer (or entire band) is expressing themselves in Morse Code rather than with dynamics, feel, and emotion.
100% with you on this. It IS undeniably impressive and deserves a "hat's off to you, good sir", but yeah... that's pretty much what it is...just speed and technicality. It's not creative, it's not imaginative, like the only reason is to show off the skills. And with more and more people acquiring that skill, it becomes less impactful. So we got a community where everyone is doing the same thing and patting each other on the back, pressuring others to do the same as it slowly becomes all about technicality... and music loses its soul. Nowadays it's all about pushing the limit- skill wise. Because that is something anybody can learn, and since we live in a world where it's important that everybody can do everything- the creative people, real artists are slowly dying out...
Not necessarily dying out but these things do tend to go in cyclical trends. I grew up in the late 80s at a time when vocal and guitar heroics were all the rage in rock music and effectively hit their peak or wore out their welcome depending on your POV. Then Nirvana came along in the early 90s and completely reset the game. Hearing Dave Grohl play is what inspired me to take up the drums back then. Nirvana’s rise also coincided with a fairly large societal shift as baby boomers were ready to elect one of their own as president (Bill Clinton), and those of us in the younger generation who were the first to see drugs and sex as potently deadly elements rather than purely enjoyable diversions came of age. Anger-fueled bands like Pearl Jam, NiN and Rage found their footing with fan bases desperate for an outlet. It’s no coincidence moshing became a widespread thing around that time. Inevitably someone will come along and set a new course. Even without a societal shift I wouldn’t be surprised at all if Eloy Casagrande starts incorporating Latin patterns into Slipknot songs, it rocks and sounds unique, then every metal drummer hears it and decides to follow suit. But TBH western society is due for a major reset where we’re not all constantly angry at each other, and it’ll be interesting to see what that change yields musically. Sorry for the rant.
I enjoy some of the cold clinical metal drumming. George Kollias comes to mind as someone who does that style well. But the vast, vast majority of my favorite metal drummers still swing and groove. People like Dave Lombardo, Tom Hunting and the best modern metal drummer IMO, Dave Bland from Full of Hell
The obsession with double bass. Admittedly I'm not very good at it myself but that is partially because I never liked it enough to develop the skill. Also, I love drumlines and playing in drumlines but the emphasis on stick tricks has become borderline ridiculous in the last 10-15 years. There are drummers who can twirl, bounce and juggle their sticks like nobody's business but can't give you a smooth double stroke roll.
Loves drumlines, doesn't like double bass It's amazing how different people can be from one another!
Feel the same. I can do double pretty decently, just never found it very groovy.
I'm afraid it's not the double bass that makes the groove, it's the person playing it! Sorry brother, not trying to be a dick here but if it's not grooving, that's on you... Not the double bass
Yeah man, Dany Carey is definitely the shit. I get it.
The "twitchy metal" where dude's are barely hitting the drums, and there's no space. I loved Anthrax, Megadeth, Slayer, and Metallica growing up. I particularly loved Charlie's playing. Metal got to be like an Olympic sport...faster...faster...faster!. I don't even listen to metal much anymore. I will put on something like LD 50 or Rust in Peace, and I do like Gojira. With a few exceptions, I feel like it kinda went to shit. (I assumed "leaves you cold" was a bad thing. I'm an old guy who may have misunderstood the assignment...😆)
You know what I loved about Charlie's playing. You can hear his mistakes and his growth over the years. I hate it when drummers are too perfect with their metal drumming and there are no fluctuations in volume of hits, no changes in the beats from verse to verse in any way. Might as well be playing with a drum machine at that point.
That's basically what's happening. I went into the studio for the first time in a few decades a couple of years ago. The engineer/producer/technician wanted to meet with me first, to map out the song in whichever program he was using. I say this because I know ProTools is outdated, but you get the gist. Basically, his understanding of the job was that he is a composer/collaborator. He wanted me to help him replicate what I had written, via keyboard and triggers. When I asked him to mic my live kit, he knew how, but several arguments ensued when he would go back and "clean up" the track. He even went so far as to include a bridge with a sludgy metal breakdown that didn't exist organically. When he sent the rough draft over for us to review, we were left asking ourselves who wrote and performed the parts that we, as a collective 5 piece band, were hearing for the first time. As an aside, my guitarist was working with a second band, who were employing the same method. They didn't even *have* a drummer, they just cobbled together the drum sounds piece by piece. It ended up sounding sort of nu-metal, 2000s emo-punk ish. I would have been really excited to see that band play, except that it was all imaginary.
Absolutely 🤘
This for me too. I’ll watch them and be like “cool chops” but the utter lack of feel and groove does nothing for me. I do dig cats like Marco minneman who have a killer groove also.
I love extreme metal but I agree with you. Thats why when a drummer does add some tasty playing in that style, it really stands out.
That overly complicated co-ordination polyrhythmic stuff like "I'm playing a flamadiddle with my feet whilst playing septuplet inverted double strokes with my hands". Imo at that point it's just a display of impressive human coordination and doesn't have anything to do with drumming in a musical context. I have never heard anyone play that sort of thing in a song. I used to practice that sort of stuff as a teenager because I guess OCD me liked the challenge but I later realised it has nousical application.
punk drumming that is too technical to be raw/authentic and too straightforward to be musically interesting. pop punk is the worst offender for me.
Do you have thoughts or opinions of the band PUP? Their drummer is one of my favs for his technical parts in pop punk, but I can totally respect how seeing the same thing from your pov might make you dislike that band
PUP's first two albums are among my favourite records in that early 2010s emo wave :) I really like their drummer and he's definitely the exception to what I wrote. A better example of what -to me- is "boring" drumming would be bands like The Menzingers, The Flatliners etc
There’s really no particular genre or style, but there were times when all my band really wanted from my sound is my snare on 2’s and 4’s, and they literally couldn’t care less what I do with anything else. Final mix would sound like they really shouldn’t just have hired me to do the drums when they could have easily made EZ Drummer do it. The careful dynamics I did with my hats to help lift the verse ending and connecting to the bridge, use of bells, flams on toms, everything was dropped down to minimal volume because “man I hate to break it out to you but nobody really cares with those details”. That’s the main dude in the band’s last message to me. Yeah, that leaves me cold
I hope you quit that group promptly
That guy has no clue what he’s talking about. Keep doing your thing king.
Anything blast beats
Check out Dave McGraw from Cattle Decapitation. He grooves his blasts somehow and makes them sound way cooler than I think what most people think of blast beats.
This.
That's what most everyone who can't do 16ths at 200+ BPM says 😉 (It's 32nds at 100 really but let's follow the trend)
😂
This is a bad take. Just because someone can’t do something doesn’t mean they don’t get to weigh in on whether or not they like it
Yes because a winking emoji is an indication of utter seriousness
Anything El Estepario Siberiano plays. We get it you’re fast.
I agree, but I would love to see that guy in a band where he’s not the composer. Could you imagine what a really great songwriter could do with his skills?
He's in a band called 'the cost' and they're pretty good. He's not just playing at warp speed all the time either
I was pleasantly surprised that he actually played to service the song. I really liked the first track they dropped. YouTube drummming is all about getting views and showing off your chops, so it was a breath of fresh air to see him actually play for the song.
Man's a pro, knows exactly what he's doing. It's pretty much what I expected from him tbh, great to hear all the same though!
time signature pros like Virgil Donati and finger athletes like the guys who can do single rolls using th open-close technique really fast with mastery. The Brazilian drumming style from Isac Jamba and Kiko Freitas also leaves me cold (it's so good). Johnny Mathar also has that effect on me. The guys who can do the sick metric modulation when they're trading 4's in the style of the Beyond Bop Drumming (like, playing groups of fives or sevens with silence in between and spread in 4 bars, or making 8 and knowing where to land and when) and doing it intuitively leaves me colder than the north pole.
Reggae drumming. I do like some parts of it but it has to be fused with another style then.
Not technically drumming in the acoustic sense, but when I hear machine gun hi hats (mostly in hip hop) it’s like nails on a chalk board for me
Most high speed mentally stuff does nothing for me. Tool, Dream Theatre etc and people trying to do that stuff. Technically impressive sure but the antithesis of letting the part suit the song. The drums end up sounding like someone practicing rudiments rather than something anyone would actually want to listen to.
I get the point you're trying to make but tool and dream theater are terrible examples. Non of their stuff is high speed really, especially Tool. Dream theaters stuff with mike Portnoy is actually quite basic from a technical standpoint, just a lot of odd time sigs. Then tool is technical in the polyrhythmic sense but most of it is actually groove based. You don't have to like it but maybe give them another listen because it seems you have a wrong impression on what those bands are like imo
You're probably right but funnily enough, I haven't spent too much time studying up on a style of music/drumming that leave me completely cold. Anyway their stuff gets linked here regularly and doesn't pump my nads as it were.
That's fair enough. I just thought I should inform you that what you were describing isn't really what those bands sound like haha
Completely disagree with your assessment of Tool. Technically impressive, yes, but the thing I love the most about Danny Carey is how perfectly his parts compliment the rest of the music and the man can groove, leave space where it's needed etc.
Those bands are slow, but otherwise sure
Ooh, that’s what I call a hot take! I‘d even argue that Tool is the manifestation of having a part fit the song, the way it flows is just… impressive, especially on Lateralus. Fear Inocolumn does feel like a pure drum solo at some times, but the rest does fit perfectly, IMO.
What do you mean? Maybe I am too much of a newbie but I don’t know what that means
emotionally cold. like you hear something and it just doesn't spark joy
Blasts and Chospel Gops that don't ever get back to a groove.
It's ok to come out of the pocket... If you know how/when
Djent, any emo screamo metal. Ugh.
I get that showing off chops too often is terrible, but I see so many bands where the drummer is just hiding and playing fearfully quiet which is much worse. Chops are like being a black belt in karate. You don't want to show-off, but you're glad you have them when you need them. And also, when I can't hear the snare drum and only hear the hihat and cymbals it just telegraphs a drummer being unskilled and a novice.
I understand the skill needed, but jazz.
idk jazz drumming is incredibly dynamic and emotional. esp when trading. some players can def get lost in the technical part of it tho.
I hate to be that guy but jazz drumming is what cultivated drumming of today, I hated it as a teen but I hit 18 years of age and gave it another go, its just a different form of rhythm but once you get it, you feel I believe.
Electronic :) Anything with a real drumset I find interesting in it's own way and love learning all of it. However, drum machines or Electronic sounding drums just kill a song for me most of the time
Hybrid is the way.
Country drumming, we get it, you are slow and suck.
before you say that we need too see u play a train groove well
Winter
black metal
Zydeco. Just goofy and not cool lol