TigerBill's DrumBeat Community Forums for Free Expert Advice on Drums and Percussion.

With me and I thnk it's a lot of good drummers. Learning to lock onto any tempo and stay there is the key. That to me was basically just playing a lot with vocalists who have certain meters where the words and the ability to colour and phrase the notes were comfortable. of course because I was playing so much I wasn't aware that I was actually training the body and mind to do this ability. A lot has to do with not allowing another player in the band to pull you off your perch so to speak. It comes down to a personal concept of playing I have, which I call "space and flow within time".
I used to set up a click and vary the subdivisions within the quarter notes as I played. Then I discovered Joe Morello and his approach to odd times by playing even time with the hats (foot) in an odd time tune. That improved my body balance for any style of music. Also I developed through listening to Joe live and on record a ride hand that worked like a clock but could still phrase and sound liquid to the ears. I used to fool around with 5/4 when I was by myself from of course "Take 5", and noticed Joe was sometimes playing 4/4 with the hi-hat against the rest of the kit. I just did that a lot when I was sitting on my kit in quiet hours after the show was over and the lounge was shut down when the bands had rooms above the clubs in the 60s. I'd spend hours with the old style metronomes just doing that sort of stuff at different tempos. I'd create a 5th gear to fool around in so that when I was playing normally I never had to get out of fourth gear. I'd also sing tunes as I was working on grooves to myself and get the comfort zone for the tunes as they could be sung. The one thing I did was to use my hi-hat foot as my time-keeper all the time in any tune. When I started playing a lot of Meters and Motown stuff, I always had that hi-hat clocking the 2&4 in the tunes.That put the time in my left side or off side and since my on-side or right hand side was already meter-wise my whole body started to turn into a sort of time-machine I guess. The one thing I made sure of as I perfected a lot of this was that I tried to stay fluid within the time frame of things I played. That's when I started to think of things as space and flow within time. It actually wasn't until I started teaching in the late 80s as a full time teacher/player that I started verbalizing what I was doing and really figuring out why I was able to sit on any time counted out and still run fills and ghost notes that didn't overflow the time. That's when I started putting Moeller together in my mind with flowing but keeping solid time. I always did a form of Moeller which they call Low Moeller today although when playing Rock I have been known to run to half Moeller and for a while in the early 80s I was actually doing pop/rock where I used a lot of full Moeller on the road.
I also realized I was actually playing stuff in each tune that was never used in another tune. I also found that the reason why I was so solid and got a pile of work because of I had paid attention to anything Morello played in Jazz or anything he wrote about it and also although tunes we play are actually based on a number of key rhythms, they all had their variations on the rhythmic theme. Therefore I had to have a very good ability to lock into a tempo and stay there. I also found I was looking at sticking patterns as rhythmic phrases rather than mechanical patterns as we do in drum corps.
I also found that in many cases I was playing on the half note instead of the quarter notes and in rock/pop and backbeat beat music I'd play off the 2 & 4 as the half notes
When playing tunes really fast I started playing on the whole note which of course meant I was locking the groove in four bar phrases as one sort of mega-note bar. Meanwhile my natural body time was keeping it as steady as a clock.
Moeller helps you do that beecause of the free strokes, and I found I was beginning to look at everything in time as free strokes which took the tension out of the concentration of keeping time by the bar. It's rather like pacing yourself in a long distance race I suppose. I had done a lot of track as a kid in school both sprinting, middle distance and long distance and loved doing those cross country runs we used to have in school. You have to learn to pace yourself in foot racing and I guess I've always put the time unconsciously into my feet and locked my hands into what the feet were expressing. I'm ambidextrous by nature but play right-handed most of the time, and I keep my time in my left foot and my right hand.
The rest just seems to follow. A lot of my drumming experience, especially in my early days of pre-teen to teen was in playing for dancers and you have to be steady there anyway.

Edited by roger strange (Thu Jul 15 2010 03:03 PM)