Seeking advice on playing by Ear to figure out drum parts

[xkyh]

Hello,

To those that are experienced in figuring out drum parts by ear, how do you improve your ability to do so? There are songs in which fills and certain nuances happen too quickly (by my standard) for me to effectively make sense of what they are doing so I can replicate them in my playing.

Do you -

1. Build better skills generally, which will translate into greater familiarity with drums parts, resulting in you being able to intuitively guess at what the drummer is doing even if you can't hear him that clearly?

2. Is there a trick of the trade that you use to isolate drum parts? Are there books, software, resources that help you do so?

3. Or do you just improvise to the best of your knowledge what they are playing and approximate it?

4. All of the above?

Detailed advice sought, and appreciated.

thanks. I'm a drummer who's getting back into active and regular practice after a hiatus, so I'm still getting the hang of it. Share thoughts on this and other tangentially related topics! : )

 

[MasamuneGoro]

Hi,

What I like to do is to just keep replaying the part until I get it. Sometimes I need to get on the drum set to slowly figure things out, or use a composing software that supports drums (e.g. Sibelius or Finale).

Generally a drummer's skill level with regards to thinking in terms of drum notations (theory) would help a lot when it comes to figuring out parts by ear because it enables you to break down and remember the drums bits with greater clarity. I think a good advice is to look at more drum scores while listening to the song itself to see how others break it down, you can get a ton of experience which would make things easier

 

[mix]

Hi xkyh,

I am a drum teacher with 4-5 yeas of experience. and I get that question ALOT. I do not know about you but more often than not, the questions come from new students. What I am about to share is what I've collected and fine-tuned over the years and I feel that unexp to exp students all benefitted from it. I hope it does the same to you!

1. Basics:
Your basics will determine all parts of your drumming from playing all the way down to listening and figuring a drum fill or drum part. There are two types of basic: Rudimentary basic and Theoretical basic. I always advocate rudiments to my students. vicfirth.com offers a spectacular selection of training materials and I highly recommend you to use it to learn your rudiments. Now alot of people will ask what is a rudiment. For a beginner, if one is not using rudiments, he/she is playing it wrong down to a single stroke on the hit-hat or the snare.

Next is theoretical basic. You need to know how to differentiate a triplet and a straight 4. Is the fill in triplets or a combination of both? Is the fill a combination of 16th and 8th? Where are the rests in the fill? You need to know all these and I can guarantee that you can break down just about every fill if you apply theoretical skills.

2. Vocabulary
My teacher Jimmy Lee (Stephanie Suns's session drummer) once told me that a good drummer builds up a vocabulary of drum parts. Listen to songs and start building up your vocabulary. It's like English where you need vocabulary to help you express yourself. You can't form a sentence with only "mummy and daddy". And you absolutely need rudimentary basic for this. If you don't a understand a fill, more often than not, it means that a basic concept of the fill is new to you. That knowledge deficiency is what is hindering you from getting it. Alot of times when listening to a song, you find that "hey, this fill sounds similar with only a few changes to my own fill in my vocabulary!". And you'll find that the vocab you have, the easier it is to know. Sometimes through different kits that the drummer use, it is impossible to know which specific toms is he hitting unless you know the configuration of the kit.

3. Experience
To me, if you feel that you can't get the fills, it means that you are not experienced enough. Listen to more music and start to be technical about the song. Listen to it repeatedly until you are sick and tired of the song. That is when you learn. Do not expect yourself to listen once and know it all. Trust me, if you listen to it 20-30 times, each of it analyzing and breaking it down into individual strokes, you will get it.

If my sharing helps but only a little, I am happy enough. : )