How to Sound Bigger, by Jacob Slichter

Eric’s Introduction:

 

“Good artists borrow,” explained Picasso, “Great artists steal!”  And it’s true.  Great musicians figure out what makes their mentors’ playing so effective, and then they incorporate the same things into their own works.

 

The funny thing is, even when we deliberately try to imitate our mentors to achieve a certain feel, we often miss the mark.  As drummers, we may listen to a song a thousand times, but then fail to really understand what it is that makes the performance so powerful.  Why?  Because much of what makes music effective is counterintuitive – we hear one thing, but then erroneously play something else trying to achieve the feeling of the original.  This month Jake Slichter returns to hip us to the counterintuitive art of playing BIG.

 

For all you non-drummers out there, READ ON.  Jake’s principles for helping a drummer to sound bigger are applicable to every art form.

 

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How to Sound Bigger

by Jacob Slichter

 

The vast landscape of clashing egos known as the world of rock and roll is, among other things, a contest to be the biggest.  The defining bands of various rock subgenres—the Beatles, the Stones, the Who, Led Zeppelin, AC/DC, Aerosmith, the Clash, U2, Nirvana—are generally those that sound the biggest because we listeners are naturally excited by a huge sound.  No surprise then that when bands audition drummers, the drummer who makes the band sound the biggest generally gets the nod.

 

How does a drummer make a band sound big?  Listening closely to one master of hugeness, Dave Grohl of Nirvana, will shed some light on things.  Grohl is known for the slamming decibel level of his drumming, but loudness is not the only reason Grohl sounds so big.  Grohl has many imitators, some of whom play as loud or even louder than he does but all of whom sound smaller.  Why?  In this article, we’ll examine Grohl’s drumming on “In Bloom” (from the album Nevermind and available for download online) and see what insights it offers into the elusive art of creating a big sound.

 

Contrast

 

The word big implies a contrast with something smaller, and most musicians know that in order for a particular passage of music to sound large, they need to lay the groundwork by first creating something that sounds smaller.  Dynamics are usually the focus of these efforts—‘Make the verses quiet and the choruses loud.’  It’s a familiar approach and one frequently employed by Nirvana.  Drastic changes in volume, however, are not the only way Grohl and Nirvana create contrast and thus bigness. 

 

One way Grohl creates contrast on “In Bloom” is through the relative complexity and simplicity of his drum part.  He uses a busier hi-hat and bass drum pattern in the verses and then simplifies his part in the choruses.  (We’ll talk more about simplicity and complexity in the next section.)

 

He also creates contrasts through the use of timbre. The hi-hat has a crisp, closed sound during the first half of the verses, loosens somewhat halfway through the verse, and finally opens all the way in the choruses and intro sections.  The snare drum has more crack in the choruses than in the verses.  The tom toms are completely absent in the verses, which makes them all the more thunderous when they appear in the choruses and intro sections.  Some of these shifts in timbre are byproducts of changes in volume (when you hit the snare harder, the sound changes), but the timbre differences are important in and of themselves.  When Grohl opens his hi-hat, he doesn’t have to add that much more volume in order to create a contrast; the change in timbre has done a lot of the work for him.

 

Finally, one of my favorite moments of “In Bloom” is also one of the biggest moments of contrast: the triplet fill Grohl plays near the end of each chorus refrain, right after the words “but he, don’t know what it means.”  One reason this brief moment sounds so big is the sharp contrast created by a triplet feel, which comes out of nowhere to interrupt the steady flow of eighth notes on either side of the fill.

 

Simplicity

 

Perhaps the biggest sounding moments of “In Bloom” are the instrumental sections—the intro of song that reappears immediately after each chorus.  It’s important to note that these are the sections with the simplest drum parts, where Grohl plays the fewest notes.  Here, Grohl crashes with the guitar chords and follows up with a relatively simple fill pattern (buh BLAP BOOM BLAP BOOM BLAP BOOM).  This illustrates an important principle of drumming: the simpler your drum part, (the fewer notes you play), the bigger the music will sound.  It may seem like a paradox, for when someone tells us to “make it sound big,” our instinct is to play more, not less.

 

Why does simplifying music make it sound bigger?  Imagine yourself walking along a crowded sidewalk in the middle of Manhattan.  Then, imagine yourself on the Brooklyn Bridge, looking at the city skyline from afar.  From which vantage point will the city look biggest?  Obviously, from the bridge because there you would have perspective.  Perspective, however, comes at a cost.  Perspective—seeing the big picture—necessarily sacrifices detail.  The city looks biggest when you can’t see the individual faces of the people who live there.  It also looks biggest when half of what you see is the empty sky that acts as a backdrop.  Indeed, if you were able to take in zillions of details from your vantage point on the bridge, you wouldn’t be able to take in the totality of the city.  The details would only distract you from the big picture, whereas the absence of details and the surrounding emptiness allow you to see it.

 

So it is with music.  It generally sounds biggest when it’s at its simplest, when one, two, or three ideas stand out in front of an open backdrop.  Drummers play a crucial role in making that happen.  In “In Bloom,” for instance, the choruses sound bigger than the verses in part because the hi-hat and bass drum parts are simpler.  The verses are built on sixteenth-note patterns, whereas the choruses are built on eighths and are therefore simpler and more open.

 

Consider Dave Grohl’s amazing fills.  They sound huge largely because they’re simple.  On “In Bloom,” he’s often hitting with both sticks at the same time, flamming on the snare drum and then on the tom toms.  This makes the drums louder, but using two sticks at once also makes the fills simpler.  When both his sticks are striking in unison, he’s painting in thicker, broader strokes than if he were speeding around the drum set with alternating left and right hands, filling up all the empty spaces with notes.  Simplicity and the emptiness that accompanies it are crucial elements of Grohl’s big sound.  The same can be said of Nirvana: the music is huge in part because of its jarring rhythmic simplicity.  This is lost on many Nirvana and Dave Grohl imitators, who are understandably obsessed with matching Nirvana’s huge sound but who focus solely on volume.

 

Feel

 

The steady, relaxed confidence of Dave Grohl’s feel has everything to do with the size of the sound.  Drummers with shaky time and the musicians who play with them face an uphill battle when it comes to sounding big.  Drummers who idolize Dave Grohl spend a lot of time practicing his fills, but often ignore his incredibly hypnotic feel.  That’s a mistake.  In order to play drum fills that sound as big as Grohl’s, one must first learn to play a drumbeat that exudes the same confidence as Grohl does when he plays drum beats at even the softest of volumes.   A solid drum feel allows the various musicians in a band to play with greater cohesion, an obvious advantage when trying to sound big.  More importantly, it helps listeners to relax and give themselves over to the music.   Nirvana listeners enjoy being lulled in to the hypnotic sway of the verses, only to be slammed by the choruses.  That would be impossible without Grohl’s masterful feel, which makes the verses dreamier and the choruses mightier.

 

All of this takes attention and practice.  The thrilling hugeness of “In Bloom” is evidence of how rewarding such focus and practice can be.

 

 

Jacob Slichter is the drummer for Semisonic and the author of So You Wanna Be a Rock & Roll Star, a critically acclaimed behind-the-scenes look at the music business.  E-mail him at semijake@aol.com.