August 2021 – Volume 45 • Number 8
On 31st Aug 2021
Articles in August 2021
The Etiquette of Sitting In
The Considerate Guest Let’s assume you are going to sit in with a group—either at your request or their invitation. There are definitely some things you should do before you actually come up on stage to play. The first and…
Low Boy
Custom Lightweight Bass Drum Beater Customizing stuff is one of my guilty pleasures—I’m always “building” cars on manufacturer websites that I have no intention of actually buying—so the opportunity to design my own beater was what initially attracted me to…
Audix
DP7 Drum Mic Pack For any pro- or home-studio engineer, live-sound mixer, or weekend tone miner, the goal is to get the sound crisp, clean, and just right. A lot of the gig is having ears, knowing the ins and…
Funky Shuffles
Music has changed a lot, but it’s important to see where the shuffle evolved from, because it really has a lot to do with all of the other rhythms that you play. For example, when I was playing “Kissing my…
Justice James on Swingin’ Surf
It seemed like a pretty normal surf show until it wasn’t. The Young Barons were onstage performing their edgy, modern-primitive style of surf music. Suddenly, the drums exploded like Buddy Rich torturing the squares at a 1940s swing dance with…
Donn Bennett’s Drum Vault
Glen Sobel’s 2015 Green Snakeskin Mapex Kit Virtually any musician can tell you about the early influences they idolized, imitated, and obsessed about. The names change, but the story is usually pretty much the same: You listened to their recordings…
Yamaha Super Rack System, April 1990
When SimCity—a video game that allowed players to conceptualize and build simulated metropolises—debuted to the public in 1989, it became a phenomenon. Given the massive architecture of the 1990 Super Rack System, it appears a few folks in the Yamaha…
Terry Bozzio
Modern Drummer, July 1994 “Even though I’ve got that humongous drum kit sitting there, I’ve learned I don’t have to use it all at once. Igor Stravinsky thought nothing of having five solo cellos play a section in the middle…
The Healing Power of Silence
The center of a musician’s world is often thought to be within their love for sound, melody, and rhythm. Most of you reading this article will be big fans of sound in general—creating sound, appreciating sound, and listening to sound.…
EAROS
EAROS ONE Decades of standing in front of guitar amps, drums, and mixing consoles has “rewarded” me with tinnitus, difficulty hearing some frequencies clearly, and if you’re sitting a few chairs away from me in a loud, ambient restaurant, you’ll…
Peter Criss
Excerpted from the February 1999 Cover Story Peter Criss—born Peter George Criscuola—is a true rock ‘n’ roll survivor. The Brooklyn-bred drummer, whose affinity for jazz prompted him to seek out Gene Krupa as a youth, ran an ad in Rolling…
Burn, Baby, Burn!
Hello, everyone. I hope your summer has been going as well as it can be. Welcome to another special issue of Modern Drummer. Come on, you have to admit the last few issues have been pretty amazing. (Thank you, MD…
Eric Boudreault’s Treetop Percussion
Just about every pit gig and live-performance for a multimedia theatrical production can be tough. Negotiating myriad cues, charts, conductors, actors, and other elements can stress out even the most skilled professional. But is your gig, 23-feet-in-the-air-atop-a-tree tough? That is…
8 Affordable Home Recording Tools
There certainly hasn’t been a bucketload of good about pandemic lockdowns, but when you have ambitious and creative musicians stuck at home, they tend to figure out ways to get their music out there. Many creators upgraded their home studios,…
Killing the Mud Monster
There are tons of things that can kill your home-studio project. A nuclear error is recording a crappy song to start with. But you also need to beware of signal-chain distortion, really awful gear (mics, preamps, etc.), format futz-ups, bad…
Bobby Bond
The Beat Goes On As time marches on, and we lose more and more of the rock-and-roll hitmakers of the 1960s, those stars still soldiering on via ‘60 rock cruises and package tours have become living embodiments of the era…
16th-Note Accents
Excepted from Accent Control Accents add color and dynamic variation to our drumming, and they’re an extremely essential aspect of every drummer’s technique. The 16th-note accent patterns that follow should be practiced using the four stickings shown: (a) alternate sticking…
The Pocket Queen
The Viral Drummer’s Brand-Building Strategies Like a superhero with an alter ego, Taylor Gordon’s transformation into The Pocket Queen had a seismic effect on not just her own career, but also upon legions of music fans and aspiring drummers. With…
Gretsch
Classic Renown 57 I was immediately aware I was in two kinds of big trouble when I opened the initial press-release announcement for the Limited Edition Gretsch Classic Renown 57. Big Trouble Number One: The photos of the kit in…
