Pistol on one hand, Steve Vai - Kill The Guy With The Ball in the heart

Steve Vai the guitarist of my respect is back. Introducing from the mini-album "Alien Love Secrets", which has fewer songs than full albums. I do not know what he thought when he decided to cover himself in silver powder, but his having such idea is also where I respect.

Alien Love Secrets

Speaking of Alien Love Secrets, of course, we should keep our ears on the song Kill The Guy With The Ball which includes the amazing high-speed technical play by the drummer Deen Castronovo. (The song title of Japanese release is like "The Ball of Slaughter".) Analyze the high-speed play at the beginning of the song and give it a try!

Also check the past Steve Vai related article: 

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The song starts from the fill with snare and toms. In the 2nd bar I initially thought it is a fill with flams, but once I hear it in slow playback speed, I found it is with 32nd notes instead of flams.

From the 3rd bar, a strange guitar play sounds as if a man is speaking begins. At the same time, the drum part starts with a revolutionary triplet pattern the world never heard. He achieved the low-pitched and seamless high-speed triplets using the three: right-hand floor tom -> right-kick -> left-kick. While he continues these triplets, he changes the position of snare backbeats and occasionally strews cymbals and toms with the left hand. Also note that accent marks are attached to all the snare notes since the low-pitched triplets look too massive in the score to visibly see snare notes.

My eyes are getting tired because of the score with a lot of triplets. When you play it on a drum kit, your right hand and your both feet may soon approach your limit. However, we came only 25 seconds so far. The strange guitar play gets more excited from here, and just before the riff, the intro part reaches the climax with the blazing fast 32nd notes! 

The length of the song so far is 36 seconds. My score transcription time per second (of a song) records the highest level ever. No, it really doesn't matter. The problem is the 32nd notes fill in 17th/18th bars. If you look closely, you see he did not play at random. The position of snare notes is the clue. Looking at the first part of the 32nd notes, we can see that 6 + 4 is repeated twice. Also, in the first 6 notes, the same sequence is repeated. That is, snare + high tom + floor tom + floor tom + kick + kick. The difficulty level is high because the stroke speed is simply fast, but I believe you can play it once you understand the 6 + 4 sequence.

I checked out the information about the super drummer Deen Castronovo, it seems that he is a good singer as well. Furthermore, the topic reffering to a sort of an arrest by assault comes out in search results in higher search relevance. It is unfortunate that Assault and Battery is the word used to represent drums part in a band. We came down to a bad end but see you soon.

Thanks,

Jamiroquai - Space Cowboy whispers to me "your life could always be more shiny"

Jamiroquai - Space Cowboy

Let's return to my starting point this time. I'm going to look into acid jazz music in the Jamiroquai's album "The Return of the Space Cowboy" released in 1994 that I covered in my past article. Let's see acid jazz in the song "Space Cowboy" from the album that I heard some ten thousands of times to physically wear the disk down! 

Return of the Space Cowboy

See the previous article here:

Elaborated performance based on 16th note

The rich and bull-bodied sound of Rhodes panning to the left and right, Jay Kay's gentle voice floats to make us chill out. Really nice and cool. Fine performances of the bass and drums based on 16th note phrasing are attractive in it. The drummer is Derrick McKenzie. Since he is originally (still now?) left-handed, I'm not very sure whether it is the reason or not, accented notes with left hand are relatively smooth compared to average right-handed drummers.

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In the basic pattern, while playing 16 beats with both hands, open hi-hat appears occasionally in 3rd and 4th beat. It sounds beautiful and sophisticated. In the 10th bar, as you can see, hi-hat and snare drum fill up every 16 notes cleanly. He forms the fill by hi-hat and snare drum keeping the RLRL sequence of both hands in 16th notes.

Focus on your left hand

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Just before the chorus in the 14th bar, he made a brilliant dive into the chorus with a syncopated 16th upbeat note. Open hi-hat with left hand and immediately cymbal with left hand on the 4th beat. It is very important to hit this cymbal accent smoothly with left hand (highlighted in red). In a typical drum kit layout in a studio or the like, the left side cymbal may be out of reach when you play hi-hat with both hands. Therefore, it is better to position the left side cymbal just above hi-hat, high tom, or wherever closer to you as needed.

From the chorus from the 15th bar, open hi-hat corresponds to the keyboard and bass. Sparkling 16th upbeat anticipations and syncopations! Here again give your full attention to your left hand. Do not forget to occasionally decorate it with 32nd notes ticks. Also see below for the difference between anticipation and syncopation. In a nutshell, there are various opinions on the words' definition.

A pattern hard to keep balance

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A bridge section from the 22nd bar goes with a different kind of pattern. Keeping the open hi-hat on 8th note upbeat, in all the bars kicks syncopate and snare is hit at a bit unusual places. This is a pattern hard to maintain balance, but precisely because it is irregular, it obviously characterizes the song. So we'd like to play the pattern just like this.

How about our younger generations?

For me music of this age is my origin. I heard and imitated it to learn music and drums. I wonder what kind of genre and artists are the origins of young people these days. Is it like Blink-182? No, when I asked members of my band younger than me by over 10 years, they gave Earth, Wind & Fire, Bootsy Collins, Tower of Power, and even Lee Ritenour as examples of their origin. There may not be a bigger gap among musicians than I thought.

Thanks,

Very well, then Final Fantasy V - Battle With Gilgamesh in exchange!

What made me frantic though this time, let me explain a drum part in a game music! Let's introduce it with a view to playing it with a drum kit instead of computer sequencing.

When I was a child, I did not feel good or bad at all listening to music, no matter how much I was getting into a game. Meanwhile, I remember that the music in Final Fantasy V made me feel that was cool and good as a child. It might have been the timing when I grew little by little and began listening carefully to the music in games. Among the sound tracks of Final Fantasy V, "Battle With Gilgamesh" is living as a very popular and great song over time. At that time, I was already starting playing drums. I remember that I tried to play this on a drum kit, but I gave it up because it was too difficult. 

The drum part of the song is sequenced like this! 

It starts with a machine digital phrase which somehow has a sense of elegance due to the sound like a pipe organ. In the tom beat from the 5th bar, cymbals overlap with toms and snare drums and no bass drums here. The pattern is not impossible to do this on your drum kit, but the quick movement of the left hand of tom and snare drum is needed and quite hard. As a workaround, play double bass on your feet and hit tom+cymbal and snare+cymbal with both hands then you can produce a sound like that.

The fill in 19th bar appears many times during the song. The fill has 4 snare hits on all the 4 quarter notes. Drummers might not create fills like that. Meanwhile the fill is a bit attractive with toms going from higher to lower. The cymbal in the 2nd/4th beat makes it considerably harder to play on a drum kit. A realistic solution is to replace those toms with bass drums.

Through the 21st bar the song moves from the intro to the next phase. The hi-hat's ticks express a sense of tension and the big move of the song. 

The open hi-hat drum pattern starts from the 22nd bar. At that time when I was a kid, I thought that it was entirely impossible for humans to play this part. In order to play that at this tempo, I strongly believed that I had to hit the third closed hi-hat in the left hand. But now I see it is not correct. The left foot makes the second hi-hat note to stop the open hi-hat ring, I can save one hand's hit here. I need only the first and the third hi-hats by the right hand. Because the tempo is quite fast, a stable coordination of limbs like Tony Williams is needed. In the songs "Fred" and "Mr. Spock" of Tony Williams LIFETIME he plays a very similar pattern which proves that humans can play that. 

Lifetime: The Collection

The part from the 22nd bar to the Dal Segno is repeated forever. The intro part till the 21st bar is only one time after you entered the Big Bridge (I'm talking about the game). If I remember correctly, it is a scene that the heroes' party goes scrolling upward and encounters some monsters, and finally faces Gilgamesh at the end of the event. Although Gilgamesh is supposed to be an enemy, he speaks a lot and you don't even need to defeat him. I think that such an event was epochal considering RPGs at that time. When I met him for the first time he seemed a big enemy so I attacked him with all my party's might without even hesitating Samurai's "Gil Toss" (Zeninage), but he only runs away after some turns. We only got slack jawed.

I have not played the Final Fantasy series newer than VIII and I don't know anything after that, but the song Battle With Gilgamesh appears a lot of times in the subsequent series arranged in many ways. Although I listened to a few on YouTube, no arranged version changed my best version. The best version would be the one when you played the game with enthusiasms. Tell me which version is your best!

Thanks,