Examples of out-of-time drumming

haha i don't think there's a single track on their compilation cd in which the drumming is in time

best band ever

the drum machine is programmed into a completely different time signature than the guitars, so the fills come in all unexpected-like.

Brian Eno's 'Here Come the Warm Jets' - where the drums come in; because of the strange delay it's put through. I guess it's intentional though, and it sounds good.

Well, it sounds as if the drums have absolutely no correlation to the song at all. Sounds out enough to me.

In "Sister Ray", Moe Tucker briefly interrupts her own metronomic backbeat to tap the rims and simulate the sound of someone "knocking on my chamber door", but she mistakenly adds an extra beat, resulting in her drumming being 180-degrees out of sync. Resulting in the loss of the backbeat for much of the remainder of the song.

I was under the impression that they didn't so much sequence drums as much as they quantised live drumming...

I'm like literally interested in finding examples of really bad (not boring, but BAD) drumming that made it onto a recording. and not like some underground punk or metal release that like 23 people heard, either. something that had a degree of popularity (even if underground or in indie circuits).

I know very little about drum recording, was very surprised when my friend's band (who have a very capable, technically skilled drummer) went the 'sample' route on the recording and just programmed it all. this is a band with not a lot of money, I have to imagine this happens more often now than ever, so we're probably not going to be hearing as much inane shit like the drumming on early Sodom albums anymore.

so ....what are some examples of bad/laughable/off-tempo/"are you kidding me" drumming that made it onto an album? Youtubes welcome but make sure to name the track cos of future dedlinx

Maybe “honky tonk women?” Tempo at the end is almost double that in the beginning

There’s a bunch of examples of drummers speeding up: the Isley Brothers’ “Fight The Power,” Stevie Wonder’s “Superstition,” the long version of “We Are Family” (that one’s pretty subtle, though), and others that aren’t immediately springing to mind.

Louie Louie would seem the obvious - and glorious - example.

The one I always noticed was how late the drum fill comes in after the breakdown on Modern English's "I Melt with You". It's like 'oh crap we are starting again, I got to catch up'.

re The Stones, that track of theirs "I'm Free" sounds like it was recorded while Charlie Watts was taking a nap.

The Flying Lizards' version of "Money." But it was a hit single so you can't argue with their choices there.

Max Weinberg sounds late here at 2:22, after “tie your hair back,” and it always bugged me. It feels like you’re coming to the top of the stairs, and you think there’s one more stair, but there isn’t, and you do a big awkward step.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4DXlOHUSnAw

If it sounds good, speeding up in the middle of a recording is fine. Especially in Al Green's "Your Love is Like the Morning Sun".
If you're Albert Goldman, you think Ringo ruined "Strawberry Fields Forever" with his "bricklayer hands".
A friend of a friend made a record where the hired drummer played an out-of-time tom fill in the second bar of the song. The friend and I used to play the opening five seconds of this song over and over for laughs.

This same hired drummer was then brought in to play a show where I was the bass player. He had us determine BPM for every song in the set and programmed it into his visual metronome.
When we started the first song, he was playing it about 2/3 of the proper speed. The guitarist and I just looked at one another and played at this funereal tempo. Our punchy three minute set opener was now a five and a half minute dirge. I think we persuaded him to let us count him in for the rest of the set.

Yeah. Some of Steve Miller Band's 70's hits (like "Take the Money and Run" or "Rockin me") are shockingly sloppy for recordings with that amount of airplay, and not just the drums. I wouldn't say BAD, you know, grooves for days. I'm not saying they're "loose" tracks, I'm saying Pastels level shambolic at times.

Bill Berry, "Losing My Religion"

(sorry/not sorry.)

There's lots of terrible drumming on Guided By Voices records - either by Tobin Sprout or Pollard himself.

D'Angelo's "Prayer" !

And another Beatles : "You Won't See Me".

'Angel Baby' by Rosie and the Originals (an instance where the drums would seem out of place if they weren't out of time)

Zep “black dog” during the turnaround with the odd time signature. I know it’s probably in time but damn if it doesn’t sound completely off

Page isn't in sync with Bonham, and rushes the turnaround, so it sounds sloppy.

There's lots of speeding up and slowing down all the time in lots of stuff, from AC/DC on up/down. But if you're looking for outright "clams," that might be tougher. I've always thought the middle of "Monkey Man" by the Stones, the solo, it's always sounded to me like Charlie got lost or thought they were done and switched back to his initial part but then struggled to keep it going instead. Listen to where Charlie suddenly switches from the ride to the hi-hat but then weirdly back again, like he doesn't know where it's going. And maybe he doesn't! That's part of what makes the song cool.

Starts here at 2:34.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4Zbnvh6I4k4

Yeah, the switch from ride to hi-hat feels a little like, "Oh, we're doing that bit more than once?" But it works so perfectly here, because it leads to those heavy tom hits at 3:00, one of my favorite Watts moments.

i feel like there is a massively influential early emocore record with godawful drumming on it but i can't name it

I feel like there's a definite song on the latest Death Angel where the drummer keeps killing the momentum of the band because he slows down at the end of each riff section, but i have to look it up

I know the rhythm section of Caspar Brotzmann Massaker are playing free time on some of Home and presumably elsewhere.
Probably also a thing happening in Free Jazz in places but not sure that's what you're looking for.

D'Angelo's "Prayer" !

― AlXTC from Paris, Tuesday, June 15, 2021 8:55 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

This is obviously intentional, it's some J-Dilla inspired beat science by Chris Dave (one of the best drummers the world has known)

It's a good question though. I usually feel like on old records with some occasional sloppy playing or human tempo shifts, it doesn't matter because the drums sound cool and it fits the vibe. And in the last few decades, it's become so easy to overdub and edit that it's really rare to leave mistakes on record.

I feel like there are some early '80s examples of live drums played along with drum machines that drift and get flammy, but I can't think of anything off the top of my head.

I played Losing My Religion to a metronome set to its BPM and it started on tempo and Berry's tempo had already sped up significantly before the end of the first verse. good call.

what about horrible live drumming examples?

The snare fills in Professor Longhair's version of Big Chief (like at :36) have always done my head in:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbolafCdcqY

They're just markedly faster than the tempo and then the groove immediately downshifts, I wonder if it's just a weird tape edit?

what about horrible live drumming examples?

Well that's just endless

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tyXl2payiWQ

For some of the examples upthread:

Simon & Garfunkel - The Sound of Silence

Apparently they were overdubbed to the acoustic track that didn't have drums, so the drummer had to follow a tempo that was already all over the place

Stevie Wonder

Same thing, apparently he would lay down keyboards first in full takes, and then overdub the drums last.

i forgot about the story to how the label added drums to make it sound more mainstream, that would make sense.

re: Sound

Lol it’s Macron, watching the game at home, who gave the special authorization to go beyond the curfew...

_D'Angelo's "Prayer" !

― AlXTC from Paris, Tuesday, June 15, 2021 8:55 AM (two hours ago) bookmarkflaglink
_

This is obviously intentional, it's some J-Dilla inspired beat science by Chris Dave (one of the best drummers the world has known)

Oups double post gone wrong !

Lambchop - "Betweemus" -- the funniest drumming I can think of, more or less in the pocket until about 1 minute in, and then it goes every damn place.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S97r9fbRRFQ

I played Losing My Religion to a metronome set to its BPM and it started on tempo and Berry's tempo had already sped up significantly before the end of the first verse. good call.

Well damn. I was just trying to be cute and give an example of some Out of Time drumming.

HAHA goddammit.

*whoosh*

it does strike me as funny that chris dave got mentioned in a thread devoted to "out-of-time" drumming, as one of the main things that learning the drums has taught me is that time is kind of a malleable substance

I feel like there's a definite song on the latest Death Angel where the drummer keeps killing the momentum of the band because he slows down at the end of each riff section, but i have to look it up

― cancel culture club (Neanderthal), Tuesday, June 15, 2021 9:14 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

have you been listening to battles in the north a lot lately

xpost is there time-travel drumming?

Anachronistic drumming.

I think more than just the drums of "Sound of Silence" are overdubbed. There's a lot of electric stuff that kind of wobbles on that one.

the electronic guitars were added later too, yeah. it was an acoustic song only

Bill Ward on Rat Salad - is it just me or is the middle drum solo section just awkward … maybe the drums are out of tune…

Like most sloppy drummers, Bill Ward eventually became un-sloppy. But, man, those first few Black Sabbath records, Ward was a straight-up caveman. The first big drum fill on "Iron Man" will always remind me of the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey where the ape man figures out he can use bones as a weapon. When "Sweet Leaf" speeds up around the solo, Ward barely pulls off those runs around the toms. He hits the rim on accident at 3:00 and trails off a few seconds later on a different fill. The band had the resources to fix or redo these parts, but the band thankfully also had the resources to leave them in. Sabbath gets credit for inventing the "doom metal" genre, and that laid-back sledgehammer feeling that defines the style is textbook Bill Ward. In the lexicon of metal drummers, he's up there with Lars Ulrich, and Lars Ulrich sucks. More specifically, Ulrich's sloppiness on early Metallica comes off as weakness. Bill Ward is the best sloppy drummer because his sloppiness gave him strength.

https://www.riverfronttimes.com/musicblog/2013/01/22/the-six-best-sloppy-drummers?page=3

He's sloppy, but (because) he *swings.*

Michael Clarke from the Byrds is probably one of the most famous "bad" drummers, but I've never had a problem with him myself.

i don't know/care much about drum sloppiness but ward has the best drum sound on those early BS albums

I mean for what it's worth that article is considering the best sloppy drummer of all time.

Oh sure but it’s still out of time drumming !
― AlXTC from Paris, Tuesday, June 15, 2021 11:37 AM (three hours ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think there are two flavors here, there's drumming where the quarter note fluctuates, which is generally unintentional and means the whole tempo of the song shifts (unless there's a click/drum machine involved, and the drummer has to get back on board with the absolute tempo).

Then there's playing around within the distance between quarter notes, where anything is fair game (and how you get feel & swing). And the Chris Dave thing is being able to do absolutely anything within the bounds of strict time, and end up exactly on the quarter notes (unless you don't want to).

Btw when listening to that Jim Steinman podcast, they mention how he & Meatloaf were big fans of Max Weinberg's drumming not in spite of, but because he sped up in the middle of songs. They thought it expressed his passion for the song and fit the theatricality of what they were doing.

Personally I like a steady quarter note, but records that rush don't bother me (dragging on the other hand...).

Live drumming - Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann are all over the map more often than not.

why is speeding up through a song considered a bad thing?

It shouldn’t be. I know that, for example, speeding things up makes this performance pretty fucking thrilling:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k4S9ke31JDA

As long as everyone speeds up at the same time, it's cool. Most gigging bands I assume have moved beyond the bad drummer period. What's the saying, a band is only as good as its drummer? I was just reading the (excellent) Richard Thompson memoir, and one of the first things the initial Fairport lineup does is ditch their drummer after the first gig for someone better.

The new drummer

Martin Francis Lamble (28 August 1949 – 12 May 1969) was the drummer for British folk rock band Fairport Convention, from just after their formation in 1967, until his death in the band's van crash in 1969. He joined the band after attending their first gig and convincing them that he could do a better job than their then drummer, Shaun Frater.

He played on the band's first three albums, but on 12 May 1969, not long after recording Unhalfbricking, Fairport's van crashed on the M1 motorway, near Scratchwood Services, on the way home from a gig at Mothers. Lamble was killed outright in this accident at the age of 19.

Their next drummer was Dave Mattacks, who also played on Bryter Layter, Solid Air and Before and After Science and wore this t-shirt on Whistle Test

https://i.imgur.com/OU7K7Aq.png

why is speeding up through a song considered a bad thing?

Ask the rest of the band.

There's old musician's joke about that. How can you tell if a drummer's at your door? The knocking speeds up.

Dave Mattacks rules.

xpost "or he doesn't know when to come in"

LOL yes.

"how do you know when a bass player is playing out of tune?"
"his fingers are moving!"

There's old musician's joke about that. How can you tell if a drummer's at your door? The knocking speeds up.

my favourite version of this is "they don't come in when you tell them to"

Live drumming - Mickey Hart and Bill Kreutzmann are all over the map more often than not.

They definitely had that sneakers-in-a-dryer thing, but the tempo itself rarely wavered. Which is too bad — when it was just Kreutzmann, there was a nice push-pull thing where the tempo breathed (“Jack Straw” on Europe ‘72 is a good example of this). Once Hart came back, tempi were set in stone. Slow stone, at that.

I hust watched a docuseries in which Kreutzmann says quite cheerfully that he's not good at keeping time, and that he prefers instead to keep feel.

He says something about assigning a different limb in his drumming to each of the other lead instruments to dialogue with. Not sure exactly how that works and if that means he can't play whatever dialoging he's doing with taht player with another limb which I assume translates to part of drumset. Like hi-hat and whatver snare would always be this player, bass drum etc would always be taht on eor something.

Sounds like he's been on the crack pipe there.

Seems to be a San Francisco thing, I don't rate Jefferson Airplane's drummer either. The worst though was Quicksilver Messenger Service, that guy was awful.

As a fan of the Dead I wish that they hadn't relaxed their sense of dynamics at some point in the 70s (I'm not enough of a scholar to pinpoint when) it seems that both drummers play(ed) consistently quite lightly, and as Tarfumes points out, the tempi leaned towards slow-to-middling, I don't know if this was a conservation of energy thing or not, or they were keeping their hard-hitting for the Drums>Space sections.

I feel like the worst moments occur when there is confusion about who is driving the beat and who is doing the fills/colour, sometimes they sound like they're both being polite and vying to hide behind each other and the ass is about to fall out of the song's rhythm any second.

At around the 11:10 mark during the super cool and minimalist 2 bass note and 2 drum note vamp that takes up all of side A of Faust and Tony Conrad's Outside the Dream Syndicate the drummer messes up and turns the beat around! Then he keeps trying to fix it and finally does at 11:25. It kind of ruins the whole thing and is glaringly obvious and front and center in the mix but I definitely heard the album many times before I ever noticed somehow!

years later, Vicki Sue Robinson depicted the harrowing incident on her hit single

I hust watched a docuseries in which Kreutzmann says quite cheerfully that he's not good at keeping time, and that he prefers instead to keep feel.

That's funny because the Dead drummers often have the worst feel I've ever heard :)

NB my experience of the Dead comes entirely from hearing snippets played on the Time Crisis internet radio show

The Dead's drumming was among the things that put me off them for years. Even as a moderate Dead fan now, the best I can say for the drums is that they provide sufficient drive to keep the songs more or less in motion. The real rhythm in that band comes from Weir and Lesh (not fantastic time keepers themselves, but at least they keep it between the lines).

The comment above about Stevie Wonder adding drums last is interesting, because the drums are the one thing on his classic albums that I wish he'd gotten someone else to play. Everything else is so good that he gets away with it, but there are songs that would really jam a little more with a sharper drummer.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPiG7HVt5lM

Ward’s fill coming out of the mid section of “electric funeral” sounds like grandpa falling down the stairs

Moon combined animal tranquilizers with booze backstage before the concert (one of the people drinking with him nearly died). Up to "Won't Get Fooled Again," it's a surprisingly solid show!

xp

It's amazing how all these hard livers (and, er, hard livers), like Moon, or Bonham or Kenney Jones or probably most of these guys rarely have bad shows.

lol @ livers/livers

The problem with Moon was less that he had sub-par shows occasionally -- and hardly any of those -- and more than he'd completely tank a show from overconsumption. On a 1976 Boston show, they barely got two songs in before Moon collapsed (this time, it was brandy and barbituates). The tape sounds like someone doing a bad imitation of Moon's playing:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=KMrHaxFHH8k

Downers seem like an especially bad idea for drummers. Coke or speed might make you speed up, but at least you won't fall over.

I rather like loose/“sloppy” drummers precisely because they sound un-tense, aka loose, and it lends the music a more casual vibe than songs with super tight drumming.
One of my faves is Thomas ‘Mera’ Gartz from Trad Gras/Swedish stoner collective and his solo stuff is great too imo.

Can’t say I’d describe his playing as out of time but it’s definitely distinctively loose.

Yeah I think loose or even "sloppy" drummers can be very groovy. It kind of all depends on seeming like you know where the 1 is (even if you only pay it nodding respect) vs. seeming like you might not be totally sure.

Ralph Molina is another one. Lots of jammers play like this ime?

Again I wouldn’t characterize his playing as out of time, but it’s def loose and loopy and not very technically difficult. I love the playing on the first few Sabbath albums too.

Bill Berry, "Losing My Religion"

― pplains, Monday, June 14, 2021 9:35 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

(sorry/not sorry.)

― pplains, Monday, June 14, 2021 9:35 PM (three days ago) bookmarkflaglink

I think gygax! got to this first, but I still lol'd.

I mean, his post was from 17 years ago, but you're right.

Guess that makes me ...

...Automatic for the People

This thread makes me realise I don’t know what ‘out of time drumming’ means.

Possessed 'Seven Churches' LP is renowned in metal for having some really sloppy drumming but still being highly regarded. The first track 'The Exorcist' seems to come loose at every fill.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-YfOGtXz4wg

haha when I heard the songs live (with basically all diff band members from that album other than Becerra" I almost didn't recognize them cos the drumming was proper.

Ouch! Mike Sus' ears will be burning ( in hell!)

Really love the Japanese band Citrus, but their drummer...oof.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9XRgHlxVAWA

There are many recordings when a drummer's clock is right on point, but the bassist or rhythm players are not so great at staying on top of the beat which makes the drums sound like they're falling out of time.

There are also many instances when it's pretty obvious that a drummer is struggling while playing to a click, when they'll suddenly start playing a little slower after a bunch of 16th fills.

XP - OL great call! Have you seen this?

https://neojaponisme.com/2008/05/21/podcast-on-citrus-and-emori-takeaki/

when i opened this thread i thought it was going to be about drumming in the style of greg saunier (deerhoof) or questlove on d'angelo albums, for example

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D22mR8pBZek

FFS that didn't work as expected, ah well, starts at 45'01"

the d'angelo beats are examples of what jordan was talking about upthread, re: purposefully playing on and off and around the quarter note in order to give it a swing or a stutter. d'angelo rules because he thinks like a drummer - on black messiah there are some songs where the drums are just slightly "off", but also there are songs where the drums are "right" and the bass is behind or ahead. his whole band grooves like hell; they all do that

greg saunier's "out of time" is very very different. sometimes he goes on a journey and come back right in time, but other times he completely does not, and it is glorious. he is still my favorite drummer

xp

there are lots of examples here, but like 2 minutes into this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i66_U30MoBE

Are you really out of time if you’re consciously out of time 🤔

Not actually out of time but:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=URCXvz-xQTw

Long version:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hOhKUI0mB8

i suppose it should be noted that playing out of time like that at any sort of length requires the band to be in on it too, heh

Minor threat ? A given for the genre?

XP - OL great call! Have you seen this?

https://neojaponisme.com/2008/05/21/podcast-on-citrus-and-emori-takeaki/

― Maresn3st, Friday, June 18, 2021 11:49 AM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

Oooooh, thanks for that, looks right up my alley!

someone who can do bpm research effectively: in "untitled (how does it feel)", is questlove varying his tempo, or is he playing it straight? he's a bit ahead of the rest of the band/vox, and it's hard to tell what causes it (and it rules)

I'm pretty certain the Questlove is right on the click, and the tempo at the beginning and the end are exactly the same. I think what creates the illusion is that the other instruments are super laid back behind him, especially in the first half.

it's like that on 'Africa', too. I always wonder if they do some editing after the fact to shift back the rest of the band just a tick or 2 more

I wouldn't be surprised...I know they worked on actually playing like that a lot, but I've also heard stories of endless Pro Tools nudging to get the perfect wrong/right groove.

“Hey nineteen” has that feel too

Re: Questlove on Black Messiah, I'm not sure how else they could achieve that effect besides recording a separate take of isolated bass delay and then removing the original.

And it sounds like the vocals are delayed the same amount, so they probably did the same thing with the vocal tracks. I'm guessing but it seems right.

I think it was a lot of both...playing really behind the beat, which those guys can totally do live, and some additional waveform moving to make it extra uncanny.

Run dmc - it’s tricky

I remember reading (in Whiney's book?) that since the samples on those early PE albums were limited to something like 8 seconds, a lot of the tracks feature the Bomb Squad triggering the samples in real time, and that human factor nudges a lot of the songs in and out of perfect quantized sound, with cool results. The thing about any band that plays well together is that the time doesn't have to be absolutely perfect, per se, since a good band can adjust on the fly to make just about about anything sound good. Like, I doubt Fugazi is ever perfectly in time, but that band is about as tight as it gets. For that matter, being perfectly in time ironically is not always ideal. I watched one of those Rick Beato videos about why so much pop music grates on old people, and one answer is that everything is perfectly pegged down to a grid, and our ears sometimes bristle at hearing something so unnaturally perfect.

Tl/dr

PE. Fugazi. Grid. Rick Beato.

so you think my drumming's out of time?
it don't make me money

You’re a drummer ?

Listening to Joy of a Toy today and Robert Wyatt's drumming on Song For Insane Times is pretty wayward, especially at the start.

I can't help but notice two bad edits in the Stranglers' Walk on By at 1:31 and 3:27. They give the false impression of sloppy playing particularly from JB.

Stan Lynch’s unpredictable drumming on the early Tom Petty albums are easily among the most exciting parts of them and a lot was lost when management/Jeff Lynne/Petty booted him from the band.

"Walk a Thin Line" by Fleetwood Mac. Lindsey played drums on it.

I've always thought the drum part in "Dreams" was odd (or hard to follow), but it's an eight-bar loop.

Sepultura - "Morbid Visions"

I saw the pseudo-Shaggs in 2016 or so opening for Neutral Milk Hotel, scared my friends how excited I was about that. But I remember thinking it was kind of amazing "normal" musicians could learn to play in the polynontime the real sisters played in naturally. About as amazing to me as that humans can play "Piano Phase" live.

At one of the Jandek shows in LA, the Rep got on the drums and I was kinda stunned at how distinct his drumming is and how resistant to change it is even after 30 years. Years of low-fi Staring At The Cellophane and here it is right in front of you

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7jvYSmoh7M

lol at thread pun.

You want out of time, I was learning how to play "Everybody's Got Something to Hide Except for Me and My Monkey" on guitar, and there's a blatant cut/edit at the beginning that shifts Ringo's timing into something literally impossible to exactly replicate. Around the 8 second mark:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eyV3zCq1OHM

Lol yeah, the edit makes the last bar of the intro 7/8, and then going into a slightly different tempo. Like, it's possible to play that live, but there's no reason to.

I'm not sure! Like, as a drummer, maybe, but as a band it might be too hard to keep together. Same with, say, "Black Dog," which really can't be played as recorded, not easily. Or, I guess, as you say, reasonably, lol.

huh?

Yeah I don't really understand that one either (Black Dog).

I just meant that the musical payoff to recreate that spliced in intro would be beside the point, but plenty of prog/math/metal/jazz etc bands can pull off a group tempo shift. My band does it live when transitioning between tunes sometimes (it's not always pretty, but we have a sense memory for the general range of a given groove, and ideally can pull something together between beats 1 & 2, at least 2 & 3).

sorry. i was referring to "everybody..." -- it's not out of time. the first kick you hear is the 1 and all the snare hits are on the & of 2

Ohhh