[Music] so the first stop on our journey through the evolution of drumming and the drum set is 1865 now why this particular date 1865 well first of all for those of you who know your history 1865 was the year that the American Civil War ended and that meant that African slaves and their descendants were free and could start to participate much more in American society and contribute more to American music and as we see as we go through this whole series uh African-Americans have contributed a tremendous amount to the drum set and to the way that we play it so what else was happening in 1865 well for the first time drummers were starting to experiment with putting together more than one instrument in other words prior to this time you had like marching band type of a scenario or maybe classical music and in those instances a drummer would maybe play a bass drum or they play a scenar drummer they play symbols well around this time period you had drummers in theaters and Stage shows and and and Vaudeville type scenarios so drummers started thinking well how you know how can we have one guy do the job of many and so this is a very interesting um time period and that's why we're beginning here so what was the most popular kind of music that was happening in America in 1865 well as we said earlier it was actually marching band music because there was no Jazz there was no rock you know there was no Blues to speak of this was before all that time so uh you had marching bands and uh the feel marching feel involved rudiments it involved bassum kind of on one and three right boom chick boom chick one two three four so you had kind of this boom chick boom chick thing going on so the drummers that were taking this idea of playing more than one instrument at once were taking this concept of of of marching and started playing a bass drum and a snare drum together at the same time but without a pedal and they developed a really interesting technique called double drumming [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] you'll notice that the style that I used in playing that little demonstration had what we call a two feel where the bass drum comes on Beats one and three one two 3 four boom chick boom chick boom so it's very downbeat heavy and you know it's music that's design designed to help large groups of soldiers March down a field from one end to the other so it's very simple and straightforward and as we move more towards the next segment we're going to get into which is rag time music this kind of basic March idea starts to become syncopated starts to swing a little more starts to dance a little more and starts to move more towards dance music the next stop on our journey through the evolution of the drum set is 1890 now in 1890 there was a really interesting new kind of music that was coming up that was kind of taking America by storm and that music was called rag time rag time okay and what was cool about rag time that it had this kind of new feel to it this sort of syncopated feel that came from African-American piano players and banjo players and guitar players and had this cool kind of this sort of thing we call syncopation and that made people dance made them go crazy they love to dance to it so Ragtime comes up and it becomes really popular in the 1890s and by the turn of the century into the 20th century it becomes probably the most popular kind of music in America so how were drummers involved with rag time well interestingly we talked about in the previous segment that you know drummers were still really in a kind of a marching scenario playing a lot of rudiments uh and remember the drum set at this time really didn't isn't a drum set that we had today we didn't have ride symbols we didn't have crash symbols we didn't have uh big tunable TomTom we didn't have a a lot of fancy Hardware so drummers really had very little to work with to create the rhythms that they were going to create behind Ragtime but one of the fun things that started to happen was that drummers began to improvise more so even though you hear the sound of rudiments now drummers are kind of getting crazy with it and they were utilizing them all over the place and and and improvising with them with this cool new sense of Swing another interesting thing that was happening around 1890 was that tons and tons of immigrants were flowing into America from all different parts of the world many different countries many different regions so you had Asians coming you had people coming from turkey and Greece you had people coming from from Europe uh and all of these different people were bringing their ethnic instruments with them they were bringing their uh drum making technology their symbol making technology uh and as a result of that drummers that were here in America who were doing this rag time drumming and and playing these different theater shows and uh you know these new kinds of music that were happening started to borrow these ethnic immigrant instruments and add them on to the very basic drum set which we had said basically just consisted of marching instruments bass drum snare drum and a symbol so they started putting all that together and and you get this cool new sound and feel called rag time [Music] [Music] [Music] so all these little devices these little Contraptions that the Immigrant groups were bringing with them to America and that drummers were borrowing just be started to become part of the very earliest drum sets and of course eventually this term Contraption was shortened down to traps so literally drummers during the last couple decades of the 1900s and the first few Decades of the 1900s right on up to about 1930 were called trap drummers that's actually the way we we we didn't call it a drum set we call it we call it a trap trap set and they were called trap drummer the next stop in our journey through the evolution of the drum set and drum set playing is 1909 and this date is super important for all us drummers today because it was the date that the lewick family patented their famous bass drum pedal design now we'll get to this pedal in a second second um but certainly pedals had been around for a while I've seen a photo from 1840 that showed a very crude operated foot device but probably by 1870 uh in the 1870s uh it was standard for drummers to use what was called an overhang pedal and this was a real interesting device it was also fairly primitive in that it actually attached to the top of the bass drum and went over the top and then this spring thing came down and had this footboard and you'd hit the footboard and this little beat thing that was attached to the spring would whap go in and hit the drum now the overhang pedal design was really clunky it was hard to get control over it it was hard to play it quickly and if you remember we talked about double drumming most drummers in the 1870s actually preferred to do double drumming without any pedal at all as a way to play multiple drums rather than use one of these overhang pedals because they were so clumsy and hard to to use so this this is a lwig pedal this one is actually a little bit later this one's from 1924 but it's very similar to the to the ear I pedals and what always blows me away we think oh gosh 1909 you know that's over a hundred years ago um obviously you know what we have today is so much better than what those guys came up with back then but in reality we're still using the exact same pedal for the most part that they were using over 100 years ago that's how durable and wellth thought out this design was and as you could see you basically have a spring an adjustable spring you have kind of a classic footboard and uh that just does the same pulls it down you have a a way to attach it to the uh hoop of your bass drum and tighten it down and indeed you even have two different adjustments there just like you do on most uh modern pedals so this guy you know has been around for a long time now couple of the things that you know again we think we're so Advanced today well these guys had a lot of real cool advancements going on as well uh one of those is that U early pedals often actually had a symbol uh attached to the bass drum and they would have a little thing coming out of here this one has a an attachment for it that you can see here a little clanger so when you press down on the footboard this little clanger would come up and hit the symbol that was attached to the batter head of your bass drum so when the bass drum hit Wham it would it would uh get that clanging effect the other thing you'll notice about this pedal that's a little different is this beater ball um now we've probably seen felt beers before but back in the day they really had uh larger beaters uh and again this is because the base of the time were much larger they were often 26 28 30 even sometimes up to 40 in in diameter so they were huge so the beaters really still resemble a marching band bass drum beater which is a lot you know tends to be a lot puffier and thicker and where it's wearing away you could see it's a a like a a lamb skin under here so this is a lamb's will beater the other thing that's so cool about this petal that we don't really think about today is that your average working drummer of the time didn't have a car not everybody had a car in those times so they had to use public transportation to get to their gigs which means they had to carry the entire drum set on their back cuz whatever you could fit on the street car was all you were allowed to carry uh so this pedal and is very very cool because we can do this take that out take this out pull this out and now your pedal's broken down and you could just tuck it in Your Overcoat pocket take it to work so there you go the bass drum pedal pretty cool I'm holding in my hand something that probably most of you out there are very familiar with these are a set of brushes of course and brush is a real interesting story and that's our next stop on our journey through the evolution of the drum set the date is 1912 and 1912 is a year that believe it or not we could find patents for fly swatters that that had been registered okay now you're thinking fly swatters what does that have to do with drumming well interestingly the need for brushes arose because drummers were having a lot of problems with always playing so loud and overshadowing the other instruments you have to remember in this early part of the 20th century we didn't have big PA systems we didn't have Amplified guitars didn't have mics to put on things but drums were already the same sizes that we have today in fact the base drums tended to be even bigger than they are today so drummers could still make the same amount of noise but they were going up against acous instruments so drummers started looking around for stuff that was out there that they could use to play more quietly and one of the things they came up with were these fly swatters so you have to remember this is the age before plastic so we think of a fly swatter today we think about you know plastic spatula looking thing but fly swatters on this day actually were metal bristles like this and they actually created some that were of the telescoping variety so you'd preserve your little bristle and a drummer picked this up one day and said man I could play you know my little r m al stuff that I've been doing my rag time drumming my early Jazz drumming but use these fly swatters and so thus begins brushes and once they became more popular with drummers well then some of the companies that were manufacturing drum stuff said well hey we'll we'll actually start manufacturing these and lo and behold the name went from fliwers to brushes but for many many years drummers continued to refer to their brushes as fly spatters when drummers first started using brushes back back in the 1920s they didn't use them the way we did today they really used them as a quieter alternative to sticks so you know whereas you had your sort of rudimental sound they would kind of imitate that with the brushes kind of like [Music] this all right as we move into the 1920s and into the 1930s they discovered that there was a lot of neat effects that you could get with the brushes and part of it was about imitating dancers or uh imitating sandpaper uh coming up with sort of different ways to use them so then they started to add more effects where they would drag the brush across the head for example right so we get into that kind of a Vibe uh and of course by the time we get into 19 30s uh which we'll be talking about a couple more segments down the road uh they really start integrating the brushes and the brushes really take on instead of just being an imitation of the sticks they really take on their own uh their own Vibe and it really becomes an art form brush playing [Music] [Music] [Music] so our next stop in the evolution of drum set and drum set playing is the year 1917 now this was the year that a band from New Orleans called the original dixyland JZ band went up to New York City and made some recordings that became huge hits all over the country and the style that they were playing was a style from New Orleans and it sort of kicked off uh what we call jazz music it was really the first Jazz official Jazz recordings so Jazz if you know your history at all is a style that does indeed come from New Orleans and there was a lot of bands in New Orleans at the time that were making this kind of music and it was kind of cool because a lot of the things that we've talked about so far uh in our in our discussion of at various points along the way here in our journey are now coming together so from a drumming perspective uh you have guys like baby dods and zudy Singleton uh Ray beduk uh a guy named Tony sparbar who was the drummer in the original dixyland jazz band and what they're doing is taking this this idea of marching right that we talked about but now combining your bass drum and your snare drum and some of these what we called traps from these different um immigrant groups that were coming in little symbols little tom-toms wood blocks cowbells and they started bringing all that together with this rudimental style of playing and combining it with rag time which had been popular for a couple of decades now which was more syncopated and more swinging so now drumming really starts to move away from the rudimental thing and kind of turn into its its own little its own little thing Jazz drumming style uh so that's that's all happening around this time period now our drum set has grown just a little bit to add some of these elements known as traps and uh we could Point some of them out certainly uh woodlock which originated uh actually in China and Korea cowbell which uh is used in a lot of cultures um this is a Turkish type of a symbol It's actually an old zilon symbol and the zilon family came to the states uh in the early uh 20th century so they were one of those immigrant groups so this is an early example of their symbol and we have a Chinese symbol here actually made in China it's a newer one it's not a vintage one but uh this is you know typical of what Chinese symbols still look like today China symbols there got that inside out garbage can look so the early drum set players from New Orleans would incorporate all of these kind of elements into what they were playing now how did they play well they took a lot of those rudiments and they started swinging them and maybe before you'd have a nice clean open roll sh up would now become that J up J up so it become more of a press roll and that sort of was more swinging and again made people want to dance so we still have our two F kind of military thing going on we don't have any high hats yet or big Toms or ride or crash symbols but we've got these smaller kind of noise making effects and drummers would start to play fills on these they were called fill-ins so here's a little demonstration of what New Orleans drumming might might have sounded like back at the time [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so far in this series we've we've span quite a few decades now looking at all kinds of different stuff about the evolution of the drum set we've looked at Double drumming marching drumming Ragtime music um traps and early Jazz New Orleans Jazz so now we're moving forward to 1919 just on the cusp of the 1920s and as most of you know the 1920s are often known as The Roaring 20s right so what was going on that gave them this name and how does that relate to this music we're talking about and to the drums well in 1919 the US Congress passed a law called prohibition which meant that it prohibited people from manufacturing and transporting alcohol alcohol for drinking because there was a lot of moralistic complaints that drinking was evil and let's get rid of this evil Scourge on society but usually what happens when you tell someone that they can't do something the first thing they're going to do is run right out and do as much of that as they can right so all of a sudden drinking becomes the cool thing to do and but because it's illegal it kind of goes underground and so the 1920s is called the Jazz Age or the Roaring 20s because everyone decided to go crazy and party it up and because drinking was illegal you had the rise in cities like Chicago but many other cities of uh as well of gangsters you know you hear of Al Capone and and guys like that and the reason they came to prominence and Power is because they were manufacturing and bootlegging liquor illegally and places where people would go to drink liquor were called Speak Easy A lot of times these were underground establishments you had to have the password to get in and when you'd go in you could drink and so what kind of music are you going to have at these places well you're going to have jazz music because jazz music was also underground illegal it had been you know created um and uh put forward it was an African-American style and of course we lived in a very segregated Nation at that time and and again it was not upstanding to uh enjoy African-American music so if you went to one of these speak easys in the 20s you'd see African-American Jazz being played you drink illegal liquor it was very exciting and of course great dancing you know and Jazz was great music to dance to in this time period the jazz is starting to evolve now it's been around for maybe 10 years and so the bands are getting a little more sophisticated we're adding more horns we're building bigger arrangements and we start heading towards what was going to be called the big band so check it out here's a little bit more about what 1920s Chicago style jazz is all about [Music] so in both the New Orleans demonstration that I did in the previous segment and this Chicago demonstration that you just saw uh you might notice that the way that I'm playing the Phils is a little different than how we play Phils today right the way we play Phils today generally we come down the TomTom crash so we crash on beat one at the beginning of the following phrase but the way I was playing here we crashed on beat four so I'd be playing along 1 2 3 4 1 2 3 4 and this is the way that Phils were played and ended back in this early period in fact drummers ended their fills on Beat 4 all the way until we get into the 1950s believe it or not and the reason for this was that uh you know you have to remember that drums were very loud the rest of the band was soft and acoustic and if a drummer crashed on beat one it was considered rude as if he were stepping on the other instruments in the band so that's why this sort of idea of crashing on Beat 4 came from and it also comes from a New Orleans syncopated idea which so there was a stress on beat four there so as a result of those two kind of combination of ideas drummers always played their crashes on Beat 4 in our last segment we were talking about the 1920s The Roaring 20s and how Jazz had kind of really evolved as more of a a a popular art form but it was happening with the gangsters and the speak EES and all that kind of thing so that's in terms of drummers playing jazz music but just like today here in the 21st century uh drummers have a lot of different things that they can do you know so a lot of us out here are what we call freelance drummers and we maybe one day we're playing a show and the next day we're playing a concert and the next day we're doing a theater thing and the next day we're playing in a club the next day we're playing for dancers so there's a lot of different things that you could do and drummers back then had the same uh sort of uh U roles they they would take on many different roles so we haven't really talked too much about this but one of one of the really most important roles of a drummer in the 1920s was as what they call a Foley artist today meaning a sound effects person and you have to remember this was back at a time period when um you didn't have you know you had radio at this point but you didn't have TV you certainly didn't have computers and you had movies but the movies were silent movies the technology wasn't there yet to have s a soundtrack go along with the movie so when a movie would come to a theater uh either they would have a piano player or in some of the bigger cities and as the 1920s progressed and things got more sophisticated they would have an entire Orchestra backing up a silent movie and it fell to the drummer in the band or drumers sometimes there' be several of them to provide all the sound effects so if there was a gunshot if there was a plane flying overhead if a baby was crying if there was a a cow mooing or a bird chirping or a train coming into the station or horses galloping or somebody shooting somebody or somebody bending over their pants ripping well the drummer was responsible for all of this and this got to be pretty sophisticated uh and you could see sheet music from the period and there would be all kinds of cues for what instrument a drummer had to play and so like today drummers had had to you know have pretty large setups in these theater circumstances or if it was a a radio show they were you know somebody was listening the drummer was providing all of this filler this background sound effects to bring the the the radio production to life so what you're about to see next is something that probably you're not going to see anywhere today this is the one and only place to check this out and it's a demonstration done by William F Ludwig III who is the grandson of the founder of the Ludwig Drum Company the original William F lwig now back in we already talked about in an earlier segment that William F Ludwig and his brother were the ones that invented the bass drum pedal design that we still use today and of course we all know that they also created the lwig drum company but prior to getting into that William F lewig was a champion rudimental drummer and he toured all over the country and was was one of the most important theater drummers in the Chicago area so his grandson William F lewick III has inherited all of his grandfather's traps and noise makers and he's going to do a demonstration for you right now of what it was like for a trap drummer either in a silent movie or a stage show or a radio show back in the 1920s my grandfather and his brother uh William F lwig Senor and Theobald lwig started out the Drum Company by having a a actual Drum Shop that they would do repairs and help people tune their drums and keep them uh operating properly as time went on people would say come to them with certain needs and say I need this sound or I need this drum to do this or this piece of equipment and so they became uh inventors of sound effects which we have here today in those days before sound the drummers were behind the screen watching the movie and doing the various sound effects along with the movie to make it more entertaining for the audience one of our uh items that we have is the gunshot sound effect and this actually holds 22 caliber blank shells and then you close this down have it on the table and strike it with a hammer or drumstick or whatever you have handy the train effect is really interesting because it's so simple but effective and then they even added this on as a separate item you could get it with or without the Bell which I thought was pretty interesting but this has a series of door springs inside this is looks like it was some kind of a file of some sort that they just saw it and picked it up and said let's try that and it worked and that's the way he did most everything that just slides in there and then you go if you're starting the train is just starting out let's say [Music] and you can increase the volume speed to really give the true effect of a train departing and uh they also had to build items that could be transported because these these percussionists were going from theater to theater it wasn't always the same theater different train whistle a boat whistle so in the movie script we say the sheriff rode into town and these are the horses hoofs that create that sound effect and also uh we say that the sheriff when he arrived in town went by the uh black Smith uh shop where he was shoo a horse [Music] and then he goes by the schoolhouse and here's the Bell [Music] tolling then also as the script continues with the Clancy Brothers getting off the train when the train stops uh a dog nervously Barks in the distance might have been a little ill at the time but nevertheless it's a dog and we also have another sound effect that I don't have with me that's a large version of this it's about this big round it's on the floor and you pull the uh cloth up on that and it's a lion roar so it's the same concept just a little deeper this is just a hollow metal cylinder with a type of head on it and you just slide a cloth over the string along those lines of the whistles we also have the basic siren and duck call which has been around forever but these are all the tools of the trade of the percussionist in the silent movie era and this rather oddl looking item is a cuckoo clock [Music] which always comes in handy and then of course the Cricut sound so you may be asking yourself when did movies with sound first start well the first what we call Takis uh were released in about 1927 and although this was pretty cool they put sound with film For the First Time by 1930 all movies pretty much were coming out had sound and the silent movie era was was pretty much over in a very short period of time and the downside of that was that literally thousands tens of thousands of drummers were put out of work overnight drummers who had specialized in doing all these sound effects and and Foley effects and if you think about it for those of us who remember back in the 1980s when drum machines first came in you know everybody was it's a very similar kind of a thing everybody was panicked oh this is it the drummers are done you know we'll be replaced by machines that was kind of what was happening back around 1927 but as you can see drummers didn't go away and here we are in the 21st century we're still around we're still playing drums we're still evolving with all the technological changes and musical changes that happen around us so it's a good lesson to look back at your history and see that we've had to face these things before new technology what are we going to do boom we go this way so here we are we're still here baby next stop on our journey through the evolution of drumming and the drum set is 1929 now this is a momentous year uh not just for drumming but for the whole world and why because you have the fabled stock market crash of 1929 that plunged the world into a global depression okay and tough times for everybody a lot of people lost their jobs their homes their farms uh it was it was a a really terrible time one of the things that helped people to get through these rough years of the Depression was jazz music and as we've talked about in some of the earlier segments um we mentioned that jazz which had started as kind of a small group phenomenon in New Orleans uh progressed in in the 1920s really the band started to become larger and more sophisticated and as we get into the 1930s and we really head towards the mid-30s uh jazz is now um America's most popular form of Music it went from being a real underground thing associated with mobsters and speak EES and um you know was African-American in origin but now it's it's really being embraced um throughout the the country and the bands have become big enough that in the 1930s the big band emerges as the vehicle that delivers Jazz okay now a lot of times we think about jazz as you know uh something that's more affiliated with maybe John colr or Charlie Parker or Whit marcelis something that's not dance music but at this time Jazz was pop music it was dance music it was the thing that people would go out to dance to on uh on a on a Friday night uh so let's talk a little bit about uh the big bands and the role they served well the big bands were there for people that were sort of you know the whole world being very depressed at this time period they made people feel good it was was a lot of musicians 17 18 musicians pumping out this wall of sound and really um made people happy made people want to dance so the other reason that the big band succeeded in the 1930s was with the popularity of radio and of course radio at this time was now commonplace enough that most homes could have a radio or you could go to an establishment and listen to the radio so uh you know every night Saturday night 9:15 to 9:30 you'd hear the Benny Goodman Orchestra uh play their radio program from some Hotel in New York City and you'd wait and you'd listen you know so starting in the mid 19 1930s we really get what's now called the big band era and this would dominate the American Musical landscape for the next 10 years if you notice since the last segment our kit has grown a little bit more and here in the 1930s some other elements were added we still have some elements of the old kit with the bell in the block here um we still have your kick and snare but now we've added some more stuff uh we've got Toms now which uh we'll talk about when we talk about Je Kupa uh we also have uh still some very small symbols we don't have big crash symbols yet because if we had a huge crash we'd knock out the other instruments uh and then we have a Chinese symbol over here and maybe the Chinese symbols of the period got a little bit bigger as well um the the main instrument though that's different on this kit now is we have this guy right here the high hat high hat makes its first appearance around 1930 and uh the high hat really became the primary timekeeper for drummers during the big band era um because earlier they had one of the things they had done when they were playing their you know New Orleans or Chicago Fields they would choke a [Music] symbol and and so that was one way of keeping time versus playing a press role or playing on the rims or playing on your wood block um but they this was really rather cumbersome because you had to use two hands right so um they also had the idea well let's come up with a with a foot symbol that can go against the bass so they created something called a snowshoe symbol which is a little foot operated symbol that sat on the floor and now you could do [Music] this so you could create a chick for every boom that you had boom chick boom chick boom chick so finally at the end of the 20s they said well why don't we take these and put them all together and they had some different uh they had what were called hand sock symbols that you were like a little high have that you held in your hand and all these sort of different variations but this is what they ended up coming up with and um the reason it's called a high hat is because you had another the the the early version of this sat on the floor and it was called a low boy so the low boy uh gave way to the high hat so now you could play the symbol with your stick and you could close it with your foot all at once and this was a revelation and it really became the primary timekeeper during the swing era the other major change that you see in drum set playing during the big band era is the switch over from the two feet de remember at the very beginning of our series we talked about how drum set plane was based on marching so you had this very heavy boom boom boom boom one two three four one two three one right so the kick was always 1 three one three so one of the big advancements in playing during the 1930s during the swing era was this gradual Evolution to the idea of playing always for to their bar on the bassum so now you get this high hat going and you get this four Toth bar bassum you get this very nice [Music] sound okay so let's check out a little bit of Swing style playing right now [Music] oh [Music] [Music] [Music] in our last segment we focused on the big band and talked about how in the mid1 1930s the big band kind of rose to prominence as the most dominant kind of pop music sound in the country and of course drummers at that time were just starting to bring in the high hat this was a new instrument for the 1930s and a new sound a new way of playing the drum set and we can't really talk about the big band era unless we talk about Jean Kupa and maybe some of you out there have heard of Jee Kupa but he's probably one of the most important names in drumming period that we could talk about out of anybody because without Jean Kupa we really wouldn't have the drum stars of today that we do we may not have the drum soloing today that we normally have come come to expect and CH Kupa really was the first uh true star of the drums there had been drummers before him that had been well known or that were maybe had done some some flashy kind of soloy stuff but Jee Kupa really was the guy that took the drummer from being the timee keeper in the back of the band and brought him forward so that he was as much a part of the band or she I should say as much a part of the band as anybody else as every other instrument and kupo was a he was a wild flashy player a lot of energy his hair flying you know and he was very exciting to watch but kupo was important not just because he was a well-known drummer and helped out the role of the drummer he was important for many different reasons now prior to this time if we go back to their early drum sets the tom-toms they had really were still almost like ethnic Chinese instruments which really was where the TomTom comes from and the heads were tacked on the drums tended to be small um and you couldn't really tune it like you could tune a snare drum one of the things that Kupa did when it comes to the drum set was that he went to his company that he endorsed the slingerland drum company and he said you know now that I'm doing this stuff in the big bands and I'm we're able to play out more play a little louder as drummers um I want to be able to to take the TomTom that we had have and and be able to tune them separately so the the idea of a dual tension TomTom was really brought out by Jean Kupa and once he started to use it with his big Mega hit Sing Sing Sing of course every other band followed suit and pretty soon every big band had to have a star drummer so it's at this time period where guys like chick Webb emerged and he actually came a little bit before Jean Kupa was an influence on Kupa uh of course Buddy Rich emerges playing with first the Harry James band then the Tommy dorsy Orchestra uh and of course Joe Jones Who was the first great drum star with count bassy's band and each one of these guys brought their own personality to the drum set and to this new kind of bigger beefier more solid drum set that allowed drummers to really step up and show off what they could do as we mentioned Jee kupo was really responsible for bringing the modern TomTom into the drum set and really using it a lot as kind of a feature instrument and playing a lot on it so I'm going to play a little je Kupa style TomTom feature for you guys right now to kind of give you an idea of what what that was all about [Music] [Music] so the next stop on our journey through the evolution of the drum set drumset history drum set playing is the year 1941 now in our previous segment we talked a lot about the big bands swing drumming we talked about Jean Kupa we talked about what a drummer played how the high hat was coming in uh and this idea that jazz music was dance music and that's why it was the most popular music in the country because everyone could go out and dance to a big band but as we move into the 1940s a couple different things start to happen uh first of all a lot of jazz musicians particularly African-American Jazz musicians kind of are saying there's got to be more to life than just playing for dancers all the time you know it wasn't necessarily super satisfying for the musicians they wanted to be able to play out and be more experimental and really take Jazz forward and if they were always having to play a very Solid Dance beat that was that was kind of a tough deal so a new style emerged in Harlem uh in the early' 40s called bbop bbop was a style that was very based very much based on improvisation and they would take um they would take an an old standard and kind of rewrite the melody in a way that was much more complex so how did the drummers fit into this bbop equation well for one thing uh you had drummers like Max Roach and Kenny Clark who were sort of two of the biggest names in early bbop drumming and they both had been swing drummers but you know they were kind of sick of again sort of this big huge bass drum remember we still had large marching siiz bass drums at this time uh and it was hard you know you just had this big booming sound underneath so they said well let's let's get a real small bass drum happening and at the same time let's move away from p p pom this bass drum thing and put our time maybe even off the high hat and put it up on a new kind of a symbol remember the original symbols were Chinese or Turkish in origin and they were they were quite small and just used for kind of little splashing and crashing but now they said well what if we made a much larger symbol and we kept time on that symbol and so suddenly the whole feel moves away from this very bass drum heavy high hat kind of low four on the floor D D D D kind of thing up to now this very light symbol that just sort of floats on top of the time this allowed drummers like Max Roach and clenny Kenny Clark to be more melodic in other words they could be listening to these new complex bbop Melodies that were being played by the sax players or the guitar players or the piano players and they could actually play those Melodies themselves using the very small kick drums and the snare drum to to actually play the melodic lines so this is what the sound of bbop was and as we move into the 40s and the 50s now the idea of what jazz music is becomes more allied with bbop and bbop moves away from being a dance music and really becomes its own art [Music] form so the best way to explain how bbop works is to actually go back to the swing era and maybe show you how things work then and then update them on a bbop type of a drum kit so we're back here on our swing era kit we still have our bigger bass drum are smaller symbols and the way that bbop worked is it would take often take a tune a classic tune and they would sort of rewrite the melody and make it more complex uh rhythmically more complex melodically um and uh and the drummers would play more of that Melody instead of just playing the time let's take as an example straight nochaser the thonus monk song you know it's a very familiar Melody that a lot of you probably know and the melody goes one two 3 [Music] four right so if I was to play that in a swing style it would kind of sound like this one two one [Music] okay so still sticking with kind of a a four on the floor feel underneath for the dance feel and we're catching a little bit of the melody but not so much so now voila we've magically changed drum kits and uh we have more of a bbop kind of a drum kit uh again notice now we've gone down from a 22 to a 20in diameter um our ride symbols are bigger this is a 20in ride and a 22 an 18inch that could be used as a ride or a crash and um we got a tight cranked up snare drum so now I'm going to play the same straight no Tracer Melody for you but in more of a Bop scenario so here we go on that one two uh [Music] so now let's move to the end of the 1940s and the next date on our journey through the evolution of the drum set and drumming is 1948 in our last segment we talked about a style called bbop and bbop was was kind of a reaction against the Big B music where musicians Jazz musicians wanted to take Jazz and make it much more of an art form uh that wasn't about dance music it was more about really exploring the outer edges and the boundaries of what you could do with jazz music so that was cool but it didn't really appeal to the average person that still wanted to go out and go dancing on a Friday night so the kind of music that evolved also from the big band era but that kept the the dance uh of the big bands was this style called rhythm and blues and it was also an African-American style like bbop it evolved uh as something that African African-American musicians did um within their Community for other African-Americans who by the way had started to benefit after World War II and could now afford to buy their own records their own style and so became a demographic so uh rythm and blues starts to emerge now rhythm and blues was similar to big band music in that you still had a horn section although it was now a smaller horn section and you still had uh this kind of dancable four on- the floor feel well when people went out to dance on that Friday night they still wanted to hear that big sound of the big band but now the band was a lot smaller and so you had to figure out ways to fill up the sound so one of the ways they did this was the electric guitar which started to really come into prominence in the 1940s because now guitar player could turn up by the end of the 40s the electric Bas shows up so you could turn the Bas up now so for the first time ever drummers could really start to lay in and they could start to play heavier grooves so the the two things that drummers did uh in creating heavier grooves first was to play a shuffle okay so the shuffle feel that idea of instead of just a ding which was kind of how Jazz Time Field had been prior to this time well now they could take that whole Shuffle field that da da D D D D D and really start to express that in a much heavier way and by the time we get to 1948 and this song Good rocking tonight the BackBeat two and four really becomes accentuated so you have this now today when we sit down to play a Groove a lot of the times in in many styles of music popular music whether it's rock or Funk or hip hop or gospel or Soul country music any of these Styles you automatically play a really heavy two and four on your snare drum right a BackBeat well believe it or not that idea of a BackBeat all the way through a song really didn't happen until 1948 and that's really the first time you start hearing whether it's heavy hand claps or a BackBeat this song Good rocking tonight is one of the first songs that has that heavy thing all the way through from start to finish now prior to this time uh it really would have been difficult for a drummer to play a BackBeat from start to finish because uh technology was such that he would have drowned out all the other instruments and we talked about that in an earlier segment in this series but now uh with the electric guitar the electric bass technology and the recording studios better you start to have some microphones for the other instruments now a drummer can really lay in and so uh good rocking tonight was one of the first tracks where this heavy BackBeat idea with heavy hand claps going on two and four which came out of the The Gospel Church all comes together and amazingly it's a huge hit in fact this song this song stayed on the charts for six months it was that popular uh all big reason why was because of this heavy BackBeat going and guess what people love to dance to it so good rocking tonight 1948 it's a major step forward for the groove in terms of rhythm and blues shuffles and back Beats [Music] ah [Music] our swing kit has now morphed into bbop siiz ride symbol and that size ride symbol once that took over then they started using that in pretty much all styles of music because they realized well now you had the option to play your high hat or you had the option to play on your ride symbol as timekeepers they were both valid so we got our big time uh symbol here and we have kind of the beginnings of what was going to become a crash symbol you know guys would use a couple different size rides um and then that eventually morphed into an official symbol that was called a crash that was specifically to be crashed uh so in rhythm of Blues of course we said the shuffle is the bread and butter Groove and the shuffle is versus this kind of an idea which was sort of the staple of the Jazz call it the Jazz ride pattern now this was the more of the minent idea in a rhythm of blue setting okay so I'm going to play a short demonstration of shuffles and I'm going to play first some shuffles without a BackBeat and then I'm going to add the back beat because remember we said the back beat kind of came in at the very end of the 40s and into the 50s so here we go [Music] [Music] [Music] now we're up to the year 1952 and this is an important year because it really coalesces the the dawn of a new phenomenon a new way of playing the drums and that involves double base now many of us here in the 21st century think that the double Bas phenomenon is like a new thing that goes along with music that's currently contemporary today you know heavy rock metal uh but actually double base has a really long and interesting history and that history really can be attributed to the legendary drummer Lou bellson now Lou bellson was a a swing era drummer he was a big band drummer started his career uh in the late 1930s with the Benny Goodman Orchestra as a young man he was the winner of the Jean Kupa drum contest remember we talked about Jean Kupa earlier Kupa actually sponsored a nationwide drum contest this is years and years before certain music stores sponsor their big Nationwide drum offs today uh same idea you'd have you know Regional contest and then you'd have a a winner who was the best drummer in the whole country and and the winner of the very first genan kba drum contest was Louis bellson and and Louis bellson was a tinkerer he's a fantastic drummer but he in he thought well what if I brought a second bass drum into this thing and already in high school he has some diagrams that he he actually showed me uh from wood shop where he was designing the idea of a second bass drum so when he became a professional he started integrating a second bass drum into his setup double bass really made its first Big Splash when Louis bellson joined Duke Ellington's Orchestra in the early 50s and he was also in addition to being a great drummer Louie was a prolific songwriter and he wrote his own song called Skin Deep that's on the very famous Duke Ellington album Ellington Uptown and Skin Deep was a feature for the double bass drums he also wrote another song called The Hawk talks which uh he also performed with Duke Ellington and uh in both of these these were really the first recordings where double Bas could clearly be heard where it was clearly featured and it just exploded and because of that you have drummers in the ' 50s and into the 60s all of whom who used double bass and of course that led to the double bass style that we have today here's a short demonstration that sort of pays a little bit of tribute to one of my favorite drummers and favorite people Louis [Music] bellson e [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Music] so far in this journey through the evolution of drum set and drumming and drum playing and cool things related to Drums we've talked about a lot of different things everything from rag time to early Jazz to Big Band swing and rhythm of Blues and bbop but now we're moving into the 1950s and the next date we're going to focus on is 1954 because we're moving into what it's going to be a huge style it's going to be a game changer for everyone and lead us to where we are today which is the style of course of rock and roll now a lot of different things contributed to rock and roll rock and roll didn't just fall from the sky fully form the way we think of it today it evolved out of all these other things we've talked about and kind of came together in some cool ways so one of the key elements of rock and roll was a style called rockabilly okay now maybe you've heard about rockabilly and you think well something to do with the South I think something to do with country music well you're pretty close rockabilly was a style that that evolved uh in the South uh in places like Arkansas and Texas uh and Tennessee and it was essentially uh taking country music the style of country music and adding drums and a more of a beefed up sound to it so drums play a really key role in the evolution of rockabilly as a sound other styles like jazz or rhym and blues had drums you know since their Inception but but country music was an acoustic form that had come from Europe originally and they had resisted having drums drums and the drum set especially was not a part of the country sound but as we get into the 1950s so many other styles of popular music are using drums that the people in the country World start to say okay if we're going to stay current with our music we need to start adding drums so the drums start to show up in country music and especially in this style called rockabilly now rockabilly kind of Ground Zero of where rockabilly happened was a record label in Memphis Tennessee called Sun Records some of the names that you may have heard of guys who got their start at Sun Records include Elvis Presley Johnny Cash Jerry Lee Lewis Carl Perkins Roy Orbison recorded there and these guys all headed to the Memphis area to get to kind of they were all doing this cool rockabilly sound so what was rockabilly well the sound of rockabilly a lot of it is driven not by the drum so much as by the bass and a lot of times you hear clicking kind of a going on on rockabelly records and a lot of people think that's actually the drums well believe it or not that is the sound of what we call the slap bass this goes back ways to to the to the evolution of country before there was drums and they Ed the bass to create the Rhythm so the the bass would go tuck tuck tuck they' literally let the strings slap off the neck of the bass and you get this very particular kind of sound um you also had what was called a dead string guitar where they would take a dollar bill or some paper and weave it into the strings and you'd literally hear just a dead dead sound no chords just a sound a rhythmic sound and so you know the drums in a lot of the earliest rockabilly had to almost be quiet they had to be played with brushes because again drums was a new thing in the world of country and and they were like I don't know how much of drums we really want here we'll give you a little bit but you got to you know play brushes so some of the biggest hits of of early rockabilly sound including Blue Suede Shoes which was a played by a drummer named WS Holland he had to use brushes on that thing but when you get that slap base going and you get the brushes going and you get the chicka chicka chick of the uh the dead string guitar all meshing together and you put a little chicken picking guitar over the top of that now you have a sound that's not quite rhythm and blues not quite country not quite rock and roll it's kind of all of these things and that's what's rockabilly [Applause] [Music] our last segment took a look at rockabilly and talked about how it was one element in the evolution of rock and roll and we were talking about the year 1954 and on this segment we're going to stick with the year 1954 because in 1954 one of sort of the very first official rock and roll song was released and that song of of course was Rock Around the Clock by Bill Haley and his comets now this is so interesting because Rock Around the Clock is really like this weird Patchwork quilt of all of the different things that made up Rock and you can hear them all happening in this one song and that's why I just love this song so you got all kinds of stuff first of all we've talked about rhythm and blues well in Bill Haley and his comments you had like a honken tener saxophone that was reminiscent of the rhythm and blues bands uh of the 1940s and s um you talk about country and rockabilly being part of rock and roll well Bill Haley and his comments had a slapping bass player who had a kill and slap sound they also had a pedal steel player uh so that comes from country music and Bill Haley himself was a former country singer and he played acoustic guitar like many former country singers and we also talked about um you know jazz in big band and the guitar player in Bill Haley's comments was a jazz guy and and he if you listen to the famous guitar solo from Rock Around the Clock it actually is a jazz solo doesn't sound anything like what we would think of as rock and roll uh and of course let's talk about the drums uh the drummer on Rock Around the Clock was a guy named Billy gussack and he's not very well known today but he was um an a swing style drummer in the style of Jean Kupa and when the band came in to record Rock Around the Clock he just laid down kind of a swing style thing with some little fills and little crashes but when you put all this together what you get is something totally unique different new and revolutionary which was the power and the drive of what was going to become rock and roll so Bill Haley and his comets Rock Around the Clock when it was first released actually didn't do too well but in 1956 two years later it was used as the theme in a teenage juvenile delinquent movie called The Blackboard Jungle and this movie again it was trying to show how juvenile delinquency was a bad thing and if you're a kid how you shouldn't be this way but of course it was so cool cuz it had this cool music in it and it had all these cool juvenile delinquent kids in it that teenagers rushed to see this movie 1 2 3:00 4:00 rock 5 6 7:00 8:00 Rock 9 10 11:00 12:00 Rock we're going to rock around :00 tonight FL join me home have some fun when the fles some of them would camp out all day in the movie theaters so they could dance to this very cool song called Rock Around the Clock so rock around the clock really brought rock and roll to the masses and helped to cement the style rock and roll okay now at the same time as you had Rock Around the Clock you had other artists black artists rhythm and blues artists like Chuck Barry Bo didley Little Richard and they were also writing music that appealed to this new demographic graic known as the teenager now this was all very revolutionary because teenagers at this point really didn't have the chance to be teenagers the way we think of teenagers today kids often just had to go right from school to work sometimes they you know poor immigrant families they couldn't afford to have free time to have money you know there was no such thing as playing video games and going to the mall back in in this time period but in the 1950s after World War II kids could sort of be kids and the term teenager became popular so now kids have a little bit of money they got some free time they start they start writing records for kids and that's what rock and roll is it was music that was made for teenagers so uh you know all these things come together and start taking off and we have rock and roll now from a drumming perspective a couple cool things happened during this time period first of all we had talked back when we spoke about rhythm and blues as the primary groove of a rhythm and blues player was the shuffle right well now as we move into the 1950s this Shuffle gets more and more frenetic so instead of it being D it kind of goes it becomes more flattened out and drummers like Earl Palmer who was down in New Orleans and playing for people like Little Richard and fats dominoes listening to this and he starts taking his Groove and going instead of D D D D D D he changes it D D D D D so now rock and roll as a drumming style starts to emerge and starts to get more beefed up the fills get bigger and now that we have a straight eth Groove you know we start going going bam and they go back to one and they start hitting one harder and now we start crashing our symbols on beat one so that's another element of rock and roll drumming that starts to to to become part of What drummers were doing and of course all these artists have big hits and rock and rolls a style evolves and lots of drummers are listening and now for the first time drummers in the late 50s start identifying themselves as rock and roll drummers for the first time ever and so we really have now what we think of as a modern kind of a rock or pop style of drumming this is when it first emerged in the 1950s dig it [Music] n [Music] so now we're almost at the end of our 100-year timeline of drumming and drum set Evolution and we're going to focus on the year 1964 because at this point rock and roll has actually been around now for about 10 years and the drum set as we know it is really come together the blueprint for it is is the blueprint of what of the drum set that we still use today in other words all the elements are now in place we've got kick snare we got a high hat we got a ride symbol we got a crash symbol we got Toms that go from high to low uh and the way a drummer plays in a popular music situation is very similar to how we would play uh today if we sit down you know based kind of on a boom boom boom kind of a deal right and we've got straight ath grooves we got back beats uh so all this stuff is coming together and I like to wrap things up you know in our hundred-year journey by talking about the years 1964-65 because something very particular happened during these years and there was one more big sea change that was going to happen for all drummers that was going to affect all of us and of course 1964 is the year of the British Invasion so you know starting with the Beatles uh you have a lot of bands The Beatles the Stones The Yardbirds uh and you know later on bands like The Who and cream and deep purple you know all the way through the end of the 60s just this onslaught of amazing British bands that actually had been reared on American rock and roll and blues and rockabilly and Soul music and they took took their you know version of that and created a new brand of rock and roll and brought it back to America they invaded America so 1964 is the year of the British Invasion and one of the key pieces of that happening was the Beatles appearing on The Ed Sullivan Show so of course at this point television everybody's got a TV in their home by now uh and the Ed Sullivan Show was was sort of like um America's Got Talent or you know one of these shows that's a a showcase for people to show off a lot of different kinds of of of talents not just singing and dancing they had plate jugglers and and uh uh animal acts and all kinds of stuff but they also had you know musical acts so the Beatles appear on The Ed Sullivan Show and at the same time as you have the Beatles appearing the audience that's watching is a new generation of American teenagers called the baby boom generation that were all born right after the end of World War II and now they're teenagers and they're looking for something to identify with right so the Beatles come on and the there is just a phenomenon you have a phenomenon called Beetle Mania America was was crazy for the Beatles and crazy for the for this these British moptop youths right and so you have a whole generation of drummers intently watching this show on The Ed Sullivan Show and you didn't have that many television channels channels at that time so some crazy number of people were actually watching some something like 45% of every of all the TVs in America were tuned into this one program so you had just the entire country riveted and what did they see they saw Ringo playing with the match grip the match grip okay and this again we don't think too much of it today you go to your you know your lesson when you're a young drummer and generally the first grip you learn is the match grip but prior to this time in the 19 60s and earlier most drummers learned the traditional grip and I'm a lefty so I play like this but most most righty drummers typical drummers will play like this okay this is our traditional grip and this of course goes back to the days of marching because you had a snare drum that came down when you would March and that had a lean so you could walk with the drum so you had to create a grip where you could have a rotational motion so you didn't have to play like this you know with your arms you could March comfortably with the drum being at a slant so when the drum that evolved drummers just left their snare drum at a slant and that's how most drummers played was this traditional grip now occasionally if there was a big solo happening or you were going to hit really hard drummers would switch over and you'd see some match grip but it was not the default grip well guess what by the time you get to Beatle Mania The Beatles were the very first band ever to play a rock concert in a stadium they played at sha Stadium 1965 for 55,000 people and this was totally new this was not something that that you would see every day to see a band of any kind let alone a rock and roll band playing in a stadium full of people well of course technology wasn't what it is today you had very small PA systems very small instruments Ringo started using a with a 20-in bass drum so in order to get that power that he needed to reach so many people and of course he had screaming girls nobody could hear anything because the screams were so deafening Ringo opted to use the Matched grip so he could really hit hard he developed this cool style you know on the high hat kind of buttering his bread as it were uh and he just laid it down and and it looked super cool so guess what a whole generation this baby boom generation of young drummers looked at Ringo and said I want to be that guy I want to be in a band like that guy I want to buy lwig drums like he's playing so overnight lwig again remember lwig going back to the 1909 we talked about them now suddenly in the 1960s they're the most popular Drum company on the planet they had to keep their Factory open three shift a day in order to make enough drums to satisfy the Demand right and of course all these young drummers they want to play rock and roll and what do they want to do they play the match grip so almost overnight the match grip becomes the default grip for drummers and that still is the case today most of us when we start playing drums we play the match grip Now ladies and gentlemen [Music] oh yeah something I think you understand when I that I want to hold your [Applause] [Music] hand so there you have it 100 Years of drumming Evolution and the entire story of the drum set all wrapped up in one video series and I hope that for most of you guys this is the beginning rather than the end of your exploration into your history and your tradition you know a lot of people think well older music I don't know about that music from the 30s the 40s the 50s that stuff's looks different it sounds different I don't know if that's something that I can relate to and I could tell you from personal experience I didn't start off being into all this stuff I started off as a kid playing rock and roll that's what I wanted to do and being really into that but what I found as I have been on my own personal journey into this exploration of our tradition and our history and our instrument is that it's only made me a better player it's made me better at playing modern music as well as playing you know this historical music and it can inform what you do today and make you a better player there's a great Winston Churchill quote I love that says the farther backward in time you look look the farther forward you are likely to see in other words the more you know about your past the more you're going to be able to create your own future okay now say you're a fan of John Bonham and I don't know a single drummer in this universe that isn't a fan of John Bonham well guess what John bonam grew up in England he grew up in the 1950s listening to Little Richard records he grew up listening to drummers like Earl Palmer he grew up listening to Jean Kupa he grew up listening to Max and when you listen to John Bonham's playing you can hear all of that in his playing so it behooves you if you want to play like John Bonham understand where John Bonham comes from and what he brings to his drumming because you'll be able to get into his bit his head more and you'll be able to really understand how to get that killer bonom Groove going because you hear that swing in there you hear that Rumble in there when you listen to his chops and the way his hands move guess what a lot of that stuff comes from jazz or swing now it's not only good to listen to you know to me hey kids learn about your history just because it's good to do you can actually it can make you a more creative drummer so if you're in a modern rock band today if you're in a death metal band if you're in a funk band if you're in a jam band if you're in a jazz band you know bringing some of these things that I've talked about in this series uh into your playing is going to give you an edge you know you may put a press roll in the middle of your heavy metal Tune guess what I don't think there's too many other people people doing that so it's going to give you more tools for your toolbox more weapons in Your Arsenal that you can bring to the picture that's going to make you stand out and of course if you want to make your living as a drummer it's super important to know about Styles lots and lots of different styles of music because they're all around us today and a lot of gigs that working drummers do which is like weddings or corporate events or blues bars theatrical shows or cir to solle or Blue Man Group I mean there's a million different ways that you can take uh what you know these different skills and understanding and knowledge of the past and apply that so that you will be more employable people are going to want to hire you because you know the difference between say this kind of a shuffle and that kind of a shuffle so that's my message to you and I really hope that you take some time and continue on this journey to explore your history your Evolution your tradition so we can keep this going and keep it rolling down the line as we move further forward into all of our future thank you so much [Music]