Another post mostly copied from Facebook!
Someone on a thread on drums made a comment to me, saying āWhat was Neil doing with all those (extra drums)?!ā
Wellā¦ if youāre going to ask, Iām going to think about an answer!
The TL;DR version, for people who like to skim: āPlaying them, of course. Playing zem all. All of zem. Bwahahaha!ā
But as a drummer and an overthinker, thatās ā¦ not enough to satisfy me.
Really, if you donāt like to read, you have already read the important parts. Move along. I appreciate the ādidnāt read all them thar wordsā comments, because theyāre hilarious, butā¦ seriously, donāt worry about it. I overthink. I know it. You can tell it. If itās not interesting to you, THAT doesnāt interest ME, either, and any commentary is wasted and I donāt want to waste your time or my own.
Okay, so what WAS Neil doing with all those drums?! He really didnāt need them; after all, he recorded Fly By Night on what we would think was a paltry kit today (a six piece, I think, an early iteration of Chromey?) and apparently Malignant Narcissism, on Snakes and Arrows, was at least written on a four-piece kit, a lot like the kit shown in https://www.facebook.com/ā¦/pfbid02mzs7BqLnzGeGHD14Lx4tqā¦ (where youāll find the original comment, actually.) And Neil played on a smaller kit for the NHL theme he did for them, and in the Buddy Rich tribute as well.
So I think itās safe tp say that it came down to approach, and not need.
Drums are hard. A lot of drummers .. there are a lot of approaches to drums. When I was thinking about it, Aerosmith came to mind: early Aerosmith, the good version, had a drummer who played like he was interested. Not only did he hold down the beat, he played the beat. Later Aerosmith - when they came back from irrelevancy thanks to Run D.M.C. - felt different. Those drums might as well have been programmed. They held down the tempo. They filled in space in the mix. They were dull. Oom. Ka. Oom. Ka. Oom. Ka. Oom. Kaā¦. that was the whole song.
You can do that, if you are a great drummer. Charlie Watts and Ringo Starr - tell them to play four on the floor, and you have a SONG. Nothing against Watts, who I mention here because he WAS a great drummer, RIP - but Starr could play a simple four count and make it sing. (You can tell a poser drummer by their opinion of Starr; āStarr wasnāt even the best drummer in the Beatles!ā is a neon sign saying someone has no idea how to play the drums, but MAY have a lot of grandiose ideas about how to play fills. Sadly, such drummers are ALSO typically massive fans of Peart, not understanding how the drums work.)
Drums donāt only hold the beat. They hold the heartbeat of a song. They have their very own phrasing, and itās typically represented by syncopation, as opposed to melody. Itās an approach to a song in terms of time, not pitch and timbreā¦ usually. And the masters of the drums control time very well. Starr and Watts didnāt have massive kits, but they had those tickers in their heads that allowed them to control the song based on the passage of time. You can do that with a two-piece kit. Check out Vulfpeck; they do that all the time in their music.
And then we get to people like Peart. I really donāt know who started the āmassive drum kitā movement; it wasnāt Neil. The first guy I remember hearing about in terms of the size of his kit was Peter Criss, from KISS, and to be honest, THAT sounded like showmanship: Iāve never heard Criss actually play that monster kit, only show it.
Peart, thoughā¦ Rush was a three-piece, and the thing about three-pieces is that they typically SOUND like three-pieces. Thereās a lot of room to fill, and you have to construct songs around it. You could do like the Who - which had four members, but three musicians - and use the studio and extra musicians on stage to fill in parts (a very standard approach, and thereās nothing wrong with it) - or the Police, and write very sparse music where the three musicians are providing things that hang in air to make a single whole thing.
Or you could do what Rush did, and say āSure, weāre a three piece, but weāre not gonna sound like it. We want six parts in this section. Alex and Geddy can play guitars and foot pedals, Neil can play the bells and the drums. Geddy, you sing here, too.ā
They were playing all out. Do a chart of the different pieces involved in a lot of their songs - especially once they hit their stride, around Permanent Waves - and playing live becomes a dance. āFor this section, I will play these notes here and here, and in the āandā Iām going to sing this at that note, and after the second āhereā Iām going to hit that note on the MIDI pedal with my right foot, and set up to switch to keyboards over thereā¦ā
ā¦ and we wonder why Geddy didnāt look like he had a lot of fun playing a certain era of songs, until the technology grew up enough to make it doable without driving himself nuts! Itās no wonder he had a rep as a bit of a control freak for a while - I can imagine that it was his refuge against all that madness.
Back to Neil and all those drums! Peart didnāt just play the beat, he played a melodic role, too. And giving him pieces to play with - crotales, a cowbell tree, all those toms, cymbals with different lengths and pitches, the bells, the gong, the glockenspiel, the .. theā¦ the.. ALL OF IT GOLLY IT NEVER STOPS
All of that gave him a melodic playground to help fill in the gaps, because Rush never really LET us say āwell, itās okay, theyāre only a three-piece.ā They always filled in all of that space in the right way, such that we never felt that they needed to apologize for being only a three-piece. (And for a lot of listeners, they canāt even TELL. A lot of people are amazed: āThatāsā¦ three people? On stage?ā)
So: did Neil NEED all of those drums? ā¦ Iām going to go with ānah,ā especially after Gruberās tutelage, where his drumming did fundamentally change - Peart had a tendency to play the beat and the fill, almost as separate parts, but Gruber changed Peartās approach such that he played the drums as more complete phrases. (Technically it didnāt change much, but the way the parts were written were more organic, in my opinion.) But his note selection was still very broad, and very capable. He didnāt NEED all the drums, but he sure knew how to play them such that we could appreciate that he had them.