Another post captured from Facebook:

Oh, Professor.

Neil Peart was in my opinion one of the most influential drummers ever. To me, he lives in a pantheon with few others: Buddy Rich, Max Roach, John Bonham, Keith Moon, Ringo Starr… there might be a few others who can aspire to his level of influence, but not many.

Here’s the thing, though: I think it comes down to influence.

On Rush Fanatics and in other groups, you see memes about it: “Drummers use metronomes! Metronomes use Neil Peart!,” for example. But that’s… not right. You also see comments about groove and Peart’s lack of it. That’s… not right either.

Let’s be fair, here, good and bad.

Peart was a freaking awesome drummer. I don’t know of any other way to put it; even if his incredibly busy, heavy style wasn’t your taste, it doesn’t take much to recognize how good he really was.

Someone might easily prefer Bonzo’s approach, or Ringo’s approach, to the skins, but choosing Bonham over Peart is almost purely a matter of taste: you like Zeppelin’s more open-handed approach to style more than you do Rush’s more technical process. On a tactical level, or a skill level, you’re really looking at half a dozen for one, six of the other.

On a technical level, I don’t know of a drummer who’s nudged more percussionists in different directions than Peart, especially when you consider the duties he took on later in Rush’s career. It used to be that Geddy and Alex would trigger samples from synthesizers, but as technology marched on, you saw Peart “playing” synthesizer as much as Geddy Lee, using his MalletKat or other pads to trigger events seamlessly on stage.

He was also incredibly dextrous and I can’t imagine how strong he must have been to hit the kit as hard as he did, night after night, for hours on end. Listening to him live, you were always waiting for those moments when he abandoned the recorded material and absolutely went for it on the drums, leaving the audience going “… wha… where did… THAT … come from?”

But let’s also be honest: he was NOT a machine, NOT a metronome. He missed hits just like the worst of us, although certainly it was rare… even on live albums there were rolls he’d skip out on every now and then, like the snare ruffle in Tom Sawyer, when Geddy sings, “But change is!,” or the high hat riff he does in the instrumental opening Xanadu - sometimes it’s there, sometimes it’s not.

Plus, his timing has NEVER been as robotic as people claim.

Look, I’ve done covers of Rush; I’ve done Animate, Closer to the Heart, Analog Kid, Distant Early Warning, and Red Sector A. I used real drums for Closer to the Heart, and programmed percussion for the others.

The first thing you do when you program drums for something like that is you do tempo detection.

The tempo on those songs - even for Animate and Red Sector A, which was done with a sequencer for timing - is variable. It’s generally constant - if memory serves, Animate was in the vicinity of 114.25 beats per minute, but it varied from measure to measure anywhere from 112 to 120 bpm. Red Sector A wasn’t much different.

You heard that live, too, where the band could (and did) speed up and slow down sections of songs from night to night - and sometimes corrected speed even DURING a section.

(There’s a lot that goes into this; it might be that Alex was playing slower or faster that night, and the others matched his speed if he wasn’t going to match THEIRS. It’s not a criticism, just an observation that we’re not talking about an inflexible robot behind the kit.)

The point is that as a musician, Peart was more influential than inaccessible… and that’s a good thing, because it keeps him human and understandable and reachable and entirely admirable.

RIP, Professor.