Bass Players and Drummers and Piano Players

Lots of things are moving towards fruition at the end of the year. Plotnik is done with the home recording segment of his Best of Tiapos Project, and down south Brother Blue is making very solid progress on the Perfect Pitch. The first video is terrific and the story-rewrite ball is in Plotnik's court right now. The more he thinks about it, the clearer it gets. As is true 1,000,000 out of 1,000,000 times, Keep It Simple Stupid is the order of the day.

That's not so easy, though, because Plotnik has been living this story for a long time. When he can write down here, in one paragraph, what The Perfect Pitch is all about, and you all can understand it clearly, his job will be done. Not yet, dammit, but we're getting closer.

As far as the Tiapos project of original songs, Plottie has got to figure out how to pick, say, ten songs out of the fifteen or so tracks he has recorded. You'll be involved in that selection process too, somehow. Most of those final ten or eleven will then get rhythm sections, and the best ones of those will then receive final sweetening touches and be part of the finished package.

It's an ass-backwards way to do a record -- rhythm sections should always come first, but when you're not a bassist or drummer you hear things differently. Plot hears melodies first, allied with lyrical ideas. He's looking at the big picture. Drummers hear a world of four beats and eight beats. Being steady is everything, and syncopations are just variations of those short, repeated four beat and eight beat sections.

Bass players take a linear approach -- they hear bass lines and melodies snaking around those bass lines. A bass line has a longer stretch than a drum beat, but a bass player and drummer must know how to listen to each other.

Guitar players all think they're the most important. They aren't, the drummers are.

But drummers always wish they were piano players. Piano players would like to be drummers. They think they are bass players, because their left hand plays bass notes, but they're not and they can't do it like a bass player can.

Bass players think they can play drums, but they can't either, because they think too musically. Drummers are musical but they are the most physical. When you play drums you use both feet and both hands, your whole body is involved at all times. Everybody else is using two hands and a brain.

A drummer doesn't need a brain.

Drummers are insane.

This rhymes.