Playalong Windfall: Swingtown and We're Not Gonna Take It

Yesterday 5 of the 6 Hal Leonard drum play-along books that I ordered from Amazon arrived (Hendrix was shipped separate). I ordered 80s rock, modern rock, funk, Blink 182, Hendrix, and pop rock. I'm trying to remember why I didn't also get the hard rock book...maybe it was out of stock...or maybe I forgot. I already have the classic rock and the Green Day books. These things are awesome and I love them. For $12 ($10 from Amazon) you get a cd with two versions of each song (one without drums) that you can slow down all the way to 50% speed and you get really accurate drum notation for the entire tune. I am able to learn tunes by ear pretty well, but I really like being able to see the notation. If verifies for me what's going on and teaches me what new figures are. Learning by ear it is easy to miss things. These books certainly aren't the only way I intend to learn tunes, but they are a great tool in the tool box.

I took a look at pop rock and 80s rock last night...trying to pace myself. Another thing I like about these books is that they introduce me to iconic drum songs of different genres that I would never in a million years think to listen to or learn if they weren't in the book. So it brings lots of riffs to me that I might not otherwise expose myself to.

There was lots of fun to be had in the first two books, and the biggest thing was that I realized that I'm really getting much better at site reading drum notation. The highlight of the night was two things, though.

#1: Swingtown by Steve Miller Band (drummer Gary Mallaber)
This is a really cool drum part. It you aren't a drummer I think you don't notice the drum part on this song. I worked on it for a while last night. It is a nice exercise in bass drum independence. One of those things that's really hard to get at first, but once you get it...it seems easy.

Not a bad view of the drummer here:


And a decent job of someone covering it where you can really hear the drum part (in the comments they say that he's missing the second 16th note bass beat, but I feel like I'm hearing it...that is definitely part of what makes it hard though):


#2: The intro to We're Not Gonna Take It by Twisted Sister
This uses a Bonham-esque triplet and is a pretty cool trick. Again, something that would never occur to me to do if I hadn't of seen it in the book.

You have to sit through a minute of story line before the song starts in the video.