< PreviousModern Drummer April 2021 8 K enny Kuzniar did a bit more than throw a party to mark his 30th year of playing drums. Instead, the Saskatchewan, Canada, drummer worked with Dustin Drummond of Drummond Custom Drums to design a kit with the shells finished to repre- sent the colors of the drums he has played over the past three decades. “I’ve toured across Canada with many rock groups, and I’ve been a drum instructor and educator for more than 20 years,” says Kuzniar. “I’ve played Yamaha Custom Maple, Tama Rockstar, and Sonor models in the past, and I wanted to honor those kits with the Drummond.” Kuzniar’s 30th anniversary kit is handcrafted from maple and includes a 24x8 bass drum; 8x8, 10x10, and 12x6 rack toms; and 16x16 and 18x18 floor toms. The snare is a 6 1/2x14 DW Collector’s series in polished brass. Cymbals are Sabian AAX, HH, and AA series models, and the hardware is a mixture of the DW 5000 series (hi-hat stand and double-bass pedal) and Yamaha (cymbal stands and tom rack). Kuzniar uses Vic Firth SD2 drumsticks and sits on a Pork Pie drum throne. “Dustin is always searching for the perfect drum sound, and he experi- ments with different shell recipes to custom-build kits for the needs of specific drummers,” says Kuzniar. “My shells are stave construction, because they produce a low fundamental note with a wide tuning range, and a good mix of attack and sustain. The bearing edges are dual 45, but progressively more rounded over as the size increas- es to achieve the thunderous sound I wanted. The drums are finished with nitrocellulose lacquer outside, oiled and waxed on the interior, and fitted with brass tube lugs and 2.3 mm hoops.” Michael Molenda True Colors Kenny Kuzniar Designs Kit to Celebrate His 30th Anniversary of DrummingModern Drummer May 2021 10 Ginger Baker on Channeling the Music “As a drummer, you have such a wide selection of sounds, and the trick is to find the right sound for the music. That’s much more of a skill than being able to play lots of different beats nobody else can play. If you can make the right sound for the music so that it sounds right, then you’re a drummer—no matter how little technique you have.” — May 1993 Buddy Rich on Practicing “I think it’s a fallacy that the harder you practice, the better you get. You only get better by playing. You could sit around in a basement with a set of drums all day long, practice rudiments, and try to develop speed. But until you start playing with a band, you can’t learn technique, you can’t learn taste, and you can’t learn how to play with a band until you actually do it. So practice—particularly after you’ve attained a job [as a drummer], because that’s an opportunity to develop. Any practice, besides that, is boring. I know teachers who tell their students to practice eight hours a day. If you can’t accomplish what you want in an hour, you’re not gonna get it in four days.” — January 1977 Harvey Mason on Doing Sessions “A good studio player is someone who goes on the date and feels at ease playing anything called for to make the artist happy, and who is fully capable of doing just that. A negative session is one in which you have an attitude where you really don’t want to play what the people who hired you want you to play. That’s really a negative situation, because if they’ve hired you, they either want you to play like you, or they want you to do something they hear—something they think you’ll be able to do for them. If you don’t want to do it, then you are not being cooperative, you’re not being interested, and you’re not doing the best job you can.” — July 1981 Art Blakey on Discipline and Feel “Freedom without discipline is chaos. You have to have some discipline. Everything you do takes discipline. Discipline means to relax. That’s what it takes to play the drums. Chick Webb—the only teacher I ever had who taught me anything—Sid Catlett taught me that. Sid would always tell me, ‘Art, when you’re in trouble, roll. Just relax. You know what I mean?’ It takes a long time to learn how to just relax. I lectured some young drummers in Chicago the other day, and they all sound like they came off of a conveyer belt, because they don’t identify themselves. There’s no originality, and this is blocking the advancement of the instrument. People don’t give a sh*t how many paradiddles you can play. People only know what they feel. The drum is the second human instrument, the voice being the first. You can take a drum and move the earth. Chick Webb told me that if you’re playing before an audience, you’re supposed to wash away the dust of everyday life. That’s all music is supposed to do.” — September 1984 Vinnie Paul on Double Bass Technique “There are so many cool things you can do with your feet that are cooler than doing them with any other drums on the kit. For example, a lot of my playing is power playing, and if I can’t do something with a lot of power, I’ll find a way to develop that power. The way I went about getting that power into my playing was to use my feet more. When I played single bass drum, to make the timing right and to get all of the off-beats on my right foot, I would keep time with my left foot—just straight 8th notes. When I started playing double bass, I just moved my left foot 10 Pieces of Wisdom from the MD Archives I n its 45 years of publication, Modern Drummer has collected essential data from thousands of remarkable drummers, percussionists, and educators. Throughout our 45th anniversary in 2021, we will offer some features that celebrate the musicians, editors, writers, and photographers who have served the drumming community in these pages. So, sit back and absorb ten snippets of advice from some heroes of the kit.May 2021 Modern Drummer 11 to the second drum, and I continued to play the 8ths with my left foot and the other notes with my right. I would sit down and play 16th notes for hours, starting off slowly until it started hurting. That’s how you develop stamina. I found my left foot was a lot weaker than my right, and I had to really work on bringing it up. So while I was developing my left foot, I was also working on new stuff with my right foot, which helped lead to the patterns I play now.” — August 1994 Anika Nilles on Solos “When it comes to doing a drum solo, I can’t play anymore. I feel totally empty. I have no ideas, no flow—nothing. I always need music to get inspired. I need melodies in order to feel something. I don’t listen to other drum solos, and I don’t like watching them. I don’t find them interesting. They’re just rhythms. People always want me to play drum solos, but I’m completely happy when I can play straight 4/4 without any fills.” — June 2017 Travis Barker on Marching Band Exercises “I do a bunch of rudimental marching exercises—stuff I learned when I was in drum line. I’m still super into that stuff. I love working on the rudiments—the crazy flams, drags, rolls, single strokes. I studied jazz for years when I was young, but when I got into marching band, that’s when my chops really got better. I took all of the knowledge I got from marching band and applied it to the drumset. Now, I make up my own exercises and crazy chops builders. When we’re on the road, I practice every day, and right before I go on, I run through all of my marching stuff to make sure my hands are loose.” — August 2001 Bernard Purdie on Ergonomics “A bad habit for drummers is sitting wrong. Drummers should sit up, with their backs positioned as if they had braces behind them and with their feet flat on the floor. If you learn how to play flat footed, it’s easy to come up on your toes when necessary. If you learn to play on your toes, there’s no place else for you to go. And if you always play on your toes, you’ll end up with nerves, so that when you want to hit something light and easy, you can’t do it. You lose the subtlety—the beauty. You get ‘thump’ instead of ‘ting.’ It can’t be helped. Also, when you play with your fingers and you don’t use the wrists, you can get all the speed in the world, but you’re not going to be able to sustain it, because the tendons will stretch. If your tendons stretch, sticks are going to drop out of your hands. You need the wrists to help you with power, longevity, and discipline. It takes years to find that out.” —November 1985 Moe Tucker on Cymbals “I don’t know who invented the foot pedal [Tucker famously played standing up with her bass drum turned on its side while playing with the Velvet Underground]. I guess it allows you to play a crash at every moment, and I don’t know who started that either. I guess a cymbal company! If you listen to old music—the kind I like—you don’t hear a cymbal from one end of the day to the next. My son plays in a band, and I advised him to take all the cymbals away from his drummer. Maybe things got out of hand when it became about groups as opposed to studio musicians. Band members started thinking, ‘We’re stars!’ and tried to draw attention to themselves. It became all about seven drums and all these cymbals, and two bass drums—which in my opinion is not only unnecessary but horrifying.” — July 2005 (website only) Prince on Envisioning Everything “One of the misconceptions about modern music is that a funky beat alone constitutes a song. Being a multi-instrumentalist, I tend not to be greedy on the drums. I don’t want to overshadow the other colors on the track. One of the things I’m trying to teach John [Blackwell, New Power Generation drummer] is to hear the finished production in his head while he’s recording it. This technique allows him to play the right thing at the right time.” — October 2001 M O D E R N D R U M M E R M A G A Z I N E • • Of Excellence THE WORLD’S #1 DRUMMING RESOURCEModern Drummer May 2021 12 F anny became the first all-female rock band to release an album on a major label when mega-producer Richard Perry signed the act to Reprise in 1969. Often missed is the other culture-changing element of Fanny—that, with Philippines-born sisters June (guitar) and Jean (bass) Millington, it also brought Asian rockers to the mainstream American music scene. Although, at the time, the band had to endure unfair comparisons to topless casino novelty acts and unfounded criticism of their musicianship, the Millingtons, keyboardist Nickey Barclay, and drummer Alice de Buhr were incredibly passionate, focused, and hard-working. They rehearsed like demons, and, as live television and concert footage prove, they were a tight and powerful band that could negotiate various musical styles. Many popular artists of the 1970s came to appreciate that Fanny was exceptionally professional and had its own audience—especially in the U.K. and Europe—and the band was invited to tour with the Kinks, Humble Pie, Jethro Tull, Slade, and others. They performed on American Bandstand, The Sonny and Cher Show, and myriad national and international variety-TV shows, and even did session work for Barbra Streisand (Barbra Joan Streisand, 1971). Among their celebrity supporters were Beatles George Harrison and Ringo Starr, Deep Purple, Rod Stewart, and David Bowie, who famously name-checked Fanny as “one of the finest f**king rock bands of their time.” In 1971, Fanny reached the commercial pinnacle of a top-40 song on the Billboard charts with the title song of their album Charity Ball. As a result, expectations were likely high for the follow-up release, and Perry brought the band to London to record at Apple Studios with renowned Beatles engineer Geoff Emerick. The mojo must have been tremendous—a Beatle would drop by here and there to check out the sessions, so there’s that—but the project was squeezed into a two-week window between concert performances. Happily, the band was tighter than Super Glue from its incessant touring. While a significant number of fans and journalists consider Fanny Hill as the band’s finest hour, the release barely singed the Billboard 200 album charts, coming to rest at #135. “There are some stunning tracks on Fanny Hill,” Barclay once stated to Technodyke, “but perhaps people let themselves be fooled by the cachet of Apple Studios—the idea that our recording an album at the ‘Beatles’ studio’ was a badge of arrival.” Taken track by track, Fanny Hill is almost like an extravagant feast at Marie Antoinette’s court. The songs are stylistically varied, zooming between ‘70s boogie (“Ain’t that Peculiar,” “Borrowed Time,” “Rock Bottom Blues”), a soaring power ballad that could have been co-written by ABBA (“Knock on My Door”), up-tempo ravers (“Blind Alley,” “Hey Bulldog,” “The First Time”), echoes of Beatle-y fairy dust (You’ve Got a Home”), singer/songwriter themes (“Think About the Children,” “Wonderful Feeling”), and even country (“Sound and the Fury”). Through it all, de Buhr drives the band’s musical scenography with beautifully constructed and harmonious drum parts, nimble dynamics, and enough aggro bash to always be HEARD, while not overpowering the emotion of the song. For a while now, de Buhr has been revisiting Fanny’s musical legacy for the marvelous Get Behind Fanny podcast she co-hosts with Fanny historian Dr. Kristen Hillaire Glasgow (who is also Fanny manager Roy Silver’s daughter) and super-fan and fannyrocks.com webmaster Byron Wilkins. So, it seemed like the stars had aligned to dig into the Fanny Hill sessions with a fresh perspective. There are plenty of session notes from the drummer’s chair, as well as insights into working with a top-drawer production team at a celebrated studio, and all at a time when Fanny was gaining commercial notoriety, and seemingly on the cusp of delivering a breakout album. “Overall, recording at Apple Studios was a great experience,” says de Buhr. “At one point, George and Ringo came downstairs. ‘Oh, what’s going on here?’ Yeah. It was a big deal.” MD: Can you set the scene for the band coming off of Charity Ball and preparing to record Fanny Hill? de Buhr: Well, Richard had gotten us this four-record deal. That was rare for any band at the time, and it was a good thing for us, because the way our album sales went, the label probably would have dropped us after one-and-a-half albums. We never did sell many records, and we were never able to break through. I don’t want to use the term “glass ceiling,” because it’s overused, so I’ll simply say that I think we were ahead of our time. But we had some radio success with “Charity Ball,” so here we were going into Apple Studios with Geoff Emerick. I remember walking in feeling this kind of awe, and thinking, “This is really cool. This could be it.” Then, we just got down to work. MD: Now, this was the era when some recording budgets were inflated and a few lucky bands would spend weeks or months in the studio “finding” the record. But you had just two weeks to deliver Fanny Hill. de Buhr: Obviously, if you’re going to cut an album in two weeks, you have to be ready, and we were well prepared. We had been touring a lot, and we’d always rehearsed a great deal as a band. I mean, Jean and I were psychically tight as a rhythm section. If we were not touring or recording, we were rehearsing—seven days a week and seven to ten hours a day. We were completely immersed in making and perfecting our sound, and that’s what made us so tight. Fanny Hill, Fanny 1972 By Michael MolendaMay 2021 Modern Drummer 13 But I also want to say that Reprise had very little money to spend on promotion. Every album Fanny did was on a shoestring budget. We were always breaking in new studios, recording during non-peak hours, and so on. MD: As you were over in London, did you have to rent a kit for the sessions? de Buhr: Oh, no. We were on tour over there, so I had my own. I used my go-to Camco drums for all of the Fanny albums I played on. I had two Camco kits, and I still have my natural-wood set. The rack toms were 12" and 14", and the floors were 16" and 18"—all tuned low. The bass drum was 22". I had a large, no-name ride and a crash cymbal on each side. My sticks were Regal Tip 5A. MD: How did the Fanny Hill sessions start off for you? de Buhr: We wasted two days trying to get a drum sound. Richard was a drummer himself, and he has said the drum sound was very important to him on the records he produced. He struggled with Geoff—and with me—trying to get whatever sound he was hearing. We did everything we could, and then Geoff vanished into this little hidey-hole and pulled out his special “Ringo mic” and used it as an overhead. [Editor’s note: This was likely a BBC STC 4038 ribbon microphone.] He told me he’d kill me if I told anyone [laughs]. But we got our drum sound. MD: It’s astounding to me that Geoff Emerick couldn’t put up mics in, like, an hour or two and make everyone happy. He was a phenomenal recording engineer. de Buhr: Well, maybe it was one dick trying to show the other dick that his was bigger. I don’t know how much of it was Richard. I know that Geoff was extremely patient. I remember Richard wanted to turn down June’s guitar for something, and June asked Geoff, “What volume level did George Harrison set his guitar for this type of sound?” And Geoff said, “11.” So, there might have been a struggle between Geoff and Richard that I was unaware of. I didn’t think there was anything different about my drums than any other time I had taken them into a studio. But for the Fanny Hill sessions, maybe Richard had a particular sound he was trying to capture, and it was too elusive. MD: During the two days they were dialing in drum sounds, were you hitting each drum individually for hours upon hours, or playing songs? de Buhr: Partially that, and partially “hurry up and wait.” It was, “Let’s try this. Let’s move that. Let’s figure out something else,” and then we’d play. The girls were hanging around going, “Alice...” [Laughs.] It was a struggle, it took forever, and I never understood why everything took so long. Whatever sound it was that Richard wanted, he either got it, or he decided to take what he got. I’m not sure. MD: What drum sound were you going for? de Buhr: Richard says in his book [Cloud Nine: Memoirs of a Record Producer] that he always tuned the drums himself, no matter who the drummer was. But I don’t remember him ever touching my drums, as far as tuning them. I liked a beefy sound. For example, when we played live, I wanted you to feel the bass drum in your crotch—so much so that you’d have to close your legs. I’m happy with the drums on the album. MD: Did you use the same tuning in the studio that you used live? de Buhr: I never tuned my drums. I didn’t even know until years later that you could tune toms to a note. Back in the day, you just tuned them until you got the sound you wanted. It wasn’t a particular key or anything. It was simply how you liked to hear them, and I liked my drums big, fat, and deep. MD: As Richard was a drummer himself, did he suggest parts to you, or give you free rein to develop your own? de Buhr: Richard never suggested parts to me. In fact, I didn’t know until today—after someone read me a passage from his book— that he had been drumming since he was ten years old. But, no, he would simply say that he liked a take, or that he didn’t. The whole magic of Fanny for me as a drummer was that I got to create the drum parts for our original songs, and I never copied the drum parts for any of the covers we did. I always felt that if you get a chance to record a song, you should make it your own. I wanted it to be Alice de Buhr’s drum part on “Hey Bulldog,” Alice de Buhr’s drum part on “Borrowed Time,” and so on. That was the key for me. MD: Did you create your parts by jamming to the songs over and over, or would you envision them in your head before you sat down at the kit? de Buhr: They developed over rehearsals. MD: Were these totally your rhythmic concepts, or would you occasionally get directed to try a part by a band member? de Buhr: There were only two songs where I was given some direction. One was never released, and the other was “Blind Alley,” which Nickey and I co-wrote. Nickey said to me, “Imagine Keith Moon being a freight train.” She wanted me to be all over the place, and yet still chugging along. I tried to give her what she wanted to hear. For June’s and Jean’s songs, they never came to me and said, “Okay, Alice, I want you to sound like a rocking chair,” or whatever. It was pretty much the four of us coming up with our own parts. We knew our instruments, and we trusted each other to come up with the right parts in the right places for the songs. MD: Some instrumentalists like to say they “play for the song,” but few actually specify how that mindset informs the parts they create. Do you have a more definitive approach to crafting drum parts? de Buhr: The philosophy I’ve had for years about how a song is best put together is with the bass and the drums laying the foundation, but that foundation also has to have some space. It’s between the layers of the different instruments where you find it, and the vacuum that creates allows listeners to fill the space in their heads. It’s so much more interesting to perceive some air than to hear a track that’s so dense it doesn’t breathe. Part of the magic of the Rolling Stones to me is that Charlie Watts could be a fraction of a second ahead of the beat, while Bill Wyman was a fraction of a second behind the beat. The fraction of a second of space created by their musical interaction is critically important. MD: How did the band set up in the studio? Was it like a rehearsal—with the players all together—or was everyone in separate booths? de Buhr: We were together. They had some nice sound baffles to set up a little drum cage to manage signal leakage, but we all had line-of-sight to each of us. MD: I assume you were the timekeeper for the sessions, as the Fanny Hill project was a bit early for the click-track obsession of the ‘80s and beyond.de Buhr: [Laughs.] I have a story for you. We were going to play along with the track to “Summer Song” on The Jonathan Winters Show. The producer asked, “Is there a click track [on the song]?” I didn’t even know what a click track was. I said, “There’s no click track. It’s just me. Da-da-de-da-da-de-da-da-boom.” Then, I saw a camera was trained on me. I looked up at the sound booth, and I said, “If I’m on camera when we start, it’s going to look really stupid, because I won’t be able to sync with the soundtrack.” The producer says, “Don’t worry, little lady, we’ve got that covered.” Then, Nickey pipes up and says, “Well, if you knew anything, you’d know she’ll look stupid.” And he goes, “That’s a wrap! You’re off the show.” MD: Fired by a click track! de Buhr: Yes. Until that time, I didn’t even know what a click track did. I just went, “One, two, three, four,” and we’d start. We didn’t play to a click track, and we didn’t record with one. MD: How many basic tracks did you try to cut each day? de Buhr: Once we got sounds, we’d do three to ten run-throughs of each song, depending if Richard heard something he liked or didn’t like. We probably tried to get three or four basics down each day. All of us were so ready to go in each day and do what we had to do. If something didn’t work, we’d re-record it the next day and fix it. It’s interesting. I kept journals from 1971 to 1973, and there’s absolutely nothing written down for the two weeks we were recording Fanny Hill. That should tell you how crazy busy it was. MD: What about scratch vocals? Did someone sing along while the band recorded the rhythm tracks? de Buhr: No vocals. We never had scratch vocals. We were so well rehearsed that we didn’t need vocal cues to know where we were in the song. MD: How were your interactions with the Millington sisters? de Buhr: June and I had a rough relationship at times—we are like oil and vinegar—but I respected her musically. In fact, I didn’t want to be in a band that she wasn’t in. After Mother’s Pride, she wasn’t there anymore, and that’s one of the reasons I quit. June was the best rhythm guitarist I ever played with, and she became the best lead guitarist for Fanny songs. One of the things I love about her solos is that they were always melodic, and they always fit the song perfectly. There was never any of that “Arabian Nights” stuff—the dweedle-y, dweedle-y, woo-woo crap. She was always laser-focused on being the best guitarist she could be for the band. As for Jean, she and I were always in the pocket. I always wanted my bass drum to mimic what Jean was playing. We had that unspoken communication thing that only occurs when a band practices together constantly. MD: When the album was completed, were you more or less happy with the result? de Buhr: Listen, I’m sure Richard was trying to make the best album he could, but I don’t feel he ever captured Fanny’s live energy. I don’t think Todd Rundgren did on Mother’s Pride [1973], either. You know, they’re male producers, so it was, “Oh, I know what sounds best,” and they added things that weren’t us. I mean, do you like the Mariachi horns on “The First Time”? I would have loved to fill that space with a keyboard or guitar solo. I don’t think either of them said, “Hey, this band is a good band. How can I help them sound their best, yet still sound like themselves?” MD: How about your drum parts, specifically? de Buhr: I think a pitfall you can have with a short recording turnaround is that the drum parts can sound the same in a lot of the songs. Overall, my drumming on Fanny Hill does not, and I’m really pleased about that. DISCOVER ENDLESS POSSIBILITIES CREATIVE PERCUSSION HAND-CRAFTED PERCUSSION PRODUCTS Looking for something different? We do different! Get 15% off your order with promo code MDMAY15 expires: 7/31/21 www.creativepercussion.netModern Drummer May 2021 16 W hat inspires the human spirit to pursue and achieve greatness? In the case of six-time Modern Drummer cover artist and MD Hall of Famer Dave Weckl, there are many levels of achievement to explore in the evolution of one of drumming’s most accomplished ambassadors. From Weckl’s youthful aspirations to his hard-earned success in the highly competitive New York studio scene, his dedication to following his passion led him to opportunities beyond his wildest expectations. In fact, what embodies the drumming industry in terms of sound, technique, style, and product innovation was partially influenced by Weckl’s unique vision to develop new sonic possibilities, pursue unexplored rhythms, and conceive products that advance the art of drumming. As a teen growing up in St. Louis, Weckl realized drumming was his passion. At 17, he was already playing six nights a week. At 18, he moved to Connecticut to attend University of Bridgeport with aspirations of becoming a New York City session player. As fate would have it, the bassist in the university’s jazz band invited Weckl to join the group that would become Nite Sprite (named for the classic Chick Corea tune)—a mostly jazz-fusion band performing original music, along with contemporary material from Weather Report and Corea. Eventually, Weckl recruited his long-time St. Louis friend, keyboardist Jay Oliver, who had been touring with Maynard Ferguson, and the two roomed together in Westport, Connecticut. Eventually, Nite Sprite debuted in New York at the Brecker Brothers club, Seventh Avenue South. It was lots of heavy lifting of gear to the upstairs venue for $20 a player. During this time, Weckl had been sending tapes and letters to Peter Erskine, who was drumming with Stan Kenton. While Erskine was hanging out in New York with jazz guitarist Steve Khan, the two went to see Nite Sprite. Erskine was so impressed with Weckl’s playing, he recommended him for a gig with a group called French Toast, featuring Santo Domingo pianist Michel Camilo and New York session bassist Anthony Jackson. Ironically, Jackson was the bassist who played on Corea’s “Nite Sprite” along with studio-drumming giant Steve Gadd—who Weckl had studied intently in his youth. And so began Weckl’s entry into the big leagues. “I had finally achieved the level I had always dreamed of reaching,” he remembers. “The moral of this story is that it’s all about supporting the music, making it feel good, and putting your own special sauce on it so you’re not sounding too generic.” May 2021 Modern Drummer 17 © Brendan Joyce PhotographyNext >