So today, we're going to focus on the early 20th century, when the world
was rapidly changing with inventions like the automobile, telephone, electricity
and the radio becoming commonplace, musicians were inventing too.
Percussion instruments from different parts of the world,
all ended up on the same stage and a drum kit as we know it
today began to take shape. Wohoo!! Vicky O'Neon presents
Drumming Through The Decades My name is Vicky O'Neon,
I'm a drummer and educator. In this series, we're looking at
the history of drumming, mainly focusing on how drumming has evolved
over the past hundred and fifty years. Live theatre and so-called Vaudeville
shows, which provided cheap entertainment to the new working class, became more
popular at the turn of the century. A vaudeville show was a precursor
to what we today know as musicals and would usually involve
music, dance and acting. Vaudeville shows really set the template
for popular entertainment being big business, but was also an attempt
to bridge social gaps between classes. So these shows opened the doors for women
and Afro-American entertainers, and although they were still overshadowed
by their white counterparts, this contributed to a greater
acceptance of both parties in society.
In the vaudeville shows, you could see female players
with so-called masculine instruments like drums, banjos and trombones,
which gave them a platform and an opportunity to showcase
their talents to a wider audience. But appearance was also more important
than their musical talent, and all female shows were often
described as a kind of sex show. So when club owners noticed that this
could be a "ka-ching ka-ching" lucrative market, they started booking more and more women,
and especially the beautiful ones.
This led to one of the first women's
rights movements who, amongst other things, fought against women being seen as a sex object rather than becoming
successful for their talent. Wait, are we talking about
the 20th or 21st century here? Would love to hear your thoughts and
comments on this, in the section below. As the Vaudeville shows got bigger,
the show owners wanted to figure out how one person could play more than one
percussion instrument at the same time, partly to make it cheaper and also
to make it look more entertaining. This led to the invention of something
called a double drumming, where drummers would set a snare drum
on a chair in front of them and a bass drum on the floor, so both can be played
at the same time using sticks. So let's head over to my studio so I
can show you what I'm talking about. So here I've set up something
that looks like a double drumming kit. And as the popular music of the time was
marching band music, that's also the rhythms that you
would hear in the double drumming. And in the bass drum,
you would have this kind of one, two, three, four,
one, two, three, four, feel.
And then in the snare drum, boom-chi, boom-chi, boom-chi, boom-chi. This rhythm is called a two feel rhythm, and it's sort of designed to make
large groups of people move, as you can kind of here, right?! And then the snare drum would also
have marching band rudiments. So let's have a little go and see what a
double drumming groove could sound like. That was fun, also kind of hard
without the bass drum pedal, obviously double drumming existed before the bass drum pedal was invented,
though there had been several attempts with so-called overhang pedals,
but they were really difficult to play and most drummers preferred
to play the bass drum with sticks. This was until 1909, when the
Chicago based Ludwig drum company invented the first, drum roll….
Bass drum pedal. What a revolution. The design they came up with is very similar to the bass drum pedals we use
today, and an extra bonus was that you could actually dismantle it and put
it in your pocket, like Wowzaaa.
You can't do that with today's
bass drum pedals. And this was especially handy at the time
since drummers had to lug their whole drum kits on trams that started to become
popular in all major U.S. cities. There was this law saying that you could
only bring on board what you could carry. So drummers started to get really
innovative to get their whole setups to gigs. All you drummers out there,
what's your thoughts on this? In the 1890s, there was also a new style of music
that started to develop called Ragtime. It was primarily played by African-American piano,
guitar and banjo players. It had what was called a syncopated feel. This rhythm made people want to dance
and it quickly became very popular. So all of the drummers
only had the double drums. They now started to get more experimental
with the rhythms and rudiments and started to improvise with this
cool new sense of swing. Here we are back in my studio. So that syncopated rhythm, which sort of defines ragtime,
comes from the Rumba clave, which originates from that Yoruban
people in West Africa.
And it sounds like this. And you could clearly hear this syncopation, which makes things more
groovy, makes people want to dance. You can clearly hear it in all the instruments that are playing ragtime,
also including the drums. So it goes something like this. And with music, it sounds
something like this. At the turn of the century, the United States was receiving
immigrants from all over the world. As a result of this, drummers started to
add new, more interesting sounds to their rigs. Popular editions were woodblocks
originating from China and Korea, African cowbells known as "Gankoqui", and Chinese "Tack Toms" and inside-out
cymbals, so-called "Chinas". Turkish cymbals were also very popular,
especially from a small family that came to the U.S.
In the beginning of the 20th
century, who carried the surname Zildjian. Just like today's session drummers,
drummers at the time were used to taking on many different roles and jobs.
Outside of marching bands and orchestras, you could also get hired for variety
shows and theatre productions to create sound effects to accompany
dancers or comedy on stage. And with the evolution
of film and radio, drummers, and sometimes several of them, would also
get hired to create sound effects for radio programs and silent film.
Hidden behind the movie screen, drummers would provide the effects
for the silent movies like gunshots, trains, babies crying, horses galloping..
You name it, with woodblocks, whistles, saws and all sorts
of different contraptions. Drum kits at the time were actually called
trap kits, and this was because of the trey that held
the percussion contraptions.
So contraption was shortened to "Trap". Eventually they became "Trap kit" and players used to be
referred to as "Trap drummers". No, not that kind of Trap. What kind of sound do you
think would have been fun to try to recreate as a Trap drummer?
Put your comment below. A common problem that bands were facing was that drummers were being too loud,
overshadowing other instruments. You see back then they didn't have PA's
or amplification, but the drums were the same size as they
are today, or actually often even bigger. So drummers started to look for things
they could use to play more quietly. And one thing they found was fly swatters, which back then were made from metal,
and some of them were also telescopic.
So "The brushes" were invented, which is, as we know, a common tool for drummers
still today. Where's my fly swatters? In 1918, the first drum kit,
as we know it was officially created by the Ludwig Drum Company.
They invented an all in one set with a bass drum and a pedal, a snare,
two cymbals and a woodblock. And they called this the "Jazz-Er-Up". This was considered a truly
significant innovation. So as the drum kits became more and more
popular in modern music, the drummer really cemented their
role for decades to follow. And this set the stage for one
of music's big breakthroughs – Jazz. More on that in the next episode. Thank you for watching. Comment below with any questions
or insights from this era. And don't forget to subscribe to catch
the next episode, where we will get to know some badass all female orchestras
and learn where the name jazz comes from and why it became the most
popular music of the 1920s.
See you then!.
from WordPress https://ift.tt/3AlsTwt
via IFTTT
No comments:
Post a Comment