times I would fi nish something and go to where the ride cymbal should be and there’s a tom there. So the map is diff erent. But I was able to compensate. It’s not a
compromise, it’s a limitation, and one that I decided on for all good reasons. And I noticed quite a few of the songs had chimes. I have that as a sample on my malletKAT, but I thought, You know what: Real chimes—it’s suitable for the theater. Century Mallet in Chicago made these beautiful-sounding black-nickel chimes. The one factor that connects all this is the
second bass drum. All the toms sound muddy on that side. And I’m told by the sound guys out front that a good thing is the main bass drum resonates in the other one, and it gives it a certain sonic quality out front that’s all right. But it’s the little subtle things like that that are a challenge.
Making Trades MD: You’ve been celebrating the fortieth anniversary of the band on this tour. How do you choose what to play? Neil: We don’t have any songs that we hate, and there’s none that we get sick of. They all have their charm to us, because they were all written from the heart, so there’s none we feel reluctant to play. We came up with alternate sets, so it allowed us to not have to drop things but just play them every three or four shows. And that served us well on the last tour, and it was the fi rst time we dared to try that. We usually hesitate to take on more work than we need. [laughs] And that’s true even on the records. We’ve never written and recorded a song that we didn’t put out. Why go through all that trouble? Our benchmarks are really organic ones. I
C M Y CM MY CY
always think if I have a good idea, I’ll remember it. If we play something that we like, we’ll remember it. So there were songs that never got played, for one reason or another. We also wanted to fi x on what we thought were high points along the way dynamically. But all the ones in the fi rst set are killers to play, physically. MD: They look demanding on you, right away. Neil: On an album, you’ll typically have a couple of slower, easier, gentler songs. But live, we don’t. So it’s an hour sprint for me. Full power from me. MD: So if you never played “Limelight” again, that’d be okay? Neil: Yeah, we’ve done it. We still like it. And there were lots of songs like that. We said, “Let’s do this instead.” We had to make those kinds of trade-off s.
CMY K January 2016 Modern Drummer 41
MD: With your new feel and clock and maturity, do you ever think about how you might do something diff erently from these iconic parts and fi lls that you wrote long ago? Neil: I do play those songs very diff erently. I’ve evolved into a diff erent, more improvisa- tional player. The clock on “Tom Sawyer” or “The Spirit of Radio” now…they’re very diff erent from what they were. I’m happy to play the composed parts the same every night. “Tom Sawyer” remains that way. If I
can play that right every night? Fine. I don’t change very much, and I don’t feel like I want to. “The Spirit of Radio” is another great example. Since 1979, I don’t think I’ve changed anything except the feel. For songs in those days, we were just
1SKB_ModernDrummer_Jan16.pdf 1 10/15/15 11:14 AM
starting to do a very formative technical thing, which was to put sequencers in the middle of a song. For that song, I’d have to play the intro and the fi rst verse, which already have two diff erent tempos, and then get to the chorus, with that sequence [sings
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