Jason Bittner Of Shadows Fall / Burning Human

This Off Beat interview with Jason Bittner was conducted by Craig Sternberg for the May issue of SD Magazine. Login on May 3rd and check out the remainder of the interview & tons more… While the Off Beat section is mainly for drummers outside of extreme metal, we put Jason's interview here to keep the three just posted together. This will be moved to our normal news section after May 3rd…

Jason on The War Within/Fallout From the War:

"The War Within" set a bit of a bar for me.  Then we went in to do "Fallout From the War", which was just a B-Sides record.  I had an opportunity with that to basically play my ass off, at least with the original songs on there.  I guess because that record was a B-Sides record and it absolutely had to come out, some people thought it was the next Shadows Fall record, but it wasn't.  It was a companion piece to "The War Within".  Since we pretty much had to get it done, I was allowed a clean slate to do whatever I wanted.  If they didn't say, "Take it out!", I didn't take it out.  Since that record didn't get recognized as much as it should have, it kind of bums me out a bit.  I really think I had some great stuff on that album.

Jason on Threads of Life:

"Fallout From the War" was more difficult as far as the drumming went.  So when I thought about going in and topping that, "Threads of Life" came around.  Well, they weren't the same type of songs that we were writing for "The War Within" or "Fallout From the War".  The fastest song on "Threads of Life" is 195 bpm.  I'm not saying that it's about the tempo, I'm just comparing the records.  I had to think of different ways on that record to say what I wanted to say on the drums in a different context.  How can I outdo myself by playing a different style?  Or some different rudimental passages?  Or some other fills or beats I've never used before?  It's not necessarily going to be better because it's faster than the last album.  I definitely think that on "Threads of Life", I wouldn't say my drumming was toned down, I just played for the songs.  That still comes down to being the most important part of being a drummer: just playing for the song.  Some of the songs on that record called for faster double bass, some of them didn't.  I'm not the kind of guy who goes into the studio and puts something in just for the sake of my ego.  Especially when it clashes with the song.  I tried that in some spots; I tried putting a blast beat on "Dread Uprising", and nope, it took away from it.  If the song doesn't call for it, I'm not going to put it in there.  I think "Threads of Life" is a great record, it's just a different record.  You can't make anybody happy anymore.

Jason on being called the best drummer in metal:

That thought has never gone through my mind, because I'm not.  I'm not the best metal drummer in the world.  I'm just a very recognizable drummer in the metal world.  If I could take the four awards that I'm looking at right now on my wall, I'd give one to Lombardo, one to Charlie Benante, one to Derek Roddy, and one to Gavin Harrison.  I don't want to be self-deprecating here, or downplay the accolades that I've gotten.  It's about popularity.  I was popular at that time, and it's great.  Do I want to give the awards up?  No!  I'm very proud of them.  At the same time, it put so much pressure on me.  I don't go on these sites all the time and read about how this guy thinks I suck or this guy deserves this and I don't deserve that.  The bottom line is, I didn't ask for it.  I didn't go online and say, "Hey, the Modern Drummer polls are up!  Please go vote for me!".  I wasn't doing the politician thing, it just happened.  I should be very happy and proud of that, and I am, I really am.  But sometimes it's nice not to win, because there's no pressure.

Jason on his old faithful kit:

I used it for the whole "Threads of Life" tour aside for a Mirage kit I used on the Static-X tour.  The blue kit is definitely old faithful; it's always reliable.  It probably would have gotten used on this album, but I'm having a hard time getting the BBE kit tuned the way I want it to sound.  The kick drums sound great, but I was having a lot of problems with my toms.  I have a very specific way of tuning.  With any Tama kit I've ever encountered, whether it's a birch kit, a maple kit, even a Superstar kit, as long as I put Emperors on top and Ambassadors on the bottom, Power strokes on the kicks, a Reverse Dot CS on the snare or an Emperor X, I'm good to go!  That kit is going to sound great!  When I got the BBE kit, the kicks sounded great, but the toms just did not sound great at all.  They just sounded flat.  I didn't know what the hell was going on; I was tuning it the way I would tune any other Tama kit, I just wasn't getting it.  Even my sound guy was like, "Your toms sound like the heads have been on them for ten days!".  There was no resonance at all.  It didn't make me very happy, for the next year I was like, "Wow, my drums sound dead everytime I put heads on them".  But you know, I dealt with it.  I was talking with Todd Sucherman this year at the MD festival, and we were talking about bubinga drums.  I have an old Sonor bubinga drum kit at my house, and I know he's a big proponent of old Sonor drums, so I was asking him how I could get those to sound better.  He said, "You have to put Clear Ambassadors on both sides".  I said, "Really?", and he was like, "Yeah, you have to put Ambassadors on them, it will make that kit really sing".  Since the kit wasn't full bubinga but it was birch and bubinga, I took that thought and I came home, put Ambassadors on.  It was like night and fucking day!  I couldn't believe it!  The drums finally sounded like what I thought they could sound like.

So I did my clinic tour with that kit, and it sounded great the whole tour.  The only thing is that Ambassadors don't last that long.  So I went into the studio and told Zeuss that I'm using Ambassadors, and he said, "Well, I don't want you having to change heads every three songs, let's try the Emperors".  So this time around what I did was I tuned each tom about three-quarters to a step higher than I normally would tune the drum, and that's what brought them.  It was just changing my way of tuning, tuning them a little bit higher all the way around really brought out that kit.  I was really impressed in the studio, and it really, really sounded good.

Jason on practicing:

As I play in different projects, I've found that I have had to go back and practice more.  It's nice that I have the luxury to call my good buddy Derek Roddy and ask him for tips; ask him, "How can I get this faster?", or, "Is this blast beat right?", and I play him shit over the phone.  Or you know, I watch Flo Mounier's DVD, and I send him e-mails and ask stuff.  It's still kicking my ass, my other projects force me to practice stuff that I thought I wasn't going to be working on.

Jason Bittner on his Neil Peart philosophy:

There was room for improv on this record, but I also did have a lot of my stuff planned out.  I think that's also what set "Threads of Life" back a little bit, too, because with that album I didn't have a lot of it set in stone, there was definitely a lot more jamming on some of the parts than I had done in the past.  With me, when I do a record, I adopt the Neil Peart philosophy: I want to go in there knowing what the hell I'm going to play, and just do it.  I want to know what fill is coming between the first verse and first chorus, I wanna know what double bass part goes well.  I want to know what goes on with the song.  I don't want to be like, "Okay, here comes the part, how do I transition into it?" — sometimes that works, sometimes it's a train wreck.

Jason on haters:

At the end of the day, the most important thing is: did I feel I did the best job I could on this record?  Yes.  At the end of the day, that's the most important thing to me.  If I'm your favorite drummer, I think that's awesome, and I appreciate that!  If you don't like it, that's cool, man!  You can check out someone else!  If you're going to spend ten minutes posting something online about hating me, isn't there something more constructive you can do with your time?  Like practicing?

Jason on being all over the drumming scene:

I never look at it like that.  It's even surrealistic for me to think about where I've gotten in the past ten years.  I know that I worked my ass off.  People say to me all the time, "Well, you're all over the place!  I see you all over the place", and I go, "Yes, it's because I'm working fucking all the time!".  When I get off the road with Shadows Fall and I know that I'm free, the first thing I'm doing is calling my students to see if they want to take lessons the three weeks I am home.  The second thing I'm doing is seeing where I can book a clinic or if there's a festival that's open, and I can fly there and do it.  I'll play with other bands back home, I'll do studio shit.  I just like playing!  The way I feel about it is that I'm so lucky to be here and have gotten this far; I've gotten to do things I never thought I'd do in my fucking life!  I still have to pinch myself.  But while I'm here I've got to work myself to the bone to stay here because there are tens of thousands of drummers that, I guarantee you, are as good as I am or better.  But they either won't get discovered because they live in some obscure town, or they don't have the persona to go out and pursue getting a band or just playing in their basement.  There's so much talent in this world that lurks around that we will never know about.

Jason Bittner on his Berklee experience:

Was it worth it for me?  Yes.  Should I have tried harder when I was there?  Yes.  Things are different there now; I went there twenty years ago.  When I got there, I walked around the building and I walked around through the drum sheds and every fucking person that I saw was killing me.  I'm coming from upstate New York where I was the big fish in the little pond.  I was the guy with the feet.  As soon as I got there I was like, "Holy shit!  Am I in the wrong place?".  Let's just say the self esteem level was not there.  After about three days, I came across the sheds and I saw this kid who looked like he was fifteen, and he was playing out of the first educational book you could ever play through.  As soon as I saw that I said, "There is hope for me!".  That began my journey.  When I was there, I was known as the double bass guy, because if you came down to the sheds, that's all you saw.  You saw Jason playing along to Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax, Helloween, that's what I did.  That's not all I did, but primarily what I did.  I was a rock drummer, but I wanted to play in a metal band.  I was a thrash metal drummer but I wanted to learn other shit and Berklee was the best place, I thought, for me to do that.  I'd spend the first hour and a half of my session wailing away on the thrash, heating up my window of the little closest I was playing in, people constantly just coming down looking in and not knowing if they were watching because they were curious or if they were just like, "What is this idiot doing?".  After that, I'd spend the next hour working on what I was supposed to work on for my lessons.  So this is what it was, when I first got to Berklee this is how I saw it, "Wow, this is awesome!  It's music 24/7 365 days a year!".  My second semester, I sounded like this: "This is fucking awesome!  It's music 24 fucking 7 365 fucking days a year" [Groans]  I was fucking over it.  I don't know why, I think that it's because I was nineteen years old and I wanted to be in a band.  I didn't want to be in music school anymore.  I loved it, my time there was invaluable.  It taught me how to start comping with jazz, start four-way independence and syncopation.  It's a tool for me to teach my students.  It got me into learning Latin, I still love playing sambas to this day.  It got me really starting to look at my technique, listening to the teachers, and it gave me the ability to play with other players.  In hindsight, looking at it now, do I wish I gave a little more of my time there?  Yes.  Do I wish that I stayed there?  Yes.  If I had stayed at Berklee and if I had gotten my degree, is there any guarantee that I'd be sitting here talking to you today?  Is there any guarantee that I would have ended up in a band?  There's a good chance I would have ended up with a degree and still worked somewhere where I'd ask you if you'd like fries with that.  So I don't regret the choices that I've made.  It would be nice if I had a degree from there but sometimes things don't happen the way you want.

Jason on the section of the DVD inspired by his stay at Berklee:

I still think it's a great school, and I would recommend it to people.  I would even go back if I had the time and the money.  That was one of the most integral parts of my experience at Berklee, learning other styles of music.  It built the whole last chapter of my DVD.  The whole last section is this thing that I call "metalfly".  It's basically just taking other styles of music and interjecting little feels to make them feel metalized.  It gives you the ability to practice two different styles at the same time, which is like multi-tasking.  Every review I have read about the DVD so far mentions that section.  If I hadn't gone to Berklee, I wouldn't have been able to come up with the segment of that DVD.

Jason and his friendship with Mike Portnoy:

Mike Portnoy of Dream Theater and I are dear friends, we have so many weird similarities it's not even funny.  Down to weird stuff, we both have a tattoo on our left forearm representing the loss of our mother.  Both New Yorkers, both went to Berklee one year, met people, got in a band, and left.  He was there a year before me, so it's weird we didn't meet then.

Jason on playing fast:

I've always been a proponent of groove and making things solid.  If your double bass is 280 bpm, that's fucking great!  I can't do that!  But to me it's almost harder to play double bass at 160 bpm and keep it even than it is to play faster.  Let's face it, sometimes faster is easier.  Even on the "War Within" record, I did the little bonus DVD for the song "The Light that Blinds".  I'm talking about one of the parts that I broke down and when I play it slow, you see on the DVD me playing it not really that well.  I said right after, "Obviously you see I can't really play it that well slow".  I can play it fast, but playing it slower is harder; it's really weird.

When we finished "Fallout From the War", at that time, the fastest song I had recorded on a record was "Going Going Gone" which was about 210 bpm constant single stroke 16th double bass.  After I finished that record I was thinking to myself, "Well fuck, now what the hell am I going to do?".  At that given time, my threshold for steady double bass was about 205-210 bpm on a good day.  I really didn't think it would do me any good to sit in my basement and try to get faster, either, it's not called for in Shadows Fall.  It's senseless for me to try to do a 300 bpm hyperblast if I know I'm never going to use it in Shadows Fall.  Great tool to have, but if I'm never going to use it, why waste my time?