Subrick's Picks: A look At Up & Coming Drummers – Pick 12
Written by: Richard “Subrick” Lowell
Happy New Year! It is I, the fat man himself, the (self proclaimed) World’s Ugliest Drummer, Subrick here presenting you the first new Subrick’s Picks of the final year of our existence. No, seriously. The world will end in 2012 from everyone laughing so hard that the apocalypse didn’t come. This will cause the Earth to shift out of orbit from all the suddenly added mass of every sane person on the planet falling on the ground from laughter, sending the Earth rocketing out of the Goldilocks zone and into the sun. Anyway, I have a Zoom Q3HD now, so that means that whatever drumming related video material I put up in the future will both look and sound amazing. Check my channel out in the assorted links at the end of this article. Also, I hope everyone had a fantastic New Year.
For your chance to be featured: All you have to do is post a video of you drumming to YouTube, Vimeo or whatever video site you prefer, and embed the link on this website in the SD Videos section. Nothing more, nothing less, but you do need to be a registered member of our site to post.
There are three categories on which I base my selections: Playing Ability, Production Value, and Kit Sound. All three are pretty straight forward, but here’s what I specifically look for with each category.
Playing Ability: I look to see if a player is technically sound; timing is good, endurance and power are up to par, among other, more miniscule things.
Production Value: I prefer to watch video from a good quality camera, or studio quality. By studio quality, I don’t mean the greatest production sound ever recorded. I classify studio quality as a drumming performance recorded with microphones and/or triggers. Electronic kits are very much encouraged (especially when using less conventional samples). Now, if you have sound quality that isn’t as good, that doesn’t mean you won't be included in my selection process. Everyone is eligible to be featured.
Kit Sound: One of the most important characteristics! We all have read Eyal Levi’s article about why drum performances are always sound replaced these days. For those who haven’t, the basic gist of it is because drummers don’t know how to tune their drums. Considering that many drum videos I see on YouTube involve players that have really bad sounding kits, it seems rarer and rarer that drummers actually tune their drums. Meet all three of these criteria, and you have a shot to be featured. You could be playing the most radio friendly Disney pop imaginable, but if I feel your video meets these criteria, you could make the front page.
And now, let us move on to the picking.
The first pick of 2012 is Cody Stewart of the band Serpents. Where they are from is a mystery to me, as their Facebook doesn’t tell their location (it merely lists their location as “Earth”), although judging from the location listed on Cody’s personal Facebook, I’m tempted to say somewhere in Kentucky. They describe their sound as “blackened deathcore”, and although I hear more Oceano than Abigail Williams in this song, the songs on their Facebook definitely qualify for that description. Cody’s kit is a four piece with a variety of different cymbal brands on it, the most visible being a Sabian crash and a Zildjian crash & hi-hats. I quite like the splash/mini-china configuration he has around his rack tom; they’re placed in a way where they’re more on either side of the tom, rather than in front of it as most drummers would put them. His cymbals are also very low, below the line of sight actually. Most drummers I know of, myself included, have their crashes either straight in their line of sight or higher, so it’s a little interesting to see a drummer play with his crashes a bit lower.
{hwdvideoshare}id=1427{/hwdvideoshare}
Cody’s Links:
That’ll just about do it for this installment of Subrick’s Picks. As mentioned earlier, subscribe to me on Youtube, and like me on Facebook, follow me on Twitter, like my bands Pandora’s Toybox and Nemesis Engine, and watch out in 2012 for the new Pandora’s Toybox album “Bleakshow”. Until next time, Subrick out!
Leave a Reply