Given the drummer is often keeping the beat in a song, what tips do folks have for keeping your place?
For example, in Grooving & Improving - section 3, lesson 3, there is a suggested song map of 7 x Beat, 1 x Fill etc. In this particular example, the guitar part definitely changes up and I could latch onto that to know when the Fill was expected. This won’t always be the case.
I guess thinking as I type, every instrument needs to know where they are at in a song so how do you do it.
In my guitar playing I like to play along to Metallica’s - Seek & Destroy. It doesn’t have that many parts and I think some go as long as repeating the same 2 bars 8 x.
For me it is usually singing the song in my head. If there’s a melody that helps, but in the case of just guitar chords or something you can still sing that. Main part, going into that new part, what does it sound like? Rhythm, notes etc. And if you have that in your memory you can usually play along to it fine as a drummer.
There is another thing which is some sort of an inuition for loops. So a feeling for what “every other bar” is. And then “every 4 bars” and then “every 8, every 12, every 16”.
There is an intuitive difference between 3 and 4 bars. To me there is also an intuitive difference between 7 and 8 bars and 8 and 9 bars. The even ones feel right and the uneven ones feel weird (not that you can never have 9 bars in a song section… it’s just… more exceptional).
My guess is that intuition grows over time. I don’t really know how I know where I am in a bar to be honest. I only know that actively counting every bar is probably not something most drummers do over time. At some point they just know where they are because they played certain things a lot.
I do finger-drumming for recording, so I’m able to look up at the computer screen to check where I am. I use Logic Pro, and I colour-code the Arrangement bars so I can see what’s coming up.
But I’ve played live a lot on other instruments, and my main tip is to practice a lot until your hands can mostly take care of playing and your mind has some bandwidth spare to follow where you are in the song.
I find it helpful as well to listen (if it’s a cover) and practice the song often enough. This helps feeling the start of a section, or anticipating a new section.
At some point lyrics and chord changes become triggers that signal an upcoming section change. This may start conscious, counting the amount of bars (or sets of 4 bars), and gradually becomes habit. Knowing the song also helps because band members sometimes happily skip over bars as well.
I play a lot with drumless backing tracks. Most of time I just use my intuition. However, when I start to practise a new song I use my recording software (Mixcraft) to give me tips where I am. I use colour-coded markers for adding notes such as “Chorus”, “Verse”, “Fill” or " Guitar solo". Sometimes I even mark Cymbal hits.