Dennis Chambers hears "Schism" for the first time

May 24, 2022 6:11 AM

Legendary funk/jazz fusion drummer Dennis Chambers hears Tool's "Schism" for the first time. Then plays it. A companion piece to Larnell Lewis Hears "Enter Sandman" for the first time.
posted by saladin (24 comments total)

Now I want to see Danny Carey play some funk!
posted by schyler523 at 6:41 AM on May 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

Thanks for posting! Dennis Chambers is awesome, and this also supports my suspicion that Tool are kind of Mahavishnu Orchestra with less solos. I'd love to hear the second or third take, I can imagine there'd be some more toms layered in filling out the sound.
posted by threecheesetrees at 6:50 AM on May 24, 2022

That was fun to watch. The last band that I played in was led by a guitar player who would record riffs into his phone, but didn't really have a sense of time signature. He just played a riff that he liked, and maybe it was in 13, maybe it was a measure of 5, a measure of 3, a measure of 7... and sometimes it wasn't consistent as he played multiple measures. Rather than try to shoehorn those back into 3/4 or 4/4, I'd try to work out drum beats that followed his lead, and that process probably looked a lot like this, but with much less finesse.
posted by Leviathant at 6:55 AM on May 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

One of the things that I love about Tool is that they are all in the rhythm section.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 6:58 AM on May 24, 2022 [6 favorites]

And to go deeper into this hole, a metal drummer reacts to Larnell Lewis listening/playing Enter Sandman for the first time. That video is equal parts awe and joy.
posted by NoMich at 7:12 AM on May 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

He just played a riff that he liked, and maybe it was in 13, maybe it was a measure of 5, a measure of 3, a measure of 7... and sometimes it wasn't consistent as he played multiple measures.


That's completely common in guitar. A time signature (and key) is always applied afterwards, unless you are working with hacks with directives from the executives, or a singer who can only sing in certain keys.
posted by The_Vegetables at 7:44 AM on May 24, 2022

Dennis Chambers is no Larnell Lewis, but that's not a criticism. Lewis has a profoundly deep musical intuition coupled with transcendant technique. When Lewis does this, he's hearing the drum stems (unlike Chambers) and while that does provide more context, I do think Lewis is decomposing the song into chunks and understanding it well enough so that he's able to (nearly) recapitulate the drum part perfectly. It's very impressive.

Chambers is doing something much more modest (though at a very high level of musianship): he's "playing along".

He's at his best in two sections. The first is toward the end when the song returns to its motif and just digs into it — Chambers has been experimenting all along with what he wants to do and here he finally nails it. Right away in the song Chambers understood how important the syncopating snare was; but it was only at this point that he settled into it fully.

And then shortly after that the song enters a slowly building crescendo where the beat really drives the crescendo forward and at this point Chambers, I think, finally really feels it and is enjoying himself.

Drumeo, and more generally YouTube, is a great resource. I envy today's young musicians.
posted by Ivan Fyodorovich at 8:15 AM on May 24, 2022 [3 favorites]

Dennis Chambers is no Larnell Lewis, but that's not a criticism.

I sort of envy people who've got the capacity to have nuanced opinions about people operating at that level. I'm sitting here with my jaw on the floor, I'm a little preoccupied to wonder whether or not it's a nice hardwood floor.
posted by mhoye at 9:27 AM on May 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

Chambers has been experimenting all along with what he wants to do and here he finally nails it

it's like he somehow knows the pieces fit
posted by logicpunk at 9:40 AM on May 24, 2022 [26 favorites]

I know nothing about drumming but I love watching these types of videos when I fall down a youtube hole.
posted by ShakeyJake at 10:22 AM on May 24, 2022

after Chambers wraps up he summarizes the effort with "if felt great to me" and yea, I love it for the same reason I like covers, instrumental versions, and re-interpretations of work that I am familiar with. He started by saying that he listens for the style, and I am most impressed with how much he was able to be true to that.
posted by zenon at 10:41 AM on May 24, 2022

"OK, I got a problem with this. This is not my type of thing!"

LOL you tell 'em!

I love how I can see Dennis is actually holding back and keeping it simple for the first pass. He's just itching to make it way funkier and throw a lot more syncopation and flourish into it.

Deep apologies to any Tool fans but this is a working demonstration of why people (like me) get irritated by Tool megafans going on about how convoluted or complex they are in the rhythm section.

I'm not a fan of Tool because I'm just not into heavy rock sounds and hearing someone yell and be angsty as a vocal and the overall aesthetic - and it's fine if you are, it just stresses me out and I used to be really into that kind of anger/darkness as a musical aesthetic and went through a very heavy industrial phase - but also mainly because the music and rhythm signatures are just not as complicated as Tool fans tend to think it is when you compare it to funk and jazz drumming and their syncopated polyrhythms.

I'm not irritated by Tool megafans because Tool is too complex and I don't get it or something but because it's not complex enough!

I mean if Tool did IDM like Squarepusher, Aphex Twin or even Plaid or something I'd probably be a Tool fan, sure, but then they wouldn't be Tool.

And before anyone says "Yeah, but MIDI and drum machines are easy!" (they're emphatically not, omg) there's a bunch of people that cover stuff like this with live drums just for the challenge of it and it's absolutely fucking mental that people do this kind of MIDI-based drum sections live. There's even been some covers of super complex IDM stuff like Aphex Twin with full orchestra arrangements and live drums.

Also, Tool studio albums definitely use heavy editing in DAWs like ProTools to get that super clean, clockwork sound, which is just MIDI and drum machines with extra steps and sampling. Most major studio albums do. A major part of the modern rock album production process for the past two decades or more is doing full on audio surgery and drum part replacements where you lay down the live drum section parts and then go over that and replace it beat by beat and note by note and apply quantization to the live rhythm notation.

This is how Tool and other bands get that super loud, clean drum sound that still sounds like live drums and not a drum machine but without the problems and crossover noise of recording a live drum kit in a studio. You can record or sample a bunch of isolated drum hits and go through and replace the live drum patterns with really loud, sonically clean recorded in isolation drum hits like a custom sampled soundfont so there's still some timbre and nuance of live drums but with the precision and quantization of a MIDI drum machine, and then do the usual studio mixing and effects and layering work in the mix on your isolated stems and drum tracks.

This is also why Tool and similar bands sound totally different live compared to the studio albums. Yes, it takes serious skill to play Tool live. Live drums and the science of micing them and amplifying them is a difficult task. Reproducing almost any studio album live on stage takes serious skills, and this is true for electronic/IDM stuff, too, even when they're using MIDI instruments and doing live MIDI improv on stage as a performance.

If anything I like Dennis' improv take better than the original album recording because it hasn't been quantized and sterilized like this and still has some funk left in it even though he's holding back and keeping it simple for a first pass by ear and feel.
posted by loquacious at 11:03 AM on May 24, 2022 [10 favorites]

Chambers is doing something much more modest

I found what Chambers did much more impressive, even if I too got the impression that Lewis took a more structural approach, whereas Chambers went more with the feel.

Lewis heard the song with the drum track, and spent much of his listening session analyzing the drum part (crashes, half-time feel, switching to toms, etc.). Then, when playing along, he initially tried to recreate the original drum part, and then built on it. In the process, he significantly changed the feel of the song, at the end. We're also told that what we heard was actually his second time playing the song. While Lewis gave a more technically demanding performance, it actually made me appreciate the tastefulness and distinctiveness of the original Ulrich part more.

In contrast to this, Chambers created his drum part completely from scratch, just from hearing the other instruments, and played the song only once. Amazingly, he completely absorbed the mood of the piece, and knew right away where to go light on the drumming and where to let loose. He ended up coming up with a very different drum part, compared to the original, and yet one that serves the song very well. Listening to the Chambers version didn't make me wish that I were hearing the original (except for a couple of places), nor did it make me appreciate the original less.
posted by epimorph at 11:28 AM on May 24, 2022 [4 favorites]

Now I want to see Danny Carey play some funk!

Best I can do is Danny Carey playing Fire at a college basketball game.
posted by spikeleemajortomdickandharryconnickjrmints at 11:31 AM on May 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

This is interesting. I wonder why this song out of all the songs in Tool's catalog. It seems like a big stretch in the original is drumless, but he favors an undercurrent of hi-hat. (I'm a sucker for ride cymbals, but it seems like he doesn't favor that so much.)

The "Enter Sandman" one is fun. Weird, because I've heard the song so many times. I don't know if I'm reacting to what he's doing or just the delta between his style and the original. Not so weird he hasn't heard it before - the song's heyday was 1991, 1992. Depending on what radio stations / channels his parents had going on at home, it'd be easy to miss. Metallica kind of went out of relevance in the early 2000s IMO.
posted by jzb at 11:39 AM on May 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

One of the things I love about the Larnell Lewis link in the FPP is how casual he is about it and has enough time to keep adjusting his IEMs and glasses all while hammering it out with a single bass kick pedal instead of a double kick, and he's still hitting those double and triple kicks.

He's not even sweating and just going for it.

And again, apologies to any Tool fans about my rant. Please don't take it personally or as a character attack, some of my best friends absolutely love Tool. And music isn't really a contest or sport. More complex or difficult doesn't automatically mean better or anything.

Forgive me, but I've just had way too many Tool megafans come at me like Tool is the best of the best since Rush or King Crimson. And if you're into that kind of prog rock, they probably are. But when I respond that I'm just not at all into them and reacting like I just don't get it since, I don't know, as far back as when Ænima was released. And hoo boy have I had the same problems with Rush and King Crimson megafans getting all weird and culty about it.

And, really, they're not exactly wrong for thinking I might like them because I do like rhythm based music. I've just never really been into aggressive metal or hard rock short of maybe industrial rock like Ministry or Pigface, which I also don't really listen to anymore because I broke my brain on weird hypercomplicated hipster IDM shit.

All that being said I would totally accept a free ticket to go see Tool or Rush. Especially Rush, but it's a bit late for that. I know they put on great shows.
posted by loquacious at 12:03 PM on May 24, 2022

You can record or sample a bunch of isolated drum hits and go through and replace the live drum patterns with really loud, sonically clean recorded in isolation drum hits like a custom sampled soundfont so there's still some timbre and nuance of live drums but with the precision and quantization of a MIDI drum machine

I did some drum recording with a friend this weekend for an album we're working on, and we actually wound up going the other direction: we played the songs through without a click, I told Logic where the downbeat was, and it built a tempo map of the performance, like magic. I'll be able to sync MIDI to it and do editing of the subsequent tracks by the beat and bar rather than hunting around, and we get to keep all the little push and pull that makes it feel alive. Best of both worlds.

It's so good that I was able to just drop in the guitar and vocal tracks from the demos (which were done to a click) to see how they worked, and the tempos automagically conformed to what we actually played live. Technology is awesome.
posted by uncleozzy at 12:52 PM on May 24, 2022 [5 favorites]

I've just had way too many Tool megafans come at me

this is where I began and left off with Tool, just working with a guy whose insistence on the greatness of the band ended up eclipsing my capacity to hear them in the shop, period
posted by elkevelvet at 2:41 PM on May 24, 2022

I did some drum recording with a friend this weekend for an album we're working on, and we actually wound up going the other direction: we played the songs through without a click, I told Logic where the downbeat was, and it built a tempo map of the performance, like magic. I'll be able to sync MIDI to it and do editing of the subsequent tracks by the beat and bar rather than hunting around, and we get to keep all the little push and pull that makes it feel alive. Best of both worlds.

Oh for sure. ProTools has similar automatic tools and there's also a ton of plugins and VSTs that will do it. Ableton Live has had a beatgrid and warp option for ages, too.

It's not really necessary to go in and surgically slice up beats and do beat replacement any more, but that was a lot of how they (probably) did it for Tool's albums from about 2001 to earlier.

Going back even earlier audio engineers and producers were doing this kind of thing even before ProTools and similar DAWs by using earlier dedicated hardware NLE (non linear editor) tech and consoles.

Even at this late stage in the history of studio albums and production I find that a lot of people have some pre-conceptions or mis-conceptions about how studio albums are functionally produced. They haven't really done the whole "the entire band is playing at the same time in the same room and they just record that" style of live studio recording since, I don't know, the first albums from the Beatles.

Doing linear or non-linear editing has been a thing basically ever since they invented multitrack tape decks. Or click tracks, or synchronized tape transport controls, or SMPTE time codes.

Sure, there are tons of styles of music and bands that still use the big room studio or soundstage method, especially anything that involves jazz, funk or improv where call and repeat, groove and being in the pocket actually means something.

But for most forms of pop music ranging from rock/metal to R&B or just plain old pop chart hits ranging from Michael Jackson to Billie Eilish there's all kinds of studio production process and magic happening.

Otherwise "one take" recordings end up sounding a bit too organic and flat because you're getting too much room tone and bleed between mics no matter how many drum shells, vocal booths and acoustic walls you set up to dampen the live room sound.

If anyone is interested in reading a lot more about this kind of music studio and recording production stuff I highly recommend Tape Op Magazine for the interviews and articles. They get into some really cool, weird niche tech stuff from notable industry wizards and witches. I think they even have all of their issues online for free.
posted by loquacious at 3:19 PM on May 24, 2022 [2 favorites]

this is where I began and left off with Tool, just working with a guy whose insistence on the greatness of the band ended up eclipsing my capacity to hear them in the shop, period

*Cues up Stairway to Heaven on a clapped out old boombox cranked up to 11 and starts operating a pneumatic needle gun and wire brush wheel on some heavy steel*

I think I've been waiting for the precedent of playing butt rock at ear splitting volumes at construction sites and industrial shops for something like 25-30 years. I figured it was going to shift into something equally loud and annoying like brostep by now, but, no, it's still Led Zeppelin and Guns 'n Roses all the time and it's a ponderous mystery to me.

The only thing that has actually changed is that now instead of the local classic rock station on an old beat up boombox it's now Spotify streams on bluetooth on equally beat up and blown out bluetooth speakers.

I have no idea where those guys are getting BT speakers that can even go to 11, but here we are.
posted by loquacious at 3:27 PM on May 24, 2022 [1 favorite]

As someone who knows nothing about music this toy drum set put through studio software makes me think that modern music is a lot like Guitar Hero. You need to get timing down and hit the right keys but software can make it sound really amazing?
posted by geoff. at 9:09 PM on May 24, 2022

modern music is a lot like Guitar Hero

I always liked to play the “sound engineer” role in Rock Band
posted by atoxyl at 9:34 PM on May 24, 2022

Weird to hear the song without the original drums but with all the sidechain compression still on the guitars and bass.
posted by sinfony at 5:38 AM on May 25, 2022 [1 favorite]

"As someone who knows nothing about music this toy drum set put through studio software makes me think that modern music is a lot like Guitar Hero. You need to get timing down and hit the right keys but software can make it sound really amazing?"

Not really.

Music technology is fantastic, and you can do a lot of things to make things sound completely different, and often better. And yes, you can tighten the timing of performances, and replace notes, and often make an out-of-tune singer in tune without most people noticing. But these techniques often work best in music that is very structured, that benefits from things being precise, and that isn’t performed live in the studio.

The video you posted is cool, but not a universal example of this use of technology. Drums on rock/pop records rarely end up sounding like what the actual instrument sounds like in the room that it’s recorded, so we’re already used to the final product sounding vastly different than the source. And even “bad” drums can sound great in the right context. And, of course, this toy drum set is being played by a very good drummer.
posted by jonathanhughes at 5:49 AM on May 25, 2022 [2 favorites]