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Tuesday, June 13, 2023

Solo transcription: Joey Baron - Goldfish

Joey Baron's solo over a 7/4 vamp on Goldfish, from Dave Douglas's 1997 album Stargazer, to which I'm listening a lot this week. 

There's not a ton of drumistic content to it, it's more of an attitude— it's a power solo, playing off the structure, for impact. Mostly pretty simple syncopated melodic things on the snare and toms, with big accents on the crash cymbal, with the bass drum or snare drum. You can play this way, solos don't have to be technical.  

Actually the vamp is three bars of 7/4 plus one bar of 9/4. 


Here we go, tempo is 142 bpm: 


He plays quarter notes on the hihat with his foot part of the time, but it's not really central to what he's playing, so I left it out. Play it if it helps you, especially setting up the syncopated rhythms he's playing on the rest of the set.  

He's two crash cymbals along with the ride cymbal— one of them is pretty trashy, almost a China sound. The ride cymbal is not the usual taped up thing he was using at the time, every other aspect of his sound is familiar, from that period— punchy toms, very fat snare drum (I still copy that sound, to some extent), he wails on a 16" crash pretty often, 20 or 22" bass drum tuned for a full sound. 

There aren't a lot of internal dynamics happening— things are mostly pretty strong, at a pretty even volume. It's a different thing, playing bam-bam style, vs. playing with a lot of soft things mixed in with your loud things.  

He does play big dynamics on that single stroke roll at the beginning. That takes a lot of ability. 

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