The Challenge of the Drums
One of the biggest challenges I face when doing a Zeppelin cover is the question of: what to do about the drums? Before I even consider saying yes to a cover I start deep diving on the drums and immediately scour the web for scores. Sometimes you’ll find a score or some drum tab that has been perfectly notated, and other times you’ll just find a few fragments here and there (perhaps from a magazine article or lesson). No matter what you find you still have to audit it for accuracy against the track itself. There are various tricks and aids you can use to help with this but it takes a lot of work and patience to do it properly. Equally challenging is making sense of the drum score itself. Being a non-drummer I am still very dependent on keys and legends to help with the notation. The cool thing is – I’m learning lots as I go!
For Ten Years Gone, I was unable to find any decent drum scores that survived my audits, and the fragments I found were not much better. It was because of this that I decided to bite the bullet and purchase Alfred’s Platinum Album Editions Drummer Edition from Amazon. These Platinum Album Editions are the best and most accurate transcriptions of the Led Zeppelin catalogue ever sold, and supersede all previous published transcriptions by Alfred and other publishers. (They are that good)
The Unknown Notation
After programing drums for the initial proof of concept demo (see here) I knew I had to start making some corrections to the drum tracks and I quickly found something in the score that I had misinterpreted
. There was a little slash notated across a snare hit (on the “a” of 2) that looked to be some sort of roll or ruff, but didn’t appear in the drum legend. I had programed it as a ruff in my drum program (Superior Drummer) and it just didn’t sound right. I had to reach out to the internet for help and it was reddit that came through for me. Apparently that single slash means a double hit, so in this case I should program two 32nd notes here. I have reddit user u/InotMeowMeow to thank for pointing me in the right direction.
Here’s the opening drum parts per the feature image in the header.
(and again in case we lose Soundcloud)
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