Hi everyone,
[edit: I’ve included a link to my sheet music for this song]
This week, I’m sharing some breakdowns of the drum sheet music for Flaccid Acid’s song, Vulture.
The drums for this song have undergone many revisions, but throughout the entire life of the song, the guitar parts have been mostly untouched.
I wanted the rhythm section to be informed by the guitar’s strumming, so I changed both the drums and the bass before David edited any lyrics. The main thing I wanted to include was the use of triplet timing, especially on the bass drum. We recorded our demos in April of 2018, and all of the bass drum parts were meant for a single-pedal setup until August 2018.
During the summer of 2018, our friend, Abhay, was rehearsing with us as our drummer. We intended to play a show with all three of us, but we were unable to book a show before Abhay moved to the East Coast to study for his MBA. While he was our drummer, I played the bass guitar when we rehearsed and continued to work on my double-bass technique outside of rehearsal. So between August and October of 2018, I added a lot of alternating double-bass parts to each of our songs.
After David wrote some lyrics for this song, I made the cymbals less intense during the singing parts. The hatched circles in the notation below are for half-open hi-hat hits and the thin “x” notes are for closed hi-hat hits.
The next revision came from practicing rudiments. I was working on accented triplets when I thought of these two bars; I just replaced the accented notes with cymbals. I was very excited to work in some cymbal chokes, shown through that quarter-note rest in bar 84. The following bar just made a lot of sense to include once I gained the muscle memory.
Again, once I got Bar 84 down, Bars 157-158 basically wrote themselves. The sticking feels much more natural for this section with traditional grip. When I attempt to play this part with matched grip, I tend to miss the drums or hit my elbow with my left stick.
The half-time section, which I affectionately used to refer to as the “spaceship” part, had an abbreviated bar. And while I tried to reassure David that I wrote the drums to fit how the guitar part was originally written, it’s pretty hard to explain the abruptness that comes from closing a bar with one less beat. This makes sense in theory, but without explaining how I count bars, it’s hard to keep the groove going and keep count of how many normal bars are before the short ones.
The last major revision for this song was the inclusion of alternating double-bass triplets in the chorus part. As I mentioned earlier in this post, the double-bass parts were added after recording demos and after spending a lot of time with the songs unchanged. While I was playing bass with the band, I listened to a lot of metal and I put a lot of time into improving my double bass technique; this part of the song was begging for double bass.
Here’s the first page preview. The sheets are available for purchase on Sheet Music Plus. $1.99 is the lowest price they allow for sale. All future sheet music breakdowns will include a link to the sheet music.
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