So I’ve been out of town for the past week on vacation. There’s been a ton of stuff going on…

I will be checking out Russian Circles this coming weekend and there will definitely be a review posted here, and hopefully some live photos. This show should be great and will be the second time I will have seen them live. The first time, last year, the band was just starting to play one or two tracks from their (then) unreleased “Station” album and I only caught 15min of their set. I’m looking forward to this show…

Just a few days after I will be checking out Earth live at The Echo and I will post a review here again, as well as try to get some live pics, if possible.

Some current drummer news bits…

The Foo Fighters played Wembley Stadium in London a few days ago (June 7th), and were joined by none other than Jimmy Page and Jon Paul Jones of Led Zeppelin. Dave Grohl manned the drums for one song, and video is available on YouTube. It’s always great to see him playing drums. He didn’t have his own usual Tama drum sets, but instead sat in on Foo drummer Taylor Hawkins’ kit. Check out more on that here…

Foo Fighters & 1/2 of Led Zeppelin

Also, Meg White of the White Stripes “sat in” on a Raconteurs gig two days ago in Detroit. The audience thought they might be getting a surprise White Stripes performance but that didn’t happen.

Source.

After reading a story on Stereogum concerning Dave Grohl, (of Nirvana and Foo Fighters fame) writing Metallica an open later chastising them, (Dave Grohl’s open letter to Metallica), ironic isn’t it? I thought I’d check out their website and see what’s up.

Apparently, Metallica launched a website called www.missionmetallica.com, a place where drummer Lars says “people can kind of tune in every day, watch clips, contests, get updates for what’s going on with the record and kind of watch the last couple of months of song titles, album titles, final mixes.” The website also contained a trailer for the new album but the site was taken down, the trailer is still available on YouTube. I just hope Lars can lay down some drum tracks this time that don’t include his super pongy snare drum from St Anger.

The YouTube clips essentially show a few sound bytes/snippets of new songs being worked on and/or recorded in the studio. If you’ve ever seen the bands “Spinal-Tap-for-real” documentary “Some Kind of Monster” it kind of looks like that. Let us also hope Rick Rubin (the Michael Bay of music), succeeds in helping the band reclaim their early sound. I hate to be pessimistic, but I kinda doubt it.

Source.

This isn’t newsworthy or anything, but as I was driving in my car the other day, the Nirvana song “Heart-Shaped Box” came on the radio. I’ve heard this song probably more than a million times, as I’ve been listening to it since I was around 11 years old. Strangely though, everytime I hear it, it sounds even better. This is probably the mark of a truly great song, but probably also the mark of a great recording as well.

I am aware that this particular song was recorded by Steve Albini, (who’s also recorded The Pixies, Bush, various thousands of other artists) and mixed by Scott Litt (REM, Incubus). Steve Albini is of course well known for his drum sound, but I like the combination of that sound combined with Scott Litt’s mixing techniques. Yea, I don’t really care that its not “super raw” or whatever. It sounds good to me. Of course the drums wouldn’t sound that great at all if Dave Grohl weren’t playing them anyway.

Steve Albini though, is known to put mics all over the drum kit, as well as all over the room he’s recording the drums in. Some multi-tracks of the In Utero album did leak recently and they show that there were a ton of mic’s used on the drums. Some room mics were used just for the sound of the crash cymbals as well as the ride cymbal. I’d love to do this kind of recording myself, I just really don’t have the money for these kind of mics, or a specifically designed drum room to record in, but I might use this technique next time I record drums on my own.

If you don’t already know about it, one of the best sites for everything drummer related is www.drummerworld.com. This site has almost every prominent drummer ever. Everyone from Dave Grohl, John Bonham to Josh Freese and Steve Gadd. As well as lesser known talents like Rashied Ali. I’ve been going to it for a long time, it’s got pictures of setups, videos and a bunch more.

This video is really cool…Dave Grohl, Taylor Hawkins and Earl Hudson from the Bad Brains having a live drum jam…

http://www.drummerworld.com/Videos/davegrohltaylorhawkins.html