Stainless steel drums! Featuring Freddie Nelson on vocals, Kevin Chown on bass, and Tobias Mertens on guitar. Buy the whole album "ProgPop" on iTunes or CD Baby.
Thomas is playing a Bajon-inspired multi-pedal orchestration with his feet over 4 pedals, a Soca-ish pattern on gong drum and "Snom" and a Gamelan influenced melodic line on 3 "Rata Toms" with the left hand, while the right hand is filling the few remaining gaps with cowbell and trashy China textures. Bonus mirror shades and 80-s style slicked back "Do". This song is about Dating Apps btw. If you like brainy beats and catchy tunes then get the whole album! You can buy "ProgPop" on iTunes or CD Baby.
Thomas Lang playing the song "Time" from his new solo-album "ProgPop" (available on iTunes and CD Baby) featuring Marc Bonilla on vocals and guitar. The drum part consists of different patterns layered on top of each other to represent cogs in a clock, different cycles that all spin together at different rates but always in perfect sync.
Find the whole album on iTunes and CD Baby
The verse-groove is inspired by music from Mali, with Thomas bridging 2 pedals with each foot in order to get kick-drum and splashy Hi-Hat sounds in unison.
The 5-stroke roll on kick drum and Hi-Hats on the "4 and" of each bar leads into a group of four 16th notes on the "1", giving the groove a heavy vibe on the downbeat.
On the last 16th note of the "2", Lang plays a heavy accent on the Gong-drum, which in combination with the busy, repetitive, low rumble of the kick drum gives the groove a distinctly tribal feel.
The "off-beat" HiHat drives the groove, giving it almost a dance-feel on top of the African-inspired rhythm. The chorus-beat is an "upside down" groove, where Lang plays a HiHat pattern in 3/4 with his feet on double Hi-Hats, while playing a heavy Funk-beat in 4/4 with his left hand between Gong drum and snare drum.
This is a poly-metric and poly-rhythmic layer of two rhythms where each individual layer is complex by itself and in combination with the second layer becomes an intricate rhythmic structure, with different cycles and loops stacked on top of each other.
In all its complexity, this chorus beat still sounds and feels great, not overbearing and self-serving.
"ProgPop" is available on iTunes - click on the Apple Music link on the release page of the album.
Ja!! Nghaaaiiinnghh! In this clip, the "Druminator" - an Austrian, bio-cybernetic humanoid drum-machine from the future with organic material covering a chrome-plated endoskeleton and a Skynet 3000 polyrhythm-processing unit, is dominating a carbon-fiber wrapped, all Maple PDP Concept kit with Black Nickel Hardware.
"Drum with me if you want to live!" Nnjaaarghnnn
How ironic this song now seems. It's all about wanting to stay home or go home. I wrote this somewhere on the road after way too much traveling and now monty of us wish we could travel that much! How quickly things can change, eh? Dang. Stay safe everybody!
