OH SNAP, GET READY FOR THE CLIMAX. IT’S THE LAST POST of TEN: This Shit Just Got Real (yo) by nhac.
At last, this brings us to the end of the series; the 10th post in my 10 years of drumming in 10 Days (ok so it turned out to be 11 days but WHATEVER).
This whole series has represented my drumming adventures over the last ten years in chronolical order so the songs should represent my changing tastes and abilities. This song comes off my most recent recording effort, an EP entitled Save Yourself by nhac. Now first up i’d like to say that it was hard to pick a song off this EP, so i chose this one based on the fact that in my opinion it’s the funnest to play and most drum oriented track on there. Also i feel like it’s the most well played song on there percussion wise.
Note: you can download the whole EP here, so you should totally hit that shit ‘cause its free. http://loss4words.com/music/nhac_-_save_yourself.html
It was probably only 6 months ago when i heard these songs for the first time. I felt very awkward about the prospect of playing along to these songs. I’m totally all about the ‘wall of sound’ guitar driven bands from the 90’s and i really like playing heavy handed with a lot of busy fills, double kick and peppering of different percussion sounds. As a result I’ve been told openly in the past by people that they doubt my ability to play with restraint, so you can guess how anxious i was when this popped up.
Looking back on the sessions we had playing and practicing these songs, i’m pretty sure any of the other guys in the band can attest to the gradual ‘stripping back’ of my playing as i gradually slotted in with what was going on in the songs. Right from the increased restraint of what i was playing, to how hard i was hitting the drums, to how i changed my setup to accomodate the differing style, to the way i de-tuned all my drums to get that dry, warm sound which i think suits this style of music better than the usual ear-bleeding crack of my snare and kick.
At the core of nhac is Chris, who i met via Dane sometime in early ‘08. These are his songs, written over many years (see his own narrative at the download link above). Also in the outfit is Dane on guitar and Hayden on bass and funnily enough its the same line-up as Million (see day seven), but we’re just doing very different things with this. Who knows, maybe the whole lot will mash together. That would be sweet.
At first it was tricky fitting a bunch of extra instruments into songs which had essentially been written for one person with one guitar. For a time we lovingly referred to this project as “Dane and Ben Ruin Chris’ Songs”. Hopefully we didn’t ruin them all too badly.
I’d say that this is probably the most polished recording i’ve ever taken part in to date. I’d like to thank Luke Reicheldt who did a great job with this project. While there’s nothing super fancy about what we did, i feel like our collective years of experience has paid off with an EP that sounds finished, which was the inspiration for this series; to show how we arrived here and that it didn’t come easy.
It’s now that we come to the moral of this whole story.
If you walked up to me with a cheque for the amount of money i’ve spent playing in bands over the years, for the cost of all the practice rooms, drum equipment, sticks, tour vans & motels, gear hire, and merch that we shelled out for over the years and then asked me to trade it all for the good times it brought me, i’d probably look at that cheque for a while before turning that offer down. I decided to play drums largely because James decided to learn guitar, and starting a band in high school was the next logical step, so i should probably thank him for that. Thanks Jeames.
I feel like as i write this i’m suiting up to embark down the next dark alley of my drumming career with really no idea what could happen next, so I suppose i should also give a nod to the tougher times, which weren’t all made of smiles, hugs and stroking of eachother’s ego, but that’s really only to say that shit happens and you can’t let it drag you down. Plus, being in a band is all about grit, right? SO BRING IT THE FUCK AWN.
ben out
