One more drumming thread? Question about Rock Band.

I know this is so stupid. I haven’t wanted to ask this question, but my curiosity keeps begging me.

I love drumming on Rock Band. I am fairly good, with mostly 95%+ scores on Hard but I haven’t tried many songs on Expert.

Based on my “experience” with the game, would I know anything about real drumming? If I love playing on the game would I love my own drum set? What would be the next step - taking some drumming lessons?

Reading music and memorizing songs seems like it would be much more difficult than smacking colors as they appear on the screen. Where am I at as far as being a drummer? As good as a first-year high school band drummer? Or pretty much just as bad as someone who has never “really” drummed?

Sorry if this is insulting to the drummers out there! I know I would scowl if someone asked me if they could ride horses based on their experience riding the $0.25 grocery store horse!

My daughter is also a Rock Band wiz. She has a bit of a disability (spina bifida) so she only has really one good leg to work with (and the opposite one for a right handed drummer – that is, she uses her left leg for the kick drum thingie). She really rocks out on it.

Then she comes up to my sister’s house, where my brother-in-law has his drums set up in the basement. I cannot drag her off those things, and for someone with never a lesson outside of Rock Band, she does pretty well – even with the opposite foot kick-drum deal. In fact, my brother-in-law asked me where she learned the basics and I just said … Rock Band.
So … there’s definitely a correlation, as they are both percussive activities, but, obviously, there is a lot more to learning the real thing.

My husband is a drummer, and it always drove me crazy. We’d be listening to a song, and I could not hear the drums as a separate instrument, which means I had no hope of ever duplicating it on his drum set. He’d try to teach me, and it did no good, because I couldn’t hear the damn drumline.

Now, from Rock Band, I can easily pick out the drumline, in particular the bass drum, which was always lost to me before. I also know (approximately) which drums are making which noises, and more importantly, how these noises work together.

I think Rock Band is an excellent beginner drum lesson, and I feel no shame about it. :slight_smile:

I can play the drums and I attempted to play drums with friends on Rock Band. Not only did the game require you to hit the trigger early (instead of on the beat), it really wasn’t proper drumming - at least the songs and level I played on.

If I were on a real set playing those songs, the drums would sound quite incomplete.

Now, perhaps at a higher level this is different, but watching my friend play at a higher level, it didn’t seem like it. Funny thing is, my friend looked and sounded like he would rock behind a real set. When I asked him to tap out a regular 4/4 rock-steady beat on the toy he was a little lost.

Personally, I hated it. Mostly because of the timing issue.

My guess, sorry to say, but pretty much just as bad as someone who has never “really” drummed?

Instead of opening a new thread…
Do any of the peripherals sold for the drum set designed to minimize noise and increase bounce do any good?

Odesio

I would say that the game gives you a decent enough foundation, and, on Expert level, is a good way to practice and gain proficiency if you have drummed before and have some basic technique down. Playing along to your favorite songs is a time-honored method of practice for most of the rock drummers I know out there.

There are, however, several important things Rock Band does not teach you. Left foot proficiency, for one. Those open high hats are usually hit on the blue pad (moving from the yellow to the blue), but in real life you’d still be hitting the same “pad” (the hi-hat, in this case), while lifting your foot.

Another important thing to note is that dynamics is not taken into account in the game. A lot of the musicality of drumming is not just putting the beats in the right place, but how you hit them. Techniques involving stick bounce, I’ve found, are a pain in the ass to get consistently right in rock band, so sometimes I’ll find myself hitting the snare pad (red) with a RL sticking pattern, when I know the drummer is really just doing a double bounce with the left hand on the snare.

Also, there’s a whole range of sounds you can get on different drums and cymbals depending on where you hit them and how you hit them (regular hits, scrapes, catches, etc.)

That said, however, I do think it’s a good way to get started into drums and it develops coordination and rhythm, as well as ways to really understand and try different drum parts in different styles that you may be used to. I’m just a wannabe drummer myself, but expert mode on Rock Band really has improved my real-life drumming a lot, and has given me lots of new ideas and exposed me to different beats I would not normally be playing along with. The drums on Rock Band, in expert, do translate to some real world skill. There’s a lot more to drumming than what happens in Rock Band, but it’s a good start.