Quote:
Originally Posted by Undertoad
The part of Black Dog where you are talking about, Page confuses us by speeding up. He does this cool thing where he seems to blatantly ignore the time.
If you pick up on the beat and just count 1-2-3-4 through that passage, you'll find that the timing on drums remains steady throughout, and then Bonham crashes on 1 as Page comes back to the time just as he comes back to the key. It's a genius move.
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Awesome sauce. Years ago, I jammed with a guy who sang a Willie Nelson song I wasn't familiar with, in the literal style of Willie Nelson, which befuddled me to no end as where the lyrics lines start has a very loose relationship with the bar line.
It's one thing to be like Chicago, and have the whole band perform a ritard for dramatic effect, but to have one member go rogue and create that 'tension and release' is really spectacular.
The next level, for drummers, is to address the count micro-differently between your individual limbs. Not in the flashy sense of playing a solo where you vary the tempo on top of a consistent ostinato, but in the subtle sense of playing hi-hats on top of the beat, but dragging the bass brum micro-behind the beat. Guys like Steve Gadd can do that, while the rest of us just try to play one thing correctly, much less execute purposeful, perfect deviations.