Here’s a transcription I’ve been wanting to share for weeks: “Get It Like That” by the Aristocrats (off the first record) with Marco Minnemann on drums. I’m vaguely familiar with Marco’s drumming as he’s part of several projects, but I didn’t know much about this band (a trio of Marco, Guthrie Govan, and Brian Beller) until I stumbled upon the song about a month ago.
I’ve been enjoying many moments from this album, and I have a good chunk of Marco’s playing to share from “Get It Like That.” The song was actually written by Marco himself, and it’s a long, wild, menacing fusion jam.
The song has a clear head section, more or less in the form of this riff:
There’s also somewhat of a B section with this dotted 8th chord vamp:
The first ~3½ minutes of the track have the band jamming on variations on this riff — it gets a little repetitive, but afterward, the song really gets cooking with a big solo section, starting with guitar and then drums. There are a lot of fun moves during the guitar solo, so I transcribed the drums starting there.
While it doesn’t look like much on paper, one of my favorite moments is this little ensemble thing at the 3:42 mark where Marco plays off of a guitar lick on the ride bell:
Starting at 4:03, there’s some pretty savage 16th-note triplet action on the hats and snare:
Aside from the head, the tresillo rhythm shows up as another motif. In addition, you’ll often hear Marco playing triple beat and gallop patterns on the cymbals.
The band goes through the head just before the drum solo, and at 4:47, Marco whips out the double kick for the first time in the score:
It’s an ugly-looking rhythm, but it’s not as complicated as it seems — it’s basically a 32nd note double beat pattern added on top of the dotted eighth rhythm from the melody:
Another way to conceptualize it is to treat the kick doubles as flams:
It may very well have been “played” that way, even though kick drum flams don’t really work the same as flams on other drums do. Kick drum flams can be tough to make sound right at all if you are not using two separate kick drums, and instead have a double pedal on one drum (like Marco does).
Moments later, the drum solo starts. There is a vamp from the rest of the band that is somewhat of a spin on the B section, with the rhythm altered slightly:
Marco kicks the vamp occasionally, but it doesn’t factor into the solo much, which begins with a little bit of comping before blasting off with a flurry of 16th-note triplets:
Even though he has one single kick drum, Marco is known for using a big drum set, and I think he used most of it for this session: three rack toms, two floor toms. Sometimes Marco puts his smallest rack tom on the right side of his toms, but I don’t think he was doing it for this LP.
I’m not exactly sure that the toms are 100% correct here (i.e., which particular drum he’s hitting), but I started to lose my patience and eventually concluded, the hell with it, close enough.
Soon after is a little blast beat moment, which starts on a barrage of cymbal hits:
Again, maybe not 100% correct — I tried my best to get all of those cymbals down, but it was tough to make out the exact rhythm he was playing, let alone the exact cymbals.
Things continue to build with singles between the ride and snare before a big 32nd double kick fill:
The final measure has another scary-looking rhythm:
Again, it’s just a double beat pattern lining up with a dotted 8th-note pulse.
The last thing that’ll get your attention is a syncopated ensemble thing that happens right after the solo:
The song goes through the head one more time before an abrupt change into a heavy half-time feel with lots of blast beats and distorted guitars. As far as timbre goes, I must give praise to Brian Beller’s bitchingly nasty bass tone.
Whew… this is some of the most intense transcribing I’ve done in a while, but not everything can be as digestible as that Dave Brubeck track I shared the other week.
Nevertheless, while I only have close to three minutes of “Get It Like That” transcribed, I was tempted to do the whole track. My original plan was just to do the drum solo, but I couldn’t help myself, and I had to include some more of Marco’s timekeeping.
