hey everyone ian west here from ian west school of drums uh today i thought we'd do a tutorial
on a um a great six piece from the trinity um rock and pop syllabus uh the track that we're going to
look at is famous quite an iconic track it's smells like teen spirit by the one and only nirvana and
on drums mr dave grohl himself and um here we have the piece uh transcribed written out for
us and we also have the audio track contained within the book so grade 6 is a very important
grading for drums because it's it's a level standard so um if pupils are on
a college course and they're studying music and they're playing drums as their main instrument
the grade six is the requirement at that level okay for as and and second year a level
so um an important an important exam um it's a great really popular piece
but it's and it's very iconic but it's quite hard to play consistently because the beat
is a repetitive beat but as you can see um there's a lot of semi-quavers in there and off-beat notes
so we're just gonna i'm just gonna take you through it and i'm gonna look at some of the
important areas some of the factors that we need to to realise if we're going to get we're going
to pass this grade we're going to get the higher grades the merit and distinctions we've got to be
um we've got to be consistent with the beat okay so what i mean by that is if we look at straight
away at figure five bar five um that's when the main groove of the song starts so we have this
okay now i'm just going to focus the camera down to the drums
so we can see what's going off there okay so there we go okay right so nice and slow
the temp of the piece is about 117 bpm so if you set a metronome up at that tempo
and you can practice the consistency of this rhythm okay so to get those higher marks what
the examiner is going to be look at looking at criteria for this is that consistency on that beat
so when i what i say to my pupils when we're doing it running our mock test before we take this at
this uh great six exam if they've chosen this piece which usually they do that's one of the
more popular pieces um is that we have to play that that beat consistently we can't play two bars
good one bar the bass drum drifts okay because if we're not consistent with our without a beat
we'll start to marks will start to lose marks on that okay and we don't want to be just scraping
the pass we want to be confident okay so that has to be the main criteria for this piece
that consistency within the rhythm okay um so once we've got that in place that we what i do
this is how i teach it so we get we i look at what the majority of the piece is so um 80& of the
piece is that rhythm so once we've got that in place then we go go through and we might look at
the intro an intro again it's quite um it's quite iconic because if i play this intro um to someone
the user can tell tell what song it is okay so here it is okay now this is a linear pattern
okay so what i mean by that is we've got the snare drum flam the bass the hi-hat the bass okay all
playing at a certain place over four semiquavers none of these voices are coming down at the same
time that's important and that's quite tricky to get that to separate especially time up to speed
okay now we've got into the um verse uh and i just took you through that intro passage we've got the
three bars guitar intro the main fill and then the groove of the song and if we look at the dynamic
there okay it's fortissimo okay which is very loud so we've got that impact of the piece starting but
then when we look at um bar nine our dynamic comes down to mezzo forte which is moderately loud so we
need to come down there and what i usually say to the pupils is tighten the hi-hat up so we
haven't got the trashy hi-hat bring the volume and intensity down on that okay the examiner
especially at the grade six level will be looking at how you um interpret the dynamics and how you
respect the dynamic of the piece so if you're going to play it all the way up the same volume
all the way through you're not going to get those high marks so again if you're looking for the
merits and distinctions you need to be playing uh respecting the dynamics on this piece okay um so
we're there at the at um at figure nine diversity we've got the first start that's going to come in
and then when the vocal line comes in it goes down to mezzo piano which is moderately soft so
and that's on bar 13. so over those first 13 bars we have fortissimo mezzo forte so we have very
loud moderately loud and mezzo piano moderately quiet so we have that has to reflect it has to