Keith Moon drumming style analysis

hey everybody my name is Mike McHale CO and I'm a drumming instructor at Dromio comm and I want to welcome all you rhythm magazine readers today I want to talk about Keith Moon Keith was the drummer for The Who and I want to discuss a little bit about who he was his personality his setup what made him unique and just what really made him stand out and the reason we're talking about him so many years after his untimely death in 1978 so it's interesting because Keith Moon was was quite young when he joined the WHO and he was with them for 15 years during his career and Keith was nicknamed moon the Loon and for some of you that maybe don't know much about him if you watch any kind of videos of him performing whether it be live or music videos you kind of see how he earned that nickname a really good example would be watching the studio version of who are you where he really acts like this young kid like always having fun never really act as active his age which is not a bad thing because it's music and we're having fun but he seemed to have this real outgoing personality where he always wanted to make people laugh and entertain them is really what Keith Moon boiled down to playing the drums was obviously his biggest passion because the way he played made him extremely unique so unique to the point that even a drummer like Neil Pierre said that this is one of his biggest influences at the time because Neil loved the WHO and definitely loved Keith moons style but let's talk a little bit about Keith Moon who he was as a person and I've read some interviews and I've seen some interviews online with Pete Townsend and some of the other members of the band you know John Entwistle and Roger Daltrey of course and there was one story in particular where they went to a city somewhere in the States and they did a show and they were heading back to the to the airport to head to the next show and the airport was quite far from the hotel and they get halfway there they're in the limo halfway to the airport all sudden Keith says oh man we got to turn around not something I forgot something and they're all kind of going man we're running late what's what do you mean he says no we got to go back we got to go back and they figured well maybe he forgot his passport or plane ticket which you needed back at that time and so the limo driver turns around heads back to the hotel heath runs out he's in the hotel room for a little bit comes running back out like 20 minutes later and the band is like now what's going on what did you forget he goes I forgot to smash the TV and of course that was sort of his sort of the way that he was sort of known is his destruction and Keith enjoyed one of his favorite things to do was to blow up toilets with cherry bombs or dynamite and dynamite became one of his favorite explosives at that time quick story once again they're at a hotel somewhere and the and Keith calls up the manager of the hotel and says you got to come over into my room there's something wrong with the toilet so the manager comes running up and sure enough as the managers in the room Keith decides to blow up the toilet and there's porcelain everywhere stuck in the walls and so needless to say they were banned from some hotels in their early part of their career and actually throughout most of career due to the destruction so Keith was a little bit of a firecracker as we could say from what we understand but this is coming from the band members too they discussed this stuff in the interview so I don't condone it so don't don't start doing that with your band that's not a smart thing to do especially nowadays so that was one thing about Keith's personality now when he took that personality to the drums it was very exciting to watch him play because it was so unorthodox I mean Keith started playing with a four piece drum set at one time and then he went to a five piece and it was up until he really was influenced and saw Ginger Baker from cream with two bass drums so that's when he decided to add two bass drums and it really was a cool look big thing on stage with lots of stuff you know and eventually added more symbols in the gong behind them you know much like John Bonham did from Led Zeppelin and it was a very cool look the one thing that was very unique about his drum sets especially the early ones was the lack of hi-hat he did not have a hi-hat so when you see some some pictures of the kit even like the pictures of Lily drum set you'll notice there's no hi-hat and it's not because the tech forgot to put it there he just didn't use it a really good example going back to the studio version of the who are you video is he has a hi-hat over on his right hand side much like I do when they're doing who are you and you see him playing the hat over here and later on at the nearing the end of his life he did add a hi-hat so you will see you will see the hi-hat being played but it wasn't a big part of his drum space drum set especially with the early parts that he created with the who in the early days a lot of ride cymbal and a lot of crash that was his thing now you may also notice when you see pictures of his drum set that there was toms and they were very spread out and Keith wasn't the kind of drummer that did fills like I call him around the world when all around the set kind of thing he his arm motion was almost like a skier like this kind of a thing right and the way that he did fills was just these sort of random placements of notes and it wasn't bad but it made him unique because everything was it felt good when he played it but very hard to figure out so for like drummers like me trying to figure out exactly how he played a fill it's tough you know and then long times he never played the same fill twice if he played the same song from from tour to tour he would do different things but that's one reason he had his drum set set up so uniquely it was just a just different way that he played he wasn't a structured I'm gonna do it like everybody else I'm gonna do my thing and you know it also made it probably easier for him to destroy the drum set at the end of the night much like Pete Townsend destroyed the guitars right the Keith Moon had a very unique way of structuring his drum parts and to me it was from sort of thinking that he had a very musical approach to what he was doing he was a piano player in a drummers body didn't want to play piano I know he played bugle when he was a child and didn't like it play drums so it came from that musical background and everything he did whether it was the phils of the groove really added to what was going on it wasn't just a straight-ahead rock beat and this was such a great time for rock and roll because there was so much experimentation that nobody could compare to so he was very free to do what he did the beauty of it was you know you listened to a lot of those parts and you can really hear the music coming out of it even in the sort of breakdown middle part of who are you where the band is going who and he's playing those Tom parts almost like a timpani section and these little rolls on the bigger drum so that's a really good example of it one thing that I really also like was his showmanship I mean like I said Keith was just at home behind the drum set and especially with the vibe and the energy of the audience it just brought out him as a person and and how excited he was and you know the facial expressions and just the way he hit the cymbal and like I said just go back and watch a bunch of videos of the WHO and you'll see exactly what I mean by that and it was exciting to watch you know and he wasn't trying to steal the show by any means that was just who he was expressing himself and his personality behind the drum set so very explosive but yet could be very dynamic which I loved fills that were in places that not drummers wouldn't normally put which I just thought was fantastic when you listen to some of those tracks and that's what I would say so you know dig into Keith Moon and watch it as much as you can watch videos of him play see his excitement see his emotion and I'll see you guys in the next video where we're going to start talking about some Keith Moon and I'll break them down for you see you there

Channel: Rhythm Magazine

Views: 321,546

Keywords: Keith Moon (Musical Artist), Drums (Musical Instrument), drumming, drum kit, drummer, rhythm, rhythm magazine, The Who (Musical Group), the who, drum lesson, learn, play drums, learn to play drums, how-to, style guide, style profile, pictures of lily, moon the loon, moonie, Music Education (Field Of Study), drumeo

Id: AH8o42zBke4

Length: 8min 25sec (505 seconds)

Published: Wed Jan 07 2015