This article is a follow up to my Muse Supremacy Drumming Analysis page, specifically an update concerning the stickings for the Verse snare drum pattern.
My latest research of live performances of this song (isn’t Youtube great?) shows that Dominic Howard’s stickings for this section is quite different to what I’m using, and I thought it would be handy to share my findings.
My Sticking
As a reminder, this is how I play the Verses in Supremacy:
I play this hand to hand with a right hand lead (I’m right handed) starting on the & of beat 1, and I mimic the orchestral timpani on beats 1 and the & of 4 using the floor tom.
What Dom actually plays
Check out this video of Muse live at the ACL Fest 2013 around the 55 second mark, where there is a great close-up of Dom playing a couple of bars of the verse before the vocals come in. He plays all the eighth notes using his lead hand (he’s left handed, so he’s leading with his LH), and only uses his RH for the inbetween notes and for the floor tom hits in unison with the orchestral timpani.
What you will also notice is that, unlike me, he actually plays the snare together with the floor tom on beats 1 and the & of 4. However, he can only do this because, as well as his usual 1 up 2 down tom configuration, he also has an extra floor tom set up on the right hand side of his kit. (Remember, he’s left handed, so his floor toms are normally on his left and his hi-hat is on his right.)
Notice also that the second two 1/16th note triplets of the & of 1 are played as a double, using his RH.
What I think is really cool about his sticking is that he uses one hand for playing all the eighth notes. This idea of using one hand to keep time like this is something I’ve heard pro drummers talk about, the benefit being that one limb keeps solid time and becomes an anchor against which all the other limbs can align themselves.
Right Hand lead version
For the benefit of right handed drummers, here are Dom’s stickings flipped over to a RH lead:
Obviously, just a mirror image. Logically, the snare notes on beats 1 and the & of 4 should also be played with the RH, meaning that the floor tom notes on these beats need to be played using the LH – which isn’t do-able unless you have an extra floor tom set up on the left side of your kit.
Alternative Sticking
So, here’s an alternative version of Dom’s sticking for those of us (most of us???) without a left side floor tom:
This keeps the same concept of steady eighth notes played on the RH, but leaves out the snare notes on beats 1 and the & of 4, leaving the RH free to play these notes on the floor tom. I think this is a good compromise, as those snare hits on those two beats are hardly audible on the album version of the song.
Does this matter?
Frankly, no. Play it whatever way you like, using whatever sticking suits you and enables you to play the part properly.
I’m glad I finally found some evidence of how Dom actually plays this, to see how that matched my interpretation of this part. If nothing else, it does at least refute the accuracy of those who insist on playing this section as a series of flams. No flams! 🙂
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