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Snyder80

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Everything posted by Snyder80

  1. Comparing Clockwork Angels to Moving Pictures is akin to John Travolta's character in Pulp Fiction trying to compare a foot massage to cunnilingus to which Sam Jackson's character responds: "...ain't no f***ing ballpark neither. You know maybe your version of a foot massage differs from mine but touches his wife's feet and sticking your tougnue in the holiest of holies ain't the same ballpark, it ain't the same league, it ain't even the same f***ing sport."
  2. I listen to a lot of The Talking Heads and I always thought they were kind of new wave. Flock of Seagulls, Duran Duran, Tears for Fears join that company as well. I don't really think Rush ever fit into that category of music. Some of their lighter sounds and electronic drums may have come close but not quite.
  3. I can only answer this for myself, but yeah, I can play most all of their songs, but I've been playing them and learning them close to 40 years. I've also been playing out in bands since I was 17. As each new album came out, I would learn the songs. I was in a Rush tribute band as the bassist/keyboardist and singer for several years. That really made me work to practice, let me tell you! Finally a believable post by a musician who can play Rush music proficiently. It's nice to hear someone talk about how long they've played and how much they had to practice. The people who piss me off are the guys who have drummed for 9 months and claim they can play everything from PeW through Signals, with ease. It makes me want to jump off a f***ing bridge. I don't want to make you fly off a bridge on Christmas eve or anything but I was kinda like that. Mainly because I had about 30 years experience "air drumming" to Rush before I ever sat behind a kit! When I did buy my first kit a little over a year ago I really felt like a natural drummer.. But one that could play Rush almost better than AC-DC!! Learning drums is easy but learning Rush is hard.. I'm not saying I can play any song complete, I can play maybe less that 5 songs note for note but you take just about any Rush song and I can get usually 80% of it bang on, usually the first 3/4.. Neil likes to challenge me towards the end of the song.. Every fukking time!! :P I've been itching to buy a kit for three years now and at 35 years old, for whatever reason, I still can't convince myself that it's worthy endeavor. Hell, I've listened to Rush my entire life, I used to set up six or seven five gallon drums and use frying pan lids as my symbols, strap on the walk-man and beat the hell out of stuff trying to cover Tom Sawer, Subdivisions, Time Stands Still, etc. These days, along with Neil, I have a lot of other drummers who are very inspiring to me, Stewart Copeland, Danny Carey, Gavin Harrison, etc. My biggest problem is I don't know the first f***ing place to start. My daughter plays drum for school so she has a good Ludwig snare and pad I could practice on but I don't the first thing about rudiments and counting notes and all that crap. Drumming for me has always appeared to be more of a feel kind of thing. I hope to give it a try someday.
  4. I can only answer this for myself, but yeah, I can play most all of their songs, but I've been playing them and learning them close to 40 years. I've also been playing out in bands since I was 17. As each new album came out, I would learn the songs. I was in a Rush tribute band as the bassist/keyboardist and singer for several years. That really made me work to practice, let me tell you! Finally a believable post by a musician who can play Rush music proficiently. It's nice to hear someone talk about how long they've played and how much they had to practice. The people who piss me off are the guys who have drummed for 9 months and claim they can play everything from PeW through Signals, with ease. It makes me want to jump off a f***ing bridge.
  5. It was the last live release on dvd that I had to have. Sound quality was good and the band was really tight. Geddy's voice was pretty solid on that show as well. I tend not to get too caught up in live material as much anymore because it's what happened over the course of a single evening. In my opinion some folks lend way too much weight to live recordings; for better or worse. I'm not really impressed by the live recordings with American crowds. Typically they're very low energy. The Cleveland recording was only the way it was because people knew they would be on a recorded show. I remember seeing the trailer for that one and seeing the girl they show headbanging and air drumming during Tom Sawyer always makes my skin crawl.
  6. 1. Marathon 2. Middletown Dreams 3. Mystic Rhythyms 4. Grand Designs 5. The Big Money 6. Manhattan Project 7. Emotion Detector 8. Terrirtories
  7. Earthshine-Live version has meatier guitar sound and the overall feel has more energy. Roll the Bones-Alex improvs a solo over the rap section and it's different nearly every night. Check out the R30 version and really take a listen. He kills it! Vital Signs-Overall I prefer the studio version but I love how when they play it live, Geddy sings "Emancipate from the norm" towards the end. For some reason the first time I heard that it was breathtaking. Awesome change. Driven-Bass solo, obviously.
  8. With no disrespect to anyone, Styk begins and ends for me with how fast I can grab the tuning knob.
  9. Worst post ever. By-Tor and the Snow Dog??? Hello??? Is anyone in there? CoS is a pretty weak effort, truthfully, it is a little too ambitious for what their skill set was at that time and it does nothing but diminish what they did on FBN. For three kids in their early twenties, FBN was pretty f***ing incredible.
  10. Material as technical as the stuff Neil plays didn't exist to my knowledge when he was seven. I'm not gonna delve too much into this because it's the one topic that can get a me a little fired up but Neil Peart reinvented how people played the drums. Period. I respect and enjoy the works of Jon Bonham and Keith Moon and I accept that there are guys out there in jazz fusion that are beyond Neil's technical abilities but at the end of the day it's pretty much like this: When Van Halen released their debut and Eruption was heard for the first time it sent every teenage kid running to his parents for a guitar, the same thing happened the first time Tom Sawyer was heard, only it was drums they now begged for. The other thing I'll say about this is that writing something is much more difficult than copying something. I know a thousand guys who can play the solo to Mr. Crowley but they sure as hell couldn't have written it if you put a gun to their head.
  11. Sooner rather than later unfortunately. The end of the road is in sight. I will certainly miss the band when they retire from a live performance perspective. And I'll miss the fact that the ever lingering anticipation of new news or new material or something will most likely cease to exist, especially from Neil. Which is sad to me because although I'm not a fan that is so engrossed with them that I would ever want to run into them during lunch, I find Neil very interesting and his lyrics have walked me through so many moments of my life that the idea of him extinguishing that part of himself almost seems like a waste of incredible talent. On a brighter tone the legacy they will leave behind for all of us to enjoy for the rest of our lives is so vast and so inspirational that I find it difficult to really locate anything sad about it. Their music is them. That part, thankfully, can never be taken away.
  12. You forgot patience. I think that is the virtue that truly separates the world class anything from the average anything.
  13. Signals as a debut album in 1983 seems like it would have been f***ing huge.
  14. I'm gonna try to attempt this very difficult task. As soon as I hit "submit" I'm sure I will have changed my mind about some. These are my top 20... 1. Vital Signs 2. Subdivisions 3. Red Barchetta 4. Marathon 5. Bravado 6. Tom Sawyer 7. Freewill 8. Cygnus X1 Book II: Hemispheres 9. The Spirit of Radio 10. Limelight 11. Xanadu 12. Animate 13. Natural Science 14. The Weapon 15. La Villa Strangiato 16. Lock and Key 17. Earthshine 18. 2112 19. The Pass 20. Circumstances
  15. Yes, it is. I have two daughters. Both of them are honor students. My oldest has to study her little ass off and her sister gets A's with barely a glance at the course work.
  16. Rush is never going to announce a farewell tour type of thing. It's just not in their nature to go out in that typical fashion. Time will pass, life will go on, there will be less and less news, interviews, updates, etc. One day, they will simply cease to exist in an outward, productive manner as a band. Incredibly sad to consider but I believe that's what will happen.
  17. Plenty of people are completely natural at things. Do you think if you practice running fast every day that someday you'll wake up and be able to run the 40 yard dash in 4.3 seconds? No, you won't. However the NFL is full of guys who can and do run that fast every day and have been since they were sixteen or seventeen years old. Nickelback practices a lot, are they as technically proficient as the guys in Rush?
  18. Would they have made it in the long run? I doubt it. Would Signals be hailed as one of the best debut albums ever made? Yes.
  19. Love every one of the songs you mentioned. And again I'll state that I'm not musician but they don't seem to carry to musical weight of much of his previous work.
  20. Typically I stay away from the bashing type threads and if I do venture within, it's usually in defense of the band or band member. In this case however I have to agree with the author. Beyond Animate or the title track for T4E I haven't heard any of Neil's once kinetic and explosive and tastefully unpredictable drumming. Personally-and I'm no musician-I attribute this to his obsession with wanting to be more sporadic and loose instead of having to keep time or "count" as he refers to it. If you listen to songs like Subdivisions or Marathon or Vital Signs it seems like he had a real knack for knowing when the sit back a bit and when to erupt. I think the fact that he's moved away from compositional parts in favor of a more improvisational approach he has lost some of his creativity. The other explanation could be that after their hiatus he just was never able to rekindle that old joy for the instrument. He seems to love playing live but the man is really more of a lyricist than a drummer anymore. That's a pretty harsh statement and I worship the man's abilities but he isn't the 28 year old writing the drum part to Tom Sawyer or Digital Man anymore. His playing represents much more of a reflective attitude instead of an aggressive attitude. At least that's what I think.
  21. He has often lamented his disdain for the RRHOF in interviews and he hasn't always been the most pleasant person with rock and roll media. I recall him once blasting the RRHOF because they inducted ABBA and I recall an interview with Rolling Stone during the Time Machine Tour, I think, where the interviewer was talking about the post-solo section of Tom Sawyer with all of Neil's big drum fills being one of the most iconic Rush moments where they all really meshed or something like that and his response was something like That's the idea, for all of us to play something at the same time. He said it in a polite tone but his facial expression was one of annoyance. I think the induction speech was his chance to finally unload without going overboard. If I had to guess he probably needed a few drinks to get up without telling someone to f**k off.
  22. To learn to play an instrument so i can finally devote my time to ruining Rush songs that I love.
  23. I feel like this thread could have been a David Lynch movie.
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