Tool-Vicarious Drum Cover-Johnkew

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This song was an absolute blast to play on the drums, and quickly became an obsession after I decided to learn it. It was one of the most challenging songs I've played on the drums. I already had a lot of respect for Tool and Danny Carey, but learning this song really made me realize what a master of the art he is. Playing along to this composition is one thing, but I could not imagine creating it. There are always individual differences between drummers, so I would never try to replicate Carey's exact playing, but I tried to stay close and do it justice. Somehow Carey managed to move along a scale of intricate to subtle within the complex time signatures in this song, pulling back when appropriate, and laying down a fill that boggles the mind at other times. It would be easy to go overboard with fills on this after learning the time signature, so I tried to stay as true to the original as possible.

I don't play music for a living, so I have precious few minutes to sit behind the drum set. I must have listened to the song 50 times on my way to and from work, tapping the rhythms on my steering wheel. So when I finally had a couple of hours to sit down and map it to the drum set, I was determined to finish the take. As you can see from the outtakes at the end, that didn't happen the first day. After a couple of sticks breaking, my hands started fatiguing, resulting a two consecutive dropped sticks near the end of this LONG song. I admitted defeat and put it off for another day. Thankfully, I got through a couple of takes the next day and what you see here is the one I liked best.

This was recorded in one take from start to finish. I am truly grateful to ScalerWave (Jim) for adding guitars to this track, and especially for mixing the song, including the drums. I had volunteered to play drums along with "Dam that River" from Alice in Chains with Jim previously, and he did an excellent job with the mixing. He coached me on how to get my drums to sound the way he mixed them, and I worked on it for a couple of weeks after recording Vicarious, but I just couldn't get them dialed-in. Thankfully, Jim became interested in covering Vicarious on the guitar, so he took all eight of my raw drum tracks and turned them into something you would hear from a professional studio. To hear some awesome collaborations from Jim, check out his YouTube channel:

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Recorded on Gretsch Catalina and Renown maple drums, Pearl 14" x 6.5" Free Floating Maple Snare, Evans EMAD bass drum head Evans EC2 batter drum heads Evans G2 resonant drum heads, Sabian Paragon cymbals (16, 18, 20-inch crashes; 19 China; 22 ride), Paiste hats and 8-inch dark energy splash, Zildjian 16 Medium Crash and 22 swish, DW5000 double pedal, DW3000 two leg hi hat stand Orange County drum throne, Pro Mark 5A sticks, Apex 435 overhead mics, AKG D112 bass drum mic, Shure SM57 mic on snare, Digital Reference mics on toms, M-Audio Profire 2626 interfarce, Logic Express 9, Canon T2i camera.