English is a silly language. English music jargon is especially silly jargon, heavily laced with strictly
onomatopoeic words to describe phenomena concisely and impressionistically. Among musicians,
percussionists are generally regarded the silliest of all instrumentalists, so it stands to reason that the labels which emerged to describe various combinations of rudimentary drum hits would be silly.
I started down this rabbit hole thanks to a soft link on
my previous writeup - a soft link which made me spit out my drink all over my laptop screen. (Thanks,
Alpheus.) Brace yourself, my insufficiently-wary reader:
Inverted Cheese Chewbaccadiddles Off The Left Hand. Yeah.
Now, I'm not a percussionist, unless you count
piano (which I teach) as a percussion instrument, or you count my dabbling at
glockenspiel as sufficient to add the "-ist" to my
CV. Sure, I'd been part of several elementary and high school bands, and I'd overheard the descriptively phonetic gibberish the
drumline used to rehearse the
cadence for our
marching band. Never in my wildest dreams had I guessed the language for combination rudiments would be this colourful, this unintuitive, this
silly, or this reminiscient of lists I have seen of
neural network AIs generating
baby names,
petitions,
Halloween costumes,
paint colours, and
recipes from a corpus of data.
I present the more puzzling of my findings, without further effort to justify or explain, as an exercise in bemusement for the reader.
- Chumbly Bumkinsteen
- Displaced Flamacue
- Doctoral Thesis
- Book Report with extra credit
- Zigiddy Bops
- Triplet Pataflafla
- Diddling the Flam
- Reverse Shirley Murphy
- Ruffadiddle-diddle
- Seinfeld
- Kramer
- Hulka Helicopter
- Pataflafla
- Backward Eggbeaters
- Cheese Parafladdle-diddle-diddle
- Ratamaflam
- Double Ratamacue
- Ravioli
- Swiss Army Triplet
- Vladiment
- Cheese Quickity Klotz kicked up a notch
This is apparently what happens when you let drummers name things.
I swear I didn't make any of these up. They are all 100% legitimate words used by real, live drummers, to label the specific way they hit round things with sticks.
Cross my heart, I didn't add any fake nonsense words... but if I
had, would you be able to tell?
Iron Noder 2019, 12/30