“Brand New” by Ben Rector
With a catchy chorus and driving lyrics, “Brand New” is a really fun song to jam to and really lends itself to the drum kit. As always, even with a drum cover, it’s important not to overdo it with chops and parts that get in the way of the song. Below I break down a few of my favorite parts and the decisions I made on the drum set. Check out the interactive transcriptions from Soundslice!
A few of my favorite parts…
1. Main Verse Groove
One of the main reasons I wanted to cover this song is for its driving energy and glorified tom parts throughout the song. Once you got them tuned up, it’s all in the accents! Keep the kick drum and floor tom steady not too loud; leaving room for the high/mid toms to sing on these accents. Though there is a lot of space to “drum”, I purposely left this part pretty simple to not take away from the verse lyrics and make it sounds too busy.
2. Chorus
Maybe it’s just because I’m in Nashville, but the chorus just screamed 16th note country snare 🤠 Again, similar to the verse tom groove above, I chose to keep most of the snare hits super soft, leaving room for the accented notes to speak and create tension.
3. Crazy Herta Fill
I feel like the whole drum part up until this point is continuing to build in energy, and really peaks to the climax at the outro chorus. So, to really accentuate this, I went for a (probably too busy) herta fill combining 16th notes and 32nd notes between the snare and high tom, culminating in a classic 16th note fill down the toms.