HOW TO REGGAE, WITH TONY AND DRUMMIE FROM ASWAD.

How do you play reggae bass and drums? Tony and Drummie from Aswad are gathered together to try to tell us. They are, after all, the supreme British reggae rhythm section, playing on all manner of sessions as well as their own records (you'd tried to forget Smiley Culture, hadn't you?).

Initially they go along with the conventional wisdom. "Yeah," smiles Drummie, "other music you can say is a matter of counting, of bars, but reggae music is really a feel. It's really simple music, reggae is, you could say the simplest form of music, but it's one of the hardest to play because of that feel you need. And it's hard to talk about that."

Feel, as we know, is that mysterious commodity that springs unaccountably from the player's very soul. But wait. Aswad have recently returned from a tour of Japan, and tell a strange tale illustrating how feel can, it would seem, be learned.

Drummie: "We heard some people there who had learnt to play reggae music just by listening for a number of years. When we heard them play we couldn't believe they were Japanese. They were playing very, very well — honestly! Yes, they taught themselves just by listening, and they were playing their own material. It sounded authentic to us."

Here I do admit to a few barely-suppressed giggles. But what about these ranking Japs' voices? "Really good, even the harmonies. Even though they were singing in Japanese."

Come to think of it, you could say that Drummie and Tony learnt to play this way, too. The budding British-born musicians began to listen to records coming in from Jamaica, absorbing and interpreting the sounds and styles they heard. The two of them developed their harmony and compatibility, first with Delroy Washington, and later with Aswad.

Tony elaborates on the feel: "Reggae music has got a lot of space. If you know how to dance to it, those spaces are left for you to rock within. You have to feel where those spaces are, it's up to you to feel that. Part of the learning is to know how and when to leave spaces. And it's an instant sort of music — if you go at something for hours you lose that feel."

"Don't play too much!" puts in Drummie. "The feel of the rhythm might mean that you don't even have to roll, all you have to do is splash to accent, say — if you roll back down into the rhythm it just doesn't sound right. But I would definitely advise that if you're wanting to play reggae you shouldn't play too much."

And staying with the drums in reggae, can we assume that the component drums in the kit are important to get the intended result?

"Well, it's the sound that's important really," suggests Drummie. "In a session I can use a four-piece kit or an eight-piece kit and people wouldn't know — the main thing is that the sound is right. If I'm not using my own drum set I go to the studio early and tune it to the sound I prefer, or the sound that suits that particular studio. That's the difference between the studios in Jamaica and the studios in London. In Jamaica, where we first went with Burning Spear in 1977, every studio is set and ready for reggae, the drum set is tuned and ready, and away you go. In England you have to go in and create the sound."

For Tony an important element is his bass strings. Going against current white rock fashion, he prefers flatwound varieties in order to achieve the depth and boom needed for reggae. "With the wirewound strings," he explains, "you get too much top-end ring for reggae. They're more for slap playing and that sort of thing. And to emphasise that bottom end in the bass, we've been experimenting over the last three or four years with bass synths doubling the bass guitar."

But before we start tuning strings, let's get back to tuning drums, and some more detail from Drummie. "When I first got a drum set," he remembers, "all I did was to set it up and start to play. It sounded really, really terrible and I didn't know why. You've got to do some work. The first thing to do is to take off the front skin of the bass drum and pad it so you get a deep, rich sound. A felt beater gives you even more woomph, but today the sound is changing, people also want to get more of a click now. So I use a hard beater now, and a bit of clear perspex on the skin of my Gretsch bass drum where it hits, to add to the click."

And in the actual structure of the music the emphasis has moved away from the sound of the bass drum to that of the snare. The team explain that the old one-drop rhythm, as was used by Carlton Barrett in the Wailers, say, where the bass drum would come late in the bar and provide the one-drop accent for the rhythm, that has now turned around to put the accent on the snare. In this way, and with this particular beat, some reggae drummers are playing what almost amounts to a funk beat.

So it's important that the snare has a big sound. Answer? A big snare drum. In Drummie's case, a very big snare drum. An eight-inch deep Ludwig, to be precise, which, as you might imagine, gives Drummie all the body he needs in the sound as well as the expected crack. "With a snare your personal taste comes in much more," he says, "and I don't like a rattly snare very much. So to stop that I put a bit of masking tape on the bottom."

What he also does is to mix in the sound of a Simmons' "snare". At first, I assumed he meant that he mixed in the Simmons' noise by triggering it from the Ludwig. But no, a Simmons pad is positioned in Drummie's kit directly behind the real snare and, as he demonstrates for me by flailing at thin air right in front of my tape recorder, to get to the two snares at once he crosses over from the main kit with both hands.

So he comes out of the beat? "Yeah, but you don't hear the hi-hat stop," he grins. Nifty. Not that he always plays them together — often he'll just choose one or the other as required. But the facility is there.

The non-stop hi-hat is a small one, in contrast to the cavernous snare. "I think the smaller the hi-hat, the neater the sound for reggae. Because you're using a closed hi-hat sound most of the time, you need a sweet sound. I've been through the Paiste Sound Edge, and at the moment I prefer a pair of Zildjian 13in hi-hat cymbals."

And briefly back to electronics, with four more Simmons pads to complete the line-up. Drummie admits that he doesn't actually prefer playing the pads to real toms, but shrugs and says that it's the sound people want to hear. "For the sound right now I need them. And they're very easy to walk down the road with."

Sounds like he's had some nicked. As was Tony's old Ovation Magnum bass. Only the culprits weren't the usual rehearsal-room thieves. "Right now I use an old Gibson EBO," he says. "Before that I had the Magnum, but the airways stole it. Lovely bass."

Pause for reminiscences and the hint of a tear. And back again.

"I also had an Aria Pro for a short time. I thought it would have been a nice bass, but after plugging it in and trying to get the sounds I wanted, I discovered the frequencies were too high. It didn't really work for me. Bass for reggae has to be tight and deep."

In the studio, Tony tends to go for a DI'd sound, retaining that necessary depth and clarity. Sometimes it's a combination of miked and DI'd — depends on the session and the requirements in sound. Drummie goes for a close- and multi-miked setup in the studio.

"Yes, I like lots of close mikes on the drums," he says. "Even two on the bass drum and two on the snare, mixed to get the best. You want that close sound as it comes from the drum, straight away — not an ambient sound for reggae. Sometimes that's a problem working in England, you go into a studio and the man puts up some microphones far away from the drum set and says he's gonna do it like that. I have to say no, I don't want that, it's not my sound. And that starts a problem straight away."

But back to Tony's tight and deep reggae bass guitar. "The instrument and the strings are the most important parts, more than the amplification, and my old Gibson has that tight sound. You play a note and it just goes 'dom'," says Tony, indicating a note that dies almost before it slides off the fingers. "Some bassists put a cushion of foam down at the bridge to get that, and it works for some basses. But you can get the sound with your hands, by damping. I play with my fingers of the right hand, occasionally the thumb in the studio, but I wouldn't use a plectrum for reggae, that's for a different sound altogether."

Much too toppy. Like those wirewound strings and that Aria bass. And, it would seem, like those Trace Elliot amps. He found them too emphatic in the dreaded top end, and sticks to his ever faithful Ampeg setup, a good, honking, deep valve system. Acoustic amps were good at one time, he acknowledges — as far as he knows Family Man from the Wailers still uses them.

This horror of the high end, does it mean that the area of the fingerboard much above open strings is out of bounds? "Well, for the sound, when you start getting above E on the A-string it starts getting too high," explains Tony. "So sometimes for a particular key I tune the bass down. Not very often, but for some sounds, like in E-flat it can be useful. It makes it easier to play — but I wouldn't take it down more than a tone because you start getting the strings flapping below that."

Quite a few bassists have tried taking just the E-string down — is this what he's getting at? "I find just taking the E down messes up my playing, because I still want to play the same patterns and shapes. For that reason I tune all the strings down by the same amount."

So he finds himself repeating the same patterns across the fingerboard? "I have certain patterns that I go back to, yeah, mainly involving moving from the root note to the fifth or the fourth. But a person could play a bass line that's just on one note and put a good feeling into that one note — and it would be better than something more complicated." And there we are full circle again. It's down to feel, and it's a matter of not playing too much. But how would Drummie and Tony sum it up?

Tony: "Music is harmony, things must go together. You've got to be able to communicate with someone else, and get on the same level."

And Drummie: "The main thing is, when it seems to be going the roughest and the hardest, that's the time that you shouldn't really give up. Remember that by keeping on playing you're going to improve. And remember not to put in too many notes and beats."