Mike Mangini
Posted: Thu Oct 03, 2013 12:27 pm
So I ended up going to see a clinic he did at a local music store on Tuesday. Figured it's not too often you get to see a world class musician outside of the classical or jazz world with less than 100 people in the room so I drove down there to check it out. Now I don't know whether I should just quit music altogether or be incredibly inspired 
Some eye opening quotes from the evening:
"I started playing drums at 2 1/2. My mom used to get mad at me because I would steal coffee cans and tuna cans and stuff from the cupboard and arrange them so I could hit them like a drum kit. I started performing as a drummer at 4 1/2."
"When I was in Annihilator, they made me stop playing the snare and the kick drum at the same time, because the engineers were complaining that I hit them within the same millisecond over and over again and it was clipping the track so much I had to not do that anymore"
"I love doing patterns with prime numbers - 7's,11's, 13's, 17's, 19's, etc. On one fill on the new record (I think he said Enigma Machine) I was trying different stuff when James Labrie jumped up and said 'THAT'S THE ONE, DO THAT AGAIN', so I worked it out and it was a group of 29"
"I can keep track of 3-4 different time signatures and tempos at the same time, so this allows us to sync our performance up exactly with the production videos that play on screen while we're playing".
"On one of the instrumental sections on the last record, I was following the keyboard and guitar line going up and down the rototoms. Jordan Ruddess kept yelling at me because one of my rototoms was '7 cents sharp from C#' so he made me retune them. I tried to argue that it just goes 'doink' when I hit it but no luck." (Makes sense to me that Ruddess would be one of those annoying-to-the-rest-of-us perfect pitch types).
He also mentioned that he only had about 3 days to prepare for his DT audition due to other commitments - teaching at Berklee and then a South American clinic tour, which makes his audition video look that much more impressive.
Some eye opening quotes from the evening:
"I started playing drums at 2 1/2. My mom used to get mad at me because I would steal coffee cans and tuna cans and stuff from the cupboard and arrange them so I could hit them like a drum kit. I started performing as a drummer at 4 1/2."
"When I was in Annihilator, they made me stop playing the snare and the kick drum at the same time, because the engineers were complaining that I hit them within the same millisecond over and over again and it was clipping the track so much I had to not do that anymore"
"I love doing patterns with prime numbers - 7's,11's, 13's, 17's, 19's, etc. On one fill on the new record (I think he said Enigma Machine) I was trying different stuff when James Labrie jumped up and said 'THAT'S THE ONE, DO THAT AGAIN', so I worked it out and it was a group of 29"
"I can keep track of 3-4 different time signatures and tempos at the same time, so this allows us to sync our performance up exactly with the production videos that play on screen while we're playing".
"On one of the instrumental sections on the last record, I was following the keyboard and guitar line going up and down the rototoms. Jordan Ruddess kept yelling at me because one of my rototoms was '7 cents sharp from C#' so he made me retune them. I tried to argue that it just goes 'doink' when I hit it but no luck." (Makes sense to me that Ruddess would be one of those annoying-to-the-rest-of-us perfect pitch types).
He also mentioned that he only had about 3 days to prepare for his DT audition due to other commitments - teaching at Berklee and then a South American clinic tour, which makes his audition video look that much more impressive.
*ain't no thang* 