I love to talk about the drums and music. I started playing drums when I was probably six and played a lot until I was about ten or eleven years old. So, I guess five or six years where I played. I had a drum set at home, and I would just bang on it. I'd even go on the Internet and study basic beats and so forth.
Rudimental snare work is something I've always loved.
I look up to a lot of old school drummers from the '70s, '80s, and '90s.
If drummers are 'anti-solo,' that's up to them. They're musicians, and they can play whatever they want. But my inspirations early on were people like Buddy Rich, seeing him on 'The Tonight Show', or Gene Krupa.
If you come in like a typical modern drummer who is used to playing only with tricks and double kick and, like, big, big, big, fast rolls, but you can't play a swinging shuffle, then you can't play in Ghost whatsoever.
One that really caught me was Joe Morello. He was the first drummer I ever saw that could do a roll with one hand. He would turn his hand over and use his fingertips to get the stick bouncing. He could sit there with his right hand doing stuff on the cymbals and tom-toms while he was doing a roll with his left on the snare drum.
I was a beginner again. I practiced hard and used to listen very closely to recordings of American jazz drummers such as Tony Williams and Kenny Clarke.
I learned to play drums to the 'Blue Album.'
There's something very particular about the kind of rage you feel when you're alone in a practice room by yourself, unable to master a simple thing like a rudiment.
Well I had a musical background, but I still didn't know a lot about drums at the time.
