Bat Country fill clinic 🦇 Dream Theater in 5 days ⏱️ cheap snare, pro sound 🪘

@Jake Rosen

Jake Rosen drops into kharchenko.vitaliy's "Your Success" and treats the funk pocket like a vault, locking every kick and ghost note to the groove. The LA drummer, who's logged time behind Dax, Mr. Talkbox, and Victor Wooten, makes the cut feel effortless even when the syncopation gets sneaky. The clip is racking up plenty of love, and it's easy to hear why.

Xavier Ware learned Dream Theater's "The Dance of Eternity" in five days, and Drumble's 48-second cut captures just how absurd that is. The tune is a notorious obstacle course of meter changes and stop-on-a-dime hits, the kind of chart most players woodshed for months. Watch the short, then chase the full performance on Drumble's channel.

Steve Gadd, Dave Weckl, and David Garibaldi all put the Yamaha Recording Custom on countless sessions, and Simon over at Thomann's Drum Bash spends five minutes asking whether that storied studio voice still earns its keep in 2026. He runs the kit through medium and high tunings, ported and unported kick, letting you hear the focused attack and tight decay that made these shells a control room favorite in the first place.

It's a useful watch if you're weighing a workhorse studio kit, and the matching Yamaha Recording Custom snare is worth a look on its own for that same dry, recordable crack.

Vic Firth's Performer Classic Stick Bag holds up to 12 pairs across three stitched interior pockets, with zipped front and back compartments, an elastic cargo net, and a padded device sleeve for the gear that always ends up loose in your gig bag. Water-resistant fabric, reinforced stitching, and adjustable floor tom straps with custom hooks make it a workhorse rather than a fashion piece. At $49.95, it is a sensible upgrade for anyone still rotating sticks out of a torn nylon roll.

66Samus throws himself at "Bat Country" by Avenged Sevenfold, paying tribute to The Rev's creative fills, iconic snare phrasing, and relentless double-kick passages. At just over four minutes, it's a tight, sweaty showcase of why The Rev's writing still functions as a masterclass for metal drummers. Worth sitting with for the fill choices alone.

Sam Barrell Jones picked up the oboe as a kid because he wanted the loudest, most annoying instrument he could find, and that same instinct now powers his drumming behind Nubya Garcia, Sons of Kemet, and Obongjayar. Yamaha's five-minute profile traces his path through Tomorrow's Warriors and into a London sound that braids jazz, grime, UK bass, reggae, and dub. Worth the sit for anyone curious how the city's improvisers are wiring club energy into the kit.

Sari Kujala's premise is one most of us learn the hard way: rudiments practiced as isolated patterns rarely translate into music. In her latest, she uses the six stroke roll as the test case, demonstrating how the same sticking can sound like a workout or a phrase depending on how you place accents, dynamics, and orchestration around the kit.

The takeaway worth stealing: stop treating a rudiment as a finished product and start treating it as raw material. Vary the accent placement, move the unaccented strokes to different voices, and play it inside a groove rather than over a click in a vacuum. It is a small shift in framing that turns hand exercises into vocabulary you actually reach for behind a song.

Ryan Prim makes the case that a cheap snare can sound pro if you stop blaming the shell and start respecting the tuning. His walkthrough centers on dialing in batter and resonant pitches, picking heads that suit the drum, and seating everything properly before reaching for moongel or a wallet on the head.

The actionable takeaway: tune with intention, not vibes. A Tune-Bot takes the guesswork out of matching lugs and finding a clean fundamental, which is usually the difference between a budget snare that cracks and one that thuds. Worth 10 quiet minutes before your next session, especially if you've been quietly resenting your backup snare.