Clapton on Steve Gadd's process 🎚️ Buddy Rich's last unseen 1982 footage 🎺 Phil Collins on serving the song

@Kembely Almeida

Kembely Almeida flips "Smells Like Teen Spirit" into a Robert Glasper-style reharm, trading Grohl's grunge thunder for loose, jazz-inflected pocket. It's the kind of genre-bending reimagining that makes you hear the riff fresh, with Almeida's touch doing the heavy lifting. A short, smart reel worth the 30 seconds.

Ash Soan, the man behind Adele, Seal, and Snow Patrol, gets handed a Steve Gadd checklist and a single original track to run it through: rudiments, iconic grooves, linear patterns, and a solo over the vamp. It's a clinic in studying another player's vocabulary without losing your own voice. Worth 71 seconds of your practice time to map how he sequences the brief.

Danny Carey walks Modern Drummer CEO David Frangioni through the rhythmic labyrinth of his Fear Inoculum Tour kit in a 63-second backstage rundown. It's a quick orbit around one of prog's most elaborate setups, with Carey himself pointing out the pieces. Worth a tap if you've ever tried to map what's actually surrounding him onstage.

ProMark's Hot Rods bundle 19 medium birch dowels under a red plastic wrap near the neck, landing squarely in that sweet spot where regular sticks are too loud and brushes are too quiet. They're built for coffeehouse gigs, church services, low-volume rehearsals, and any acoustic setting where you still need stick attack and dynamic control without overpowering the room. At 5B feel with a .550" diameter and 16" length, they belong in every working drummer's stick bag.

Eric Clapton, in a 2003 documentary interview Hudson Music has now pulled from the vault, walks through what it was like having Steve Gadd build the drum parts for his Blues record. The five-minute Part 2 clip is less about war stories and more about process: how Gadd absorbs a song, where his ideas come from, and why Clapton trusts him to find the part rather than be handed one.

It is a short watch, but worth sitting with because the perspective is rare. You are hearing one of the most discerning bandleaders in popular music describe, in plain language, what makes Gadd's approach to a session different from everyone else's.

Buddy Rich at the Statler Hotel, 1982, trading fire with Mel Tormé and Gerry Mulligan on "Oh, Lady Be Good." Drum Channel is calling this perhaps the last unseen Rich footage in existence, pulled from three shows he filmed at the Statler that year and now remastered with guests including Woody Herman, Ray Charles, Stan Getz, and Lionel Hampton across the broader series.

The clip runs about seven and a half minutes and it is worth sitting with. Watch how Buddy comps behind Tormé's vocal, the touch and dynamics on brushes and ride, then the way he reloads the band coming out of Mulligan's baritone solo. Late-period Rich, still operating at the level that made him the benchmark.

Dennis Chambers digging into "(Not Just) Knee Deep" is the kind of pairing that sells itself: one of funk's most fluent drummers locked into a Funkadelic groove from 1979's Uncle Jam Wants You. Over five minutes, Chambers treats the pocket like a living thing, riding the one with that signature blend of greasy backbeat and gospel-chops fluency that made his name in P-Funk circles to begin with.

If you've only heard Chambers in fusion contexts, this is a useful reset. Watch how restrained he can be when the song asks for it, then how casually he drops in a flurry without ever pulling focus from the groove. The Drumeo Clips cut is a teaser for the full session, but it stands on its own as a study in funk authority.

@Rick Beato

Simon Phillips opens up his approach to linear fills in a quick clip with Rick Beato, and even without a play-by-play, the concept itself is worth pocketing: in a linear fill, no two limbs strike at the same time. Every note is its own voice, which is why these fills sound like they tumble forward instead of landing in blocks.

Here is how to start working on it today. Pick a simple six-note cell spread across hands and kick, something like right, left, right, left, kick, kick, and loop it slowly around the kit. The point is not speed. The point is hearing space between every single hit, no flams, no accidental unisons. Set a metronome around 70 to 80 bpm, play the cell as straight sixteenths, and only move it around toms once it is clean on the snare. A common trap is letting the kick sneak under a hand stroke, which instantly kills the linear feel, so record yourself and listen back. Once the cell is solid, try ending a two-bar groove with it on beat four, the way Phillips and players like Gadd and Garibaldi often do, where the fill barely interrupts the time.

Linear vocabulary rewards patience. Get one cell truly even, then start collecting more.

Rob Brian's trick for sounding like a Linn drum on an acoustic kit, no samples or triggers required, is pure stick control: three fixed stick heights, played the same way every time, until the snare reads as a programmed part. He pulled this out on a Simple Minds session with Charlie Burchill and Jim Kerr, and you can hear it sitting under Broken Glass Park.

The takeaway is counterintuitive. Stripping dynamics out of your hands is harder than adding them in, and that same locked-in control opens up a very different feel on the hi-hat too. Filmed at Dorset Drum Festival 2026, with a bonus tip on using offcuts from old heads as a budget Big Fat Snare substitute.

Phil Collins has a message for drummers, and Drumeo just clipped two minutes of it. The full sit-down lives on the Drumeo channel, but this short cut is the headline version: the man behind "In the Air Tonight" and a half-century of Genesis records talking directly to the kit player watching at home.

Without fabricating his exact words, the angle Collins consistently returns to in interviews is worth carrying into your practice room today: serve the song, play what it needs, and trust that feel beats flash almost every time. So before your next session, try this. Pick one tune you already know cold and play it through once with no fills, just time, dynamics, and the pocket. Then play it again and allow yourself exactly two fills, placed where the song actually asks for them. Notice which version feels better. If you want a Collins-specific lab, loop the verse groove of "In the Air Tonight" at a slow tempo and focus only on hi-hat consistency and snare weight. The famous tom fill is the dessert. The two minutes of restraint before it are the meal.

Watch the clip, then go hit something quietly and musically. The takeaway: play the song, not the drums.

Jonathan "Sugarfoot" Moffett, the man behind the kit for Michael Jackson, Prince, Madonna, and Stevie Wonder, is getting a fresh appreciation thread over on r/drumming. The clip making the rounds shows exactly why pop's biggest names kept calling him back: locked-in precision, theatrical flair, and a pocket built for stadiums. Worth a few minutes if you've ever wondered who powered those tours.