Stay tuned for the next playthrough video in the coming weeks. We have also posted a couple of videos with footage from the guitar, bass, keyboard, vocal and drum recording sessions on our YouTube channel.

Even though gigs haven’t been possible for the past few months due to Covid, I have actually really enjoyed being able to focus my time on learning some very difficult tunes by Animals as Leaders, Virgil Donati and Nova Collective by learning from the drum transcriptions made available by these drummers. There’s nothing more rewarding than approaching a piece of music that is initially so daunting, breaking it down and slowly increasing the tempo on the metronome until you can play the whole section or song. I have already seen my playing and improvisation improve drastically as a result of digging in heavily into these songs.

If anyone is interested in learning the music of Virgil Donati, he has a book called Ultimate Play-Along Drum Trax which has a bunch of charts and insights into how some of the mind bending rhythmic sections work. Matt Gartska (Animals as Leaders) also has all the transcriptions from the last two AAL albums available to purchase on his website.

Here’s one of the epic sections I’ve been learning by Nova Collective. The transcriptions including guitar pro files for their album are available to purchase at mattlynchdrummer.com. Highly recommend. Check out my Instagram for more.