Thank you Ricky for inviting me on this journey.

This is a special video for me as it is the very first drum cover I’ve officially been a part of. Absolutely happy at the outcome video, from editing to how to the drums sound. The work that Ricky did as an engineer is top notch and I have been blown away by the quality of sound he was able to extract from my takes, and to my surprise, no samples!

This video took about 7 days to put together from scratch and it was an absolute blast all the way through. Don’t get me wrong, it was quite the challenge but it was one I very much hope to do again. 1 day of transcribing, 4 days to learn, another to record, and lastly a day to edit. And just barely made it through.

While the figures in the song are not terribly difficult, I found, as anyone would considering this is a Meshuggah song, the permutations and accents to be the bigger challenge when it came to memorization. The second biggest challenge I’d say is the second guitar solo, which features a more involved drum composition with more room for error.

I also took a much different approach to the transcriptions, or rather lack of. Just in case I couldn’t make it through the challenge, rather than transcribe with typical drum notation, I chose to recreate the drums for the entire song on midi using the P4 GGD drum pack. This not only created a fallback but it also let me have the drums visible, almost as if they were notated note by note as I created a midi layout/mapping that closely resembles basic drum notation. Using this to my advantage I was able to read through quite a lot of the figures and had a much easier time deciphering all of the more complex orchestrations, rather than relying solely on the ears.