Awesome Drumeo

We enjoy watching Drumeo’s series, where they ask musicians to create the drum track for a song they’ve never heard. In this session, they challenged Julliard jazz professor Ulysses Owens Jr. to perform the Nirvana song In Bloom. Ulysses’ interpretation both touches on the original and adds some new flourishes compared to Dave Grohl’s original.

(PG-13: Language) Drumeo frequently invites percussionists to improvise rhythms to songs they’ve never heard or played before. In this session, they asked Red Hot Chili Peppers drummer Chad Smith to take on the Thirty Seconds to Mars song The Kill (Bury Me), and he totally nailed it despite his lack of familiarity with the track.

Dirk Verbeuren has been banging the drums since the 1990s, and is the current drummer for thrash metal band Megadeth. Unlike most of us, he had never heard The Killers’ 2004 hit Mr. Brightside before stopping by Drumeo’s studio. After giving a drumless version a listen, he broke it down, chopped it up, and performed his own take on the track’s rhythms.

Percussionist Dennis Chambers has performed with acts including Santana, Parliament/Funkadelic, George Duke, and CAB. Drumeo challenged the legendary jazz-funk musician to listen to Tool’s Schism for the first time ever, after which he improvised a killer new drum track.

Crazy as it sounds, Snarky Puppy drummer Larnell Lewis says he never heard the Metallica track Enter Sandman before now. But it didn’t take much time for him to pick up the rhythm, which he proved with a flawless performance right after his first listen in this video from Drumeo.