If anything, moving your limbs as a drummer keeps them lubricated. Look at Buddy Rich: He was whaling the hell out of his drums until he was an old man. Although it wasn’t metal music, he was doing blasts on the snare–he was a blastmaster!

March to the beat of your own drum

One of the most common failings [when writing a drum track] is repetition. Nobody wants to hear that same stupid 16-line bass-snare pattern throughout the WHOLE song. Didn't your mother ever teach you that variety is the spice of life?

While Jeff leads with compassion, that alone won’t necessarily inspire people. If you’re trying to create a cohesive culture, there are three specific beats a drum major can lay down. “Number one is to have clarity of vision,” Jeff says. “Two is the courage of one’s conviction. And three is the ability to effectively communicate those two things.

One of my philosophies about playing drums is if you really break it down, there's probably only about 10 or 12 percent of the people in this world that are actually musicians that understand what goes into making a song. The other people are just listeners and they feel the groove and they feel the beat and that's what makes them move and that's what makes them go, 'That's a fuckin' kick-ass song.' As a drummer, I always approach things as, 'I want to play just enough to keep other drummers interested, but not enough to go over the average listener's head.' That's where I think a lot of these guys today are just, 'I'm the drummer, man. Check it out. Here's my lick. I just learned this new drum lick. I'm just gonna blast all over the place.' It's like, 'Man, you've got to let the song breathe.'

It's all about tones.This is very important to remember: It's all about tones. You hear the sound in your head or your heart, and you send a message to your fingers. That's my technique. On a good night, it works.

If you don’t have a drummer, you can still make a beat. The good news is, it won’t sound like anyone else’s beat, and most people won’t be able to tell if it’s Matt Chamberlain or just you frantically tapping a launchpad.

Once the song is done and recorded, I like to go back and then cut the drums, because then I know exactly what the song needs, and what it doesn't need.

I hadn't heard his remixes and didn't know how amazing a drummer Travis is. But we got together, I threw on James Brown's 'Funky Drummer,' one of the most sampled beats in hip-hop, and 'I Know You Got Soul' by Bobby Byrd. His face would just open up; he would match the beat perfectly. I thought, 'Damn, this is fun.' It's like a skeleton you get to put the clothes on. And once the clothes are on, you yank out the spine.

If you listen to a lot of the heavy bands, even , or – they were heavy as hell, but I always though the production sounded like shit [...] There was this general consensus that nobody who produced stuff like gave a shit about it. They’d say, ‘Oh, they play too fast and it sounds like a dog barking.’ [...] no one ever tried to make them sound good. And at the time, Jim, and Tom really were pioneers as far as doing drum triggering. And they invested money in PC electronics and figured how to use that to make high really good recordings. And I jumped right in the fire and learned as I went along.

The hardest thing to do is to swing quietly, with control and restraint. Lots of bands swing loudly. I refuse to let my band play loudly in order to try to swing when it isn’t swinging softly. I think that the best jazz in the long run is the jazz that is controlled and will swing on its own terms.

What's the last thing a drummer says in a band?

What I would do was use the bridge pickup with all of the bass turned up, so the sound was very thick and on the edge of distortion. I also always used amps that would overload. I would have the amp on full, with the volume on the guitar also turned up full, so everything was on full volume and overloading. I would hit a note, hold it, and give it some vibrato with my fingers, until it sustained, and then the distortion would turn into feedback. It was all of these things, plus the distortion, that created what I suppose you could call my sound.

One needs only to study a certain positioning of the hand in relation to the keys to obtain with ease the most beautiful sounds, to know how to play long notes and short notes and to [attain] certain unlimited dexterity... A well formed technique, it seems to me, [is one] that can control and vary a beautiful sound quality.