< PreviousModern Drummer December 2022 38 music with great harmonies, so I naturally hear those parts. But that goes both ways because when I am tracking drums sometimes the guys will make suggestions about beats and fills. It’s always fun when you have a non-drummer tell you how to play something. Seriously! Sometimes some really cool stuff can come from non-drummers. But other times I have to say, “I’m not an octopus, I don’t know how you expect me to play that, but I’ll certainly give it a shot. MD : When you are coming up with a part to match a riff, are you filling in the blanks between and complimenting Dan’s notes, or are you generally thinking about playing basically the same rhythm as Dan? MW: As we all know, the drummers most important job is keeping time. You have to be aware of time and space. Some riffs call for me to emulate the riff and to really lock in with the kicks. Other times if the guitar is playing more open, I will do the same thing and keep my part more open. When Dan and I jam, I know that once other parts or elements come it, I’ll have to take some parts out. I’m not the biggest “chops” guy. For me it’s not about ego, lots of fills, or whatever. It’s about what’s right for the song! That’s my thing. I’m not a soloist, I like groove, I like the people in the audience to be able to bob their heads to our music. MD : Who are some of your favorite groove players (besides Tommy Lee and Vinnie Paul?) MW : I really don’t listen to a lot of new music these days. I don’t want to insult any of the newer bands because there are a lot of great bands and talented players out there. I live in the world of metal when we are writing and touring, but I like to change things up. The thing that gets me grooving is the old classics. I love 70’s rock. I like all the “geographically named” bands like Chicago, Boston, and Kansas. I like the Eagles, their harmonies are fantastic. Those are all legendary bands. But I think that unfortunately if a lot of those bands were young today, they might not even get a record deal. Too much music today is repetitive, similar, and sort of homogenized. In my opinion, there isn’t a wide range of identity out there. MD : You have a nice room here with a lot of equipment, can you tell me about some of the drums on these shelves? MW : This hand-painted set is the set from our Indestructible tour. It was airbrushed by Nubbie from Orange County Choppers. That kit stays here at home. The rack of snare drum rack has a newer Black Beauty, a Tama Bell Brass, a bunch of Pearl wood snares, a Pearl Steel shell, a DW Steel, and a Ludwig Epic wood. The drum kit on top is the first drum kit that I ever played. My uncle played drums in a wedding band. When I was about eight, we would go to his house, and I would sneak into the room where he had that kit set up. One day, he came in and caught me looking at his drums. Instead of yelling at me, he said, “Why don’t you show me what you got?” He wanted me to play them! Then he started giving me pointers. Many years later, I bought him a new kit as thanks, and he gave me his old kit. MD : What are your favorite recording and live snares? MW: Live, I used to use the Pearl Steel all of the time. But now they have a hybrid Kapur and Fiber shell. That is a great live snare. I like crack and response from a snare, so I tune really tight and high. I have started using that in the studio too. It just works really well. I bring a bunch of snares with me every time we record, but we usually end up using either the Ludwig Black Beauty, the Tama Bell Brass, or (now) the Pearl Hybrid. But every drum will sound different depending on who hits it. MD: Do you remember what snares that you used on what songs on this new record? MW : No. I’ll be truthful with you. I love to create songs, and I love to see a song grow, I love to groove, but when it comes to recording, I don’t really like that process. Going for take after take… That is not enjoyable to me. There is always a technical problem, or a drum goes out of tune, or something… I can’t stand the start-stop-start-stop aspect of recording. There is no such thing as momentum for me when I’m in the studio. MD: No one has ever been truthful enough to say that to me. What you are saying is you aren’t going to retire from Disturbed to become a session drummer? MW : Never! I play drums because I love the band, and I love the final musical product that we create, but I don’t think I would have the patience to do this with anyone else. MD : When you tour, do you play to a click live? MW : Yes. But I am the only one with a click in my mix, and the rest of the band plays to me. I just keep it on for a reference, I’m not burying the click for the entire show, but it does help me stay locked in with some samples that we use during the show. I lay back on some sections of certain songs, and I will play on top sometimes too. I like to sound human. Sometimes we will put a click in everyone’s ears instead of me counting off a tune, it makes it look like we are all magically in sync. For me it’s not about ego, lots of fills, or whatever. It’s about what’s right for the song! That’s my thing. I’m not a soloist, I like groove.December 2022 Modern Drummer 39 Check out Mike's drummer profile page, at modern drummer.com MD: Do you like playing with a click? MW : It’s second nature for me. Dan kids me that when we are in a car, and I turn on the turn signal, I subconsciously start playing a beat along with the clicking of the turn signal. MD : I do that with the windshield wipers or with ticking clocks. How about the song “Don’t Tell Me” from the new record, I hear something different in there. MW : You are hearing Ann Wilson from Heart singing on the track. David thought we should do a vocal collaboration on that tune, and he didn’t even entertain the question of “who should it be?” He called Ann, and she was down for it. We were blown away! It was a proud moment for us. MD : Coming from Chicago, has the Chicago musical tradition played a part in you or the band’s sound or development? MW: When we came up there was almost two different scenes, there was the downtown pop scene with Smashing Pumpkins, Veruca Salt, and Local H, but we were considered to be too heavy to be a part of that, so we played on the southside and in the suburbs. That was a great and very supportive scene. We all supported each other. If you didn’t have a gig one night, you went to someone else’s gig to support them, it was great. I live in Milwaukee now, and there are some great cover bands up here, and some really talented musicians. MD : Speaking of covers, Disturbed has done some fantastic covers like Simon & Garfunkel’s “Sound of Silence” and Sting’s “If I Ever Lose My Faith in You.” Who brings in the cover suggestions? MW : We all do, when we decide to do a cover, we each bring in a list of tunes, and then it gets decided from there. “Sounds of Silence” was actually my idea. Growing up, my father was a huge Simon & Garfunkel fan. On Sunday’s we all had our chores to do, and while we cleaned the house, he would have Simon & Garfunkel playing in the background. After I suggested the song, (our singer) David took it to another level, and we went orchestral by adding some piano and strings. MD : I know that the new record just came out. But you mentioned a new tour, when are you guys heading back out? MW: It will be in 2023, everyone is out touring right now, some people are doing well and some aren’t. There is a whole new set of logistics now. Gas is still really expensive and tour buses are tough to get. But we’ll be going out early next year. Pearl Reference drums : two 18x22 Bass drums, rack toms in 8, 10, 12; suspended floor toms in 14 and 16 on my right, and an 18” floor tom on my left. That is what is in the picture, but on this new tour I might be going with 10, 12, 13 rack toms, and 16 and 18 floors and maybe a gong drum on the left, we are still figuring that out. Sabian Cymbals : from left to right: 14” AAX Stage hats, 18 AAX Metal Crash, 18” Holy China, 19” AAX Metal Crash, 19” AA Rock Crash, 19” AA Rock Crash, my remote hats are 14” AA Metal X Hats, 17” AA Rock Crash, 19” AA Xtreme Holy China, and my ride is a 23” Vault series Override. That ride is one of my favorite cymbals ever, especially in the studio. I also love the AA Rock Crashes. Evans Heads : Toms, Clear EC 2 on tops, and G1 on bottoms, bass drums have Clear Emad 2, snare ST Dry. Vater Sticks: Mike Wengren signature mod- el, and Humes and Berg Cases have been with me for a long time. MIKE’S GEARModern Drummer December 2022 40 Emilio HerceDecember 2022 Modern Drummer 41 The Mars Volta has been an influential band for a long time. Throughout that time, they have had quite a few influential drummers in the band. Blake Fleming, Jon Theodore, Deantoni Parks, Thomas Pridgen, Dave Elitch, Willie Rodriguez Quinones, and now introducing… Linda-Philomène Tsoungui (also known as Philo.) So who is Philo, and where did she come from? The answer is a long and very interesting story. Philo is a 30-year-old, highly educated drummer from Germany, with a very interesting and tumultuous background in classical percussion that resolved in a career playing drumset. Philo : By Mark GriffithModern Drummer December 2022 42 MD : It’s rare that a drummer that we have not heard much about bursts on the scene with such a big and influential band like The Mars Volta. Your road to that gig is a very interesting, with some interesting twists and turns that some of us can relate to. Can we talk about the road that led you to The Mars Volta? PT : I played mostly classical percussion until I was 24 years old. My mom found a teacher who was a classical percussionist. He taught his students to become classical soloists or percussionists. Fortunately, I was drawn to classical music, and I was listening to it a lot at the time. It is the only type of music that I can always listen to. At the time the prestige and the elite vibe around classical percussion and music was quite appealing to me. When I seriously got into it, I was 14 and in the process of finding myself, so that all made sense. I was trying to find out where I belonged, so the feeling that your ability on the instrument was the only thing that really mattered was very appealing to me. Early on I was aware that I had to make a choice. Music and drumming was either going to be my hobby, or I was going to take it very seriously. I made the decision that I was going to be all about music, and classical music and percussion would be my future. I didn’t want to be average. I kept studying classical percussion for the next three years before I went to university. There I wanted to study with Peter Sadlo. He had a big reputation, and he was known as a soloist and an educator. I wasn’t put into his classes when I made it into university, but that didn’t stop me. I still sought him out, I would sneak in lessons, I was asking him questions, I was always asking to be a part of his projects. Over a course of four years, I think my determination helped me play a way into his heart. That was a very hard four years. People always ask me about the Whiplash movie, and I tell them, “That’s sort of how it is.” I dedicated my whole being to playing music and school was intense. It was a constant sequence of practicing a piece, playing it for a teacher, getting hardcore feedback, practicing it more, receiving more hardcore feedback, giving a small concert of what we had learned, and then put that in our repertoire and move on to the next piece. In school you had to choose whether you wanted to become a soloist, play chamber music, be a classical percussionist for an orchestra, or be an orchestral timpanist. The classical scene is very competitive, and the places where you can get a job in an orchestra are super limited. In an orchestra there are maybe five or six Emilio HerceDecember 2022 Modern Drummer 43 percussionists who are employed, and those positions don’t open up regularly. When they do, the competition is crazy, you have to hold yourself to the highest of standards. MD : I can absolutely relate. When I was young, I was briefly thrust into the classical percussion world as well, but I realized very quickly that I wanted to be a part of the drum set world, and I pursued the drumset. PT: It’s good to know that you know the drill. The jazz department was next door to the classical department, and after 3 years of coexisting with it, I was beginning to get very interested in it. I was in the beginning of my twenties when one day a jazz major came up to me in the halls of the practice building while we were each taking a break. He told me that this guy named Robert Glasper was playing in Munich. I wasn’t familiar with Robert Glasper or drummer Chris Dave at that time, this was around the time of the first Black Radio record. At the time I had gone to very few pop or pop culture concerts or events, up until that time I would only go and hear classical music. These jazz majors had an extra ticket so I went to the show with them. I can easily say that night and that show changed my life!!! That was the first time I had seen only black people on stage in real life, that was a profound experience. But the way the musicians on stage were acting was profound too. They were so loose, so into the music, they were enjoying themselves, the people on stage and the audience was having FUN! I always viewed a classical music concert like an athletic competition. The harder it looked the better. The fact the Robert Glasper’s band was so relatable while they were on stage was mind blowing to me. There wasn’t that weird hierarchy between the people on stage and the people in the audience. There was an interaction, the entire club was one symbiotic organism, I had never felt that. That night my entire idea of performing classical music just collapsed. I made up my mind when I was 14 that I wanted to play classical music. But at the age of 22 I had changed my mind. I wanted to be a drummer in a band. I wanted to be a part of that, I didn’t want to feel like I was on an island playing super-hard music, I wanted to be a part of that interactive thing that I had felt seeing Robert Glasper. That year I asked the college to help me make the transition into the jazz department, they offered me drumset lessons for 30 minutes every other week, and the school said that was the best they could do for me, but I took whatever I could get. I took it as another fight worth fighting to get where I wanted to be. MD : What an awful way to treat a student in today’s world. PT: After I practiced classical percussion all day, I would wait until everyone else had gone home, and I would have the opportunity to practice drumset for an hour, and it was FUN! During those years I started meeting and hearing drummers like Jost Nickel, Anika Nilles, Claus Hessler, Benny Greb. I was immediately struck by the fact that these super top drummers were very down to earth people. They were nice and super into sharing ideas. I realized that all of those drummers had a link to Udo Dahmen who started the Popakademie in Mannheim. MD: That is like the German version of Berklee right? You can go there and study popular music. PT : Yes. So I got out of Munich, and went to Mannheim to the Popakademie to study the drumset. When they accepted me, I was still trying to figure out how the drumset actually worked. I put a lot of time in focusing on coordination and sound. They were the things that were the most different from my classical percussion background. MD: Did you have any experience with playing drumset before you started pursuing playing the set at Popakademie? PT : Not really. People always ask me if I had played drumset before going to Popakademie and my answer is kind of strange. At college I had sat at the constellation of instruments called the drumset, and I had played it. I had read sheet music, drumset parts, and charts… But essentially I had no idea how to play THE DRUM SET. I grew up in the small conservative Bavarian town of Hof. We had a theater, an orchestra, and a ballet. The presence of that culture made me want to be a part of it. At the same time my mom was very into Erykah Badu and she tells me that as a kid I loved the Soulquarian music that Questlove, D’Angelo, and Erykah Badu were making. That led me to ask my mom about the drums. But since the music scene in my town is so tied to the theatre and orchestra, I ended up going to a classical teacher. MD: It’s interesting that you mention that your mom remembers you liking the Soulquarian music when you were very young, and then the show that changed your life was Robert Glasper. Because that is all coming from the same musical place. It’s possible that without even knowing it, your mind subconsciously made that association. But it’s amazing that between those two events that were years apart, you had didn’t have much experience in playing the drum set. You said that when you finally got to Popakademie and started studying the drumset, you started studying coordination and sound What do you mean by that? PT : In classical music you don’t have to deal much with coordination. I had good technique, but not drumset technique. I had to apply what I had learned from classical technique to the drumset. I also had to figure out sound and tuning. In college, I would take out a snare drum from the storage area and practice my snare drum stuff. If I didn’t like how it sounded, I would take it back to the storage room and grab another snare drum. I had to learn to tune the drums in both the way that I liked the drums to sound, and in the more accepted (and generic) way that drums should sound for studio gigs. At Popakademie I started with super basic stuff. Ted Reed “Syncopation,” the Jim Chapin book. Then I went to the Gary Chaffee and Gary Chester books. With those books, you have to think creatively. That was new. The biggest lesson that I learned was practice wasn’t about showing your teacher that you could play something. It was about figuring things out for yourself, figuring out what and how you wanted to play. The teacher is there to tell you if you are on the right track, and to give you inspiration. Practice is not only about getting better, it’s about figuring out what you want to do. In classical percussion you never have really “Whenever I found a drum pattern in a song that had to be there no matter what, I would practice it with a click away from the music, just to get it down”Modern Drummer December 2022 44 think, you always have someone telling you what to do, what to think, and if something is good or not. But at the Popakademie I was left alone to figure out what I wanted to do. Then I started studying with Claus Hessler. He is the best teacher that I ever had. His realm of knowledge is so huge. He knows everything about the drums and he knows everything about the body. All of his students can play the craziest stuff and look super relaxed while doing it. He teaches a lot of Moeller technique which helped me a lot. His collapsed rudiments help you really squeeze everything out of every rudiment and idea. He stresses that until you have done everything there is with a paradiddle, you haven’t really mastered it. MD : That is so true. When you come upon a nice musical idea, you can play it “as written,” backwards, inside out, shift the accents, whatever… You can (or should) spend a lot of time really exploring a single idea. PT: Claus has also really brought odd subdivisions, polyrhythms, and odd times to the next level. But as a student, the trick is to filter what you want, for how you want to play. I knew that I didn’t want to be a super complicated fusion drummer, but Claus’ stuff still helped with coordination. At Mannheim, overall it was really about the community of the drum class. Everyone was showing everyone something, and everyone was inspiring everyone else. Everyone was pushing themselves, but it wasn’t in a competitive way. It was a supportive, positive, and loving environment. MD : The Chaffee stuff is far reaching, what did you do specifically? PT : Stickings and Time Functioning. That’s what I spent the most time on. It blew my mind and was very helpful. MD : Once you started studying drumset, did everything come and progress quickly? PT: It didn’t feel like it. I am very self-critical, and I was pushing myself really hard. But as I look back, I started getting gigs after my second year in Popakademie, so maybe I sounded better than I thought. MD : Were you listening to a lot of music and drumming during that time? PT: I listened to my teachers because they were all very good players. And whenever someone was coming through town to play, Udo would always try to get them to give a workshop or a clinic at the school. I remember seeing Richard Spaven; Chris Colenburg, and Zach Danziger to just name a few. I also shared an apartment with another drummer and he was into Ronald Bruner and Mike Mitchell. I was more into Brian Blade, Marcus Gilmore, Mark Collenberg, and Justin Tyson at the time. We would sit in our kitchen and watch all of those guys on YouTube. MD: What did you learn from watching them? PT : All of them have very conscious use of dynamics and vocabulary. None of them uses too much or too little of anything. And they can move and shift between all of the subdivisions easily and smoothly. They all seem to incorporate the soul of Elvin Jones in their playing. But it wasn’t in what they played, it was how they played that inspired me. I could always tell that all of those guys really “mean it.” And that’s what Elvin represented to me. He “meant” everything he played. Whether it was the simplest subdivision or the most complicated polyrhythm, he meant it. That’s what speaks to me the most. I love when drummers speak through their instrument, and when their playing becomes truly inexplicable. When all of those guys play, they are always staying true to the “heavy beat.” But that heavy beat isn’t always some external thing that is generated by a metronome, it is internal and in comes from deep inside. MD: The inner clock is essential for a great drummer. How long was it from when you first started at Popakademie and when Covid began? PT : Roughly three years of studying and doing gigs. MD: Then during Covid you buckled down, what did you focus on during Covid? PT : When Covid hit, I had the time to zoom out and look at what I had been working on, reflect on who I had been working with, and examine everything that I had been doing at the drumkit. I had been Emilio HerceDecember 2022 Modern Drummer 45 so busy preparing for the next gig that I didn’t have any time to really improve. But during Covid, I rewired myself to how I was when I was first studying classical music. I found what I needed to work on, and how I needed to improve during that time. I thought that I wanted to focus on chops. But what I wound up working on was sound and my internal mix at the drums. And I really focused on how my body actually feels while I’m playing and how I wanted to set up my kit. Up until that point, I had never really paid much attention to how I set up my drums, what sticks I used, none of that. I set up my kit like everyone else did and I used 5As because that was the first pair of sticks I ever got introduced to. During Covid I spent time trying to figure out what truly felt comfortable. I really wanted to find out how I could be even more comfortable at the drums, and what my body type was dictating to how I should set up my drums. I experimented with seat height, bass drum spring tension, and the height of my snare drum. MD : What kind of adjustments did you make? PT: When I sit at my drums, I want it to feel like I am sitting in my comfortable chair in my living room. I had been sitting too high, and psychologically that always made me feel “on the spot.” I lowered my throne and raised my snare drum. I wanted to be able to play a rimshot at any time without raising and shrugging my shoulders. I now sit relatively low, I have my snare relatively high, and I can relax my shoulders and play consistent rimshots. If I want to play something more delicate, I only have to make a very slight adjustment and lift my hands slightly higher. I learned that if you have one tense part of your body, it effects how your entire body feels. I think that’s a very important thing for drummers to know. I started to try and eliminate all of the tension in my body. Sure, when you get nervous you might tense up. But I wanted to have a foundation of no tension. I want my position at the drums to be inviting for all of my muscles to be relaxed. That opened a whole universe for me. If everything is relaxed, my posture is good, and everything is “in flow,” all of the harder coordination stuff suddenly starts to work and become easier. Through setting up my drums differently and making sure my posture and my body was in flow, I had better control over my muscles, and that made me a better player. It seems super simple, but it’s not the type of thing that you get taught at school. When we had special workshops about that at school, they were only one day events. We were all young and silly and just said “Yeah whatever, I just want to play drums.” But that bodywork is really important. MD : How low are you sitting? PT: If you have the highest point and the lowest point on the throne; I sit a little lower than halfway between those two points. I didn’t do anything extreme. I always try to keep the angle between my hips and my leg a little more than 90 degrees. MD : We have finally worked our way up to present day. How did the Mars Volta gig materialize? PT : The CEO of the label that Mars Volta is signed with, Johann, found me on Instagram, and he texted me. He was looking for new people to work with so I went to Hamburg to meet with Johann and we got along great. I think he saw similarities between Omar and me, and eventually he introduced me to Omar. Omar flew to Hamburg, and we hung out for about ten days jamming and recording stuff. We got to know each other. They had already completed the new record, and he asked me to play drums on the tour. MD : What music are you playing on the tour? PT : We are playing two new songs and lots of older stuff. MD: How did you learn their music? It’s pretty complicated music, did you write out charts? PT : No I didn’t chart the music out. I do that sometimes, but with harder music, I would rather listen to the music until I know it, and then start playing along to it. I made a huge playlist of songs, and I rated their difficulty from 1 to 10. I didn’t want to overlook any of the songs, and I wanted to prioritize the harder songs. Then with the harder songs I identified the hardest parts of the songs, then I listened to those harder parts over and over from both the studio and the live recordings. Through listening and talking to Omar, I realized that he had asked me to do the tour because he wanted me specifically, not a replica of someone else. That gave me the self-confidence to figure out what parts had to be the same, and what parts could be different. Whenever I found a drum pattern in a song that had to be there no @Emilio Herce The biggest lesson that I learned was practice wasn’t about showing your teacher that you could play something. It was about figuring things out for yourself, figuring out what and how you wanted to play.Modern Drummer December 2022 46 matter what, I would practice it with a click away from the music, just to get it down. I also prepared myself to play the songs faster than the recordings as some live recordings on YouTube were a lot faster than the studio versions. MD: What are some of your favorite tunes to play, and why? PT : “Eriatarka,” “Cicatriz,“ “L’Via,“ and “Cygnus....Vismund Cygnus.” I like how “Eriatarka” let’s loose at the end, after having a difficult drum pattern during most of the tune. We get to jam during “Cygnus” and “Cicatriz“ and and we love doing that. MD : How comfortable are you improvising? PT : I am very comfortable improvising with that constellation of musicians on stage. And I love accompanying Omar’s solos. I think we perceive things in similar ways. When he plays, I know what he’s “saying” and what he’s going to “say next.” I know when he wants me to push, and I know when he wants me to give him space. Everyone in the band is incredible, and everything is working so well on and off stage. I‘m so happy to be in a situation with such a wonderful family of musicians, we have a lot of trust and love for each other. MD : What was the hardest song to learn, what one really kicked your butt? PT: I guess “Cicatriz ESP.” I have a lot of respect for that song. It has a very stoic groove, but it’s also very delicate and super busy. It has a little bit of everything condensed into a one- bar drum pattern. It’s super repetitive and that can be difficult. Though all Mars Volta songs seem to have hard sections that get resolved into something very comfortable. MD: How are you approaching these songs diff erently from Deantoni, Thomas, and Jon? PT : I approached the music with respect to the legacy of all of the drummers that have played before me in The Mars Volta. After that, I have the opportunity to give it my own touch. We all have diff erent sounds, and I think we all feel dynamics in a diff erent way. I am always balancing serving the music with being given the freedom to express myself within the music. For me, that freedom often comes from dynamics and nuance; for other players it might be something else that is also completely legitimate and most likely perfect for whatever the music wants in that moment. MD : How has your early musical training prepared you for this gig? PT : I have played under pressure a lot during my musical life. All of those situations have helped me prepare for this gig. Before this tour, everyone wanted to know who was playing drums in the band, it was a big deal. I knew everyone would be watching very closely. But all of the previous musical situations have prepared me for this. MD : Speaking of pressure, you actually played “Music for 18 Emilio HerceMODERNDRUMMERCLUB.COM HTTPS://DISCORD.GG/MODERNDRUMMERCLUB HTTPS://TWITTER.COM/DRUMSNFT NFT METAPASS These NFTs will be your key to Modern Drummer's Music, Media & Entertainment ecosystem in Web 3. Our community is growing fast & will reap rewards for all META PASS holders.Next >