Mike Portnoy part 2

Octavarium Era.

Drums are an intenseful, demanding, instrument. They aren't like ANY other instrument in a modern band musical setting, (guitar,bass,etc.) and requires you to have independence on all four limbs. Not only that, as many people know, drum are the heart and the pulse of the song. you speed up, everybody speeds up so it's ultra important our job as a drummer is to keep a steady rockin' beat.

Those are only the basics of course. Master veteran drummers like Portnoy, on top of doing what is already very hard, breaks through the mold and acquires what you would call, your own voice on the drums. I have heard that having your voice on the drums is many more times harder on top of being just a drummer. Surely, it takes decades of playing and/or a sheer amount of talent to achieve that.

Now I fell in love with drums or more importantly, percussion in my 8th grade high school music class. It was made mandatory at the time to purchase an acoustic guitar. I had already been down that road once in 5th grade of my middle school when the same thing was asked of my teacher so I already owned a guitar. Once again like three years back, I tried learning the chords, really learned the strumming but alas, nothing.

I promptly put down the 5 stringed instrument in one class thereafter and searched around the room for the next most interesting instrument. My eyes caught the snare drum which was laying on top of a corner chair; it was badly tuned and the heads needed replacing. The snare wires on the underside were damaged but it was still a 14" snare nonetheless. The christmas concert was in weeks. I had no real intentions of playing the guitar with 7 other classmates, fail or not. It wasn't that exciting at all.


This post went about 6 or 7 years back of my life. This was before anything. In part 3, I'll talk about my first experience with a real drum set and more. To be continued. Stay tuned.