Matt Halpern Reacts to ME Playing Periphery's HARDEST Song 

Matt really is just an incredibly cool, down to earth person. He really deserves all of his success. Great job all around 80/20, I really enjoyed this. I like the way you're pushing your own boundaries while also giving other drummers something to do and think about.

You put a lot of time into that cover and did an excellent job. It's inspiring to see you playing something outside of your comfort zone and do it well. In the end, nobody will play that track the way Matt plays anyways.

Hats off to you Nate, I did NOT expect you to pull (Fat) Drac out of their entire discography. Absolutely insane song with some of the WILDEST drumparts. This took guts!

Dracul Gras is a masterpiece of a song. Periphery is a machine of a band. Seeing Halpern changed my flow in drumming after learning about his F8, figure 8 kind of splash wave sticking. His approach to the kit is a philosophy on its own. Thanks for sharing Your take on this song cause, Dracul Gras is an absolute trip of a song. 🔥🧛🏿‍♂️🥁

His point on not playing the rhythm was evident from the start. Bonham did this alot. Bonham played guitar parts on drums and that's what Matt's doing. Learn the guitar parts, accent on the spaces in between noting. There's where the drummer sits in this song.

I think you did a good take Nate, and I’ve noticed over time your stick height and attack of drums and cymbals improved in terms of making this kind of music sound good. I was really enjoying the final take and my head was bobbing!

So much time and effort taken. Thank you for sharing your approach and journey.

Been watching you for years. Love this genre and never would've imagined you doing something like this! Kudos!!

Have to say, when P1 and P2 were around, Matt Hellporn was the drummer’s drummer to geek out to, at least in my circle. Since Matt there’s been Matt Garstka and Clay from Polyphia and tons of others but Matt existed pre-super Instachop and kind of in the rise of RU-vid etc

Periphery is definitely my favorite band and stuff like this makes me appreciate them that much more. They’re heavily invested in sharing the music and enabling listeners to partake in the magic. I try to count and quantize the beat when listening to this song and other odd-time gems from their library, but I usually give up and do exactly what Matt recommended. It’s phenomenal advice; sometimes total memorization is the only real way to achieve mastery of a complex track. All in all I think you did a great job here, and I fully welcome more prog-djent analyses from Periphery and Tesseract (their new record is just splendid). Cheers Nate, merry Christmas and a happy New Year!

Way to go, Nate! Matt's songs are always a fractal, the more you look into it, the deeper it goes.

This was sick AF!! Great story build! Love this song!

Man, you must have learned a lot and I take my hat off to your openness in sharing the learning process and also the imperfections. A great approach to learning new things - it's always true that "the more you know, the more you know what you don't know".

Your videos got me through Covid and inspired my language learning in a big way. I passed my Goethe Institute B1 in German, have taught myself to type on a French keyboard and am reading difficult novels in French. The key point of this video to me was, deliberately put yourself into difficult and embarrassing positions so that you feel obligated to deliver. There are plenty of people willing to help, but you have to hold up your end of the bargain in order for them to respect you.

This was dope man. Song is really f'n hard and you had it down pretty nicely at the end. The amount of practice it takes to be on Matt's level is.. phew.

Yes! This is so great! Nice work!

Man I freaking love your process and breakdown of everything you do on this channel! I really hope we get to meet at a Meinl even some day soon!

Hey man. Great job. Love to see you take on this challenge.

sick content man love the videos and effrot!

Thanks for sharing as always!

Awesome job, entertaining video! I've watched more of your content than I've seen/heard of periphery's. Very cool. I like heavy music and some prog stuff but I haven't gotten bitten by this band yet. Keep doin what you do! Cheers!

Hey Nate merry Christmas duder absolutely sick drumming mate that's a tricky song to drum along with from what I heard you covered a lot of ground and interpreted the changes well- in my humble opinion. Brave effort beast of a song

I really appreciate this video, great take

Very impressed! Really like watching your videos.

super cool, got into fusion and jazz through prog rock/metal so it's cool to see you trying out that stuff :)

Between the two of yous - you’ve sussed out a notion that has stuck with me all day long - and, yes, likely more days to follow…taking a groove I am learning and learning to make the groove, as I play it, danceable! beyond practiced. Kool and the Gang 😊

This is really cool! Do more of this stuff! It's fun watching you branch out beyond your immediate comfort zone! Only suggestion I could give you is that you need to play with more energy with this kind of music. I feel like when matt is playing, he's less focusing on being perfectly tight and each beat being perfect, and more like he's dancing behind the kit and it does give him a very unique sound that I haven't heard any drummer successfully replicate. I can just tell when matt is playing even without other instruments. Props to you for being brave enough to not only do a cover of a really difficult song, but also having him and us critique it. I couldn't play this nearly as clean so I have absolutely nothing to complain about. you smashed this!

Well done 👍 👏 Now we need a video of you learning Periphery’s “Insomnia”. Good luck 😂

Fantastic work! I'm excited to see what happens next as now I think you have a taste of the heavy and you may pursue that a little further! :-)

Quite the undertaking, Nate! You did great!

Hats off, I tried learning this on guitar and felt like I needed at least 4 additional brains to get the rhythm and all these slightly alternating patterns, I guess this feels the same for the drumming parts. Getting down this much in such little time is mind blowing!

Kudos man, just pure respect for this, and well played. Must have been amazing to get tips directly from Matt himself. Are there any other parts of their discography you're interested in? Can we expect more Periphery content in the future 👀

Wow great great video, educative, and extremely fun, awesome to have Comments from Matt, one of the best, and the song...wow.

Hey thanks for making this video-great insight into the intricacies of this song (and Matt's playing + the band compositional style). I think you played it well I admire that you show the whole humbling process of learning/playing a song of such complexity -and 3 weeks is not bad for a prog song- I will give you a grade of 80/20 .... and that's also a prog rock time signature ; ) Enjoyed.

Impressive ! Great job!

The drum solos near the end big band part of the song are so good. It would have been cool to see you learn those as well

Always good to get out of ones comfort zone every once in a while. Even better to show people a good example on YT! :)

Great cover!

Matt is such a breath of fresh air in the metal drumming community. Super down to earth and doesn’t gatekeep any of his methods or philosophy regarding his writing approach.

Ohhhh look at them ears starting to turn! Them man ears are really starting to show. It hurts but it also tells everyone else you’ll hurt them lol. Let’s go! Great video from you as always that I see.

I get to listen to drummers from the rafters at my local venue... Matt Halpern has the loudest, cleanest, and punchiest RAW DRUM sound I've ever heard in person

Imo the toughest part isn't even the little solo at the end, it's what you call the "big band" section. At least for me. All those fast flams with the floor Tom's plus the constant but even ghost notes that make it so tricky for me at least There's a part in icarus lives that this reminds me of actually

That final performance, you can see the head bobbing Matt talks about a lot, great job dude

I got to hang/work with him when he was with the underwater. Amazing drummer and great dude!

Superb, really brave to take this on.

Enjoyed the deep dive even though I’m not personally into this style (I do enjoy the less scream-y styles of prog, tho). I appreciate the craft of the complexity, and I appreciate how you dug into how to think about it in chunks.

Well executed Sir 🤟🏻

This was awesome! I definitely echo Matt’s advice about internalizing songs…I write a lot of stuff in weird compound times but once I have the guitar riff or whatever is driving the song internalized, it’s fairly easy to play and also improvise (I know: sacrilege when talking about prog!)

I mean when i started seeing you get comfortable kinda nodding to the beat, you got that groove going and sounded great. Matt looks like a human octopus when he plays and he just an alien or super human with his playing and is extremely different to emulate lol Maryland pride right there 😁 natty bo, blue crabs, old bay, and mfin periphery!!

You've got bawls!😊

We spend most of our time avoiding being challenged …..so much easier doing our riffs ! Good job! It came together in the end ! The one thing to remember ….and this works both ways…you got to play with some power and aggressiveness with this stuff…adopt the stance so to speak!! Rockers playing jazz it’s the same thing!

You my hero dawg

I laughed at the Craig Reynolds quote (I love Craig)--it does seem like there are so many Matt's that are incredible drummers (excluding myself here because I'm not a great durmmer or anything). This was a super interesting and enjoyable video! And Matt offering his time was super cool!

I think it was awesome, and i love that you broke it down! Next up, Blood Eagle

“Was all this still in 4… did it matter?”

Tbh this made me feel a bit better about myself. I volunteered to do a full band cover of Atropos a few months ago. I didnt know the song at the time but it seemed like one of their easier songs so i thought i could learn it within a couple weeks of practicing 1-2 hrs a day It took me over 2 months before i was ready to record the cover and i felt like it meant im a terrible drummer So seeing even a pro take a good amount of time to learn periphery makes me feel less shitty Even though dracul gras is miles more difficult than atropos but i also havent been playing drums for very long Btw the full band cover is almost done if anyones curious

You know who is a super under rated drummer? Matt from Four Stroke Baron. Would be awesome to see him on the pod cast and for you to breakdown one of their songs.

Always interesting to see a jazz drummer try out metal (and viceversa), you did great!, althought i gotta say, you should try playing it hitting harder, just for fun, maybe you fall more into the groove of it, because even tho you were playing the parts correctly, the feeling wasn't there, just my opinion as a mostly metal drummer

man I respect the hell out of Matt's approach. write the drums organically, not technically, and you end up with an organic, not technical, song.

Matt's cheat sheet is on his IEM.

Great

Grande

2 billion dollars to the first person who tells me what the hell that tiny ride is that matts using next to his rack tom on the right

I've taught a few Periphery songs to students, and The Walk and Light seem like the hardest to me.

Oh! This is what you posted on Instagram. You're absolutely insane lol

💪💪💪💪

Play Silent Flight Parliament by BTBAM! Great vid, keep it up bud! Subbed!

11:45 matt finally cave in and admits he's bald

I remember reading an interview with Danny Carey and he said, and this isn't verbatim..."I play the song. Don't just play the drums."

its interesting, watching u first try it, you looked confident. The actual playthru tho, u looked like a deer in headlights lol

A very good job, considerin😮g the level of difficulties of the song, in that short amount of time. I would never, ever be able to learn that song, even if I spent the rest of my life trying. 5000000 times better than me.

Don’t like the song that much, but I can see the challenge. Another great education/self-learning video

As I was scrolling I thought that was joe rogan in the thumbnail lol. Had to go back and look

Don't be afraid to hit those drums you look so miserable, I beat mine like they stole something and I couldn't be happier lol

Tbh he says it so many times I gotta criticize it, I dont think this is one of their hardest songs on drums but it's because of how many difficult songs they have If you watch only his playthroughs? Maybe it's the toughest of his playthroughs. Out of their whole discography? Probably not even top 20 I'm guessing lol Not to say it's not hard, it's insanely hard. What's worse is so much of periphery sounds WAY EASIER than it actually is and Matt makes it look even easier than it sounds. Learning periphery is BRUTAL so I'm not trying to discredit him. I'm super impressed be did this But still, there's shit on the 1st 2 albums that put this to shame IMO

im kind of confused, where’s the reaction?

Mr. Bean plays the drums

If you're gonna play metal I would suggest you start hitting those drums a lot harder. You're gingerly tapping them like you're using brushes in a jazz ballad.

Yes, it is pronounced Djent

He's a master of disguising simple time signatures making it seem like it's far more complex than it is. This type of drumming is extremely hard because you have to learn how to override the most basic rules that form the very foundation of drumming. The things he does are what drummers are taught NOT to do because it's nearly impossible to do your job as a drummer. This is like putting a roof on your house during a hurricane. Who the fuck would ever do that? Well Matt Halpern would do it, and it would be the nicest roof in the neighborhood. He's a fucking freak.

2 of my favorite drummers!!

Any periph song is hard but this isn't the hardest, i'd say Omega by them just in terms of learning bit by bit is up there