I heard Steve Ferrone at a rehearsal playing on a pretty beat-up set and it sounded like a record. I figured out basically he has a built-in mixing board in his playing: he can change the volume of any individual limb without changing the feel. It's harder than you think, and after doing it for a while, I got a new appreciation for how much you can do with a simple beat. For instance, try to compose a five-minute drum solo at a moderate tempo without using anything faster than, say, an eighth note. It's extremely humbling. After doing that for a while, I felt my playing become a little more centered.

It's also important to make stuff simpler so you can actually hear what it is. It's not how fast can you play, but how fast can you hear? It's hard to hear fast, to hear each individual note in a roll or a string of fast paradiddles or sixteenth notes. It's a lot easier to train your hands to play them than to train your ears to hear them, but I think it's crucial to developing a good sound and clean execution.

 With certain fast chopsy stuff, I had a tendency to blur-which I still do [laughs]-but I don't have to play them as fast anymore to make them sound fast. If I'm playing sixteenth note groupings, I can accent the fifth or the seventh sixteenth note; I can actually play the subdivisions and really feel where the fifth not or the seventh note is, it's not just part of a stream.

I may be wrong, but I feel that you can practice stick control or whatever for eight hours on a practice pad and while it might be good for your technique, it won't enhance your playing, really. I think the muscle/hand/nerve aspect only makes up about 30% of the ability to execute something.What I'm really trying to do is make a connection between the technique and my musical understanding and the sound I have in my head. That's what I'm concerned with-the sound of my hands, not the sound of the drumset. It's being able to play anything and create the sound.