Through his excellent drumming books and DVD, Gavin Harrison has made a mission of teaching drummers how to play polyrhythms, beat displacements, and metric modulations, which collectively will confuse the hell out of your bandmates even as you come down on the 1. If you’ve never heard Harrison play, you might assume from the last sentence that his drumming would be self-indulgent and busy, as he endlessly screws around with the beat. You couldn’t be more wrong. Harrison is a great groove drummer, and his playing always feels perfect. He has incredible dynamics and taste, but always enhances the arrangement with enough spice to keep things interesting – a fact proved on every song he plays with Porcupine Tree, a band that blends the introspection of Radiohead or Coldplay with heavier progressive influences of Tool or A Perfect Circle.

"Halo"

In this song, Harrison starts with another cool funk groove that makes great use of dynamics and hi-hat openings, and ends with a six-stroke-roll fill. At the chorus, he moves his right hand to his ride cymbal, and uses his left hand to play the open hi-hats. This disk has lots of odd-time sections, and in this song, there’s a part that alternates measures of 9/8 and 8/8, though you can just as easily think of the second measure as 4/4. The second time through the pattern Harrison plays a sparser pattern on a sloshy hi-hat, and adds some double bass ruffs to raise the difficulty level even higher.

By Brad Schlueter
http://www.drummagazine.com/lessons/post/gavin-harrisons-hot-licks/