Megadeth’s Dirk Verbeuren played a drum clinic for 150 people at Musicians Institute. From one drummer’s seat, it was one of the best nights I’ve had in a room this year.
Let me be upfront about my bias: I have played drums for years, and watching one of the biggest drummers in metal work through his craft for a couple of hours is about as good as a Tuesday night gets for me. On July 28th I was lucky enough to catch Dirk Verbeuren’s drum clinic in Hollywood, and I am still thinking about it.
The clinic was put on by Metal Injection, Savage Lands, and Musicians Institute. Metal Injection is a competitor to this site, and one that has been around a lot longer than Weapon K, so credit where it is due: they threw a great event. (We flagged this clinic when it was announced.) It went down in MI’s concert hall, the room right inside the front doors on the ground floor. Musicians Institute is a for-profit music college in the heart of LA, a name most players out here know, and its hall probably holds six or seven hundred people. There were about 150 of us. That is it. Learning from a drummer of this caliber in a room that small is a rare thing, and everyone there seemed to know it.
Dirk’s kit was already up on stage, and here is the first detail that got me: it was not the big, polished Megadeth rig with the rack toms. This was his personal Tama kit, the one he told us he has used on recordings for sixteen years, going back to his Soilwork days. He opened with two Megadeth songs, “Tipping Point,” the new single off the band’s self-titled final record, and “Wake Up Dead.” I figured he would rip through a set, take some questions, sign a few things and head out. I was wrong. This was so much more than that.
After those two songs he grabbed a mic and just started talking to us, comfortable and clearly happy to be there. He got into why teaching music in rooms like this matters, and how a school a lot like MI, back in France, was where he really fell into it. He had been playing about four years when he enrolled. When he asked how many of us were MI students, about half the room raised a hand. The rest were people like me who had just gotten lucky.
He climbed back on for “This Was My Life,” another Megadeth cut you do not hear live very often, and then came the part the drum nerd in me loved. While he talked, his tech reworked the kit behind him: the ten-inch tom came off for a splash cymbal, the snare got swapped for a piccolo. The reason was Soilwork. Dirk explained that the ten-inch tom is really a Megadeth thing, because Dave Mustaine wants those songs to sound live exactly like they do on the records, so there is not much room to interpret. Soilwork gave him free rein. He even pointed out the Kevlar snare head, built to take blast beats and last.
Then he played two Soilwork songs, and I will be honest, I do not know their names, and he did not say them. I will also admit I am nowhere near as deep on Soilwork as I am on Megadeth. But you could see it instantly: this is where he turns into a beast. The playing gets physical, blast beats and polyrhythms, and he gives it everything. After that he told us about Scarve, the band he started back in music school and his first major one. They have not been active since 2009. He played two Scarve songs, and they were even more demanding than the Soilwork material. Hearing it in order laid out his whole arc as a player: Scarve, technical death metal with some prog, then Soilwork as a more commercial extension of that, and now Megadeth. Digging into Scarve is officially my homework.
He spent a good fifteen minutes on gear, which made sense in a room full of musicians. Tama drums, that sixteen-year-old studio kit. Meinl cymbals, and he owns that Meinl is not the biggest name but says they work for him, with custom splashes because the stock ones did not hold up to his standards. Evans heads. He wears in-ear monitors running a click to stay locked in, headphones over them to kill the stage volume and protect his ears, and gloves. He had just switched to Meinl sticks, 2Bs, which are heavy for this kind of playing, so pulling that speed and those blasts out of a heavy stick is no joke. He runs direct-drive pedals instead of chain-drive and swears the speed and control are worth it. And the thing I most loved seeing: no triggers. His kicks were miked naturally, which you almost never hear anymore in metal. Every now and then you would catch a tiny slip, and honestly that ruled. This guy is human.
He also played a song he tracked with the Devin Townsend Project, “Juular,” off 2011’s “Deconstruction.” He called it one of the most demanding things he has ever had to keep in his hands, feet going the entire time through a brutal blast section, and said he still runs it regularly even now with Megadeth just to keep his chops sharp. He does not have a fixed way he practices, it keeps evolving, but “Juular” is the constant.
The Q&A ran about thirty minutes, and the crowd was sharp. People asked about Soilwork, about his life, about how he balances all of it, not just Megadeth, and he answered everything with a refreshing honesty. He talked about how Megadeth lets him contribute more through stage presence, since some of those songs are simpler than what he wrote before, so he gets up, works the crowd, throws sticks in the air. His real challenge there is folding in the styles of every drummer who came before him, Nick Menza, Gar Samuelson, Shawn Drover, Chris Adler, all different players, while staying faithful to the older songs and still sneaking in a little of himself. He has recorded the last two Megadeth albums, but the set leans old. He also mentioned he listens to a lot of jazz now, and you can feel how that groove and swing has crept into his playing.
Someone asked the question every music student is scared of: how do you find work when school is over? He did not sugarcoat how tough the business is, and gave real credit to Mustaine’s business sense, calling him a serious businessman in the way he has built Megadeth. Dirk’s own break came from filling a gap: after he graduated in France, he became the school’s metal drum instructor, and things opened up from there. His message all night was simple. Do not give up, your breakthrough could be right around the corner. He got into technique too, staying clean through fills and transitions instead of letting them get sloppy, and into taking care of your body, eating well and sleeping, because drumming is physical in a way most instruments are not. It did not matter that there were 150 of us. He gave it like there were ten thousand, and somehow it still felt intimate.
The last question opened up something he clearly cares about. He has been vegan for ten years, his wife longer, and he does not push it on anyone. He just said he has more energy and feels like he is playing better than he ever has, and that it is part of that. That led into Savage Lands, the NGO he co-founded that plants trees around the world to fight deforestation. Hellfest in France is a big partner, with 10,000 trees going in. He talked about working with people building in Costa Rica, asking them to leave a little jungle behind the property, because you might get monkeys swinging through. And who does not love monkeys.
He closed with two more Megadeth songs, “Take No Prisoners” and “Good Mourning/Black Friday,” then moved into a meet and greet to sign stuff and talk. I walked out reminded of something that is easy to forget when a band gets as big as Megadeth: the people in it are lifers who love this. Dirk Verbeuren is one of the most articulate, generous, flat-out great hangs I have come across in this scene, and watching him work from a drummer’s seat was a gift. If he ever does one of these near you, go. You will not regret it.