Mark Slutsky’s music journey started as a boy when his mother (a music teacher and pianist) took him to a Billy Joel concert and he was instantly inspired to take up playing drums. To this point in his career he has performed with and toured alongside of a variety of national recording artists and popular bands to include drumming for Splender and Currently Hugo. He has played in arena’s and outdoor festivals as well as appearing on a number of television shows such as the David Letterman Show, playing with Kylie Minogue at the New York City, Christmas Tree Lighting, and a very recent Warped Tour performance. A quick look at Marc Slutsky’s playing resume will give you a feel for the versatility and creativity that have made him a sought after musician at the National level. Besides his well rounded music education, first class work ethic, and “Go-getter” attitude, Marc is well grounded, very personable, and genuinely a good guy. After seeing him perform with Hugo at a recent concert, I was very interested in getting a chance to talk with him about his style of playing and the versatility of his drum set up. With Hugo, Marc is using an unconventional drum lay out that includes a floor tom to the left of his hi-hat as well as an array of electronic samplers and triggers on both sides of the kit. A quick discussion with Marc backstage lead to an informative and inspiring Skype interview as Marc invited me into his Brooklyn New York residence via the internet and we proceeded with an interview that spanned nearly 2 hours.
The following are select portions of our interview:
E - When you were getting your music education did you have a goal for your career yet?
MS - You know, I didn’t. Sometimes I think I wish I would have but maybe it’s good that I didn’t. Who Knows, but, I knew I wanted to make my living as a drummer. At a very early age I found this thing I loved and I knew that this was what I was going to do with my life. I didn’t quite know how I was going to do it or what would happen, and I guess somewhere in the back of my mind I figured that I was going to be as good as I can at as at many different things. After graduating from school I moved back to New York City because that was the obvious thing to do. I ended up playing some Blues gigs and I did some Jazz gigs and some Rock gigs and I even did gigs where I played double bass. I remember thinking at the time that I didn’t know exactly what I was working towards. I was just trying to make 50 bucks here and 50 bucks there. My rent was $400 and I was just making my rent. I was giving drum lessons too. I think there’s a lot of luck and circumstance involved in these kinds of things and a huge defining moment which was the next chapter in my life was when I got into the band Splender. That was a band that got signed to Columbia records.
E - Did you ever come to a point where you were afraid you weren’t going to make it and you would have to break down and go get a regular job?
MS - No, I gave drum lessons and I did enough gigs at the time. They weren’t always good gigs. I did crazy ridiculous gigs sometimes. I did Blues gigs out in the middle of Long Island for 2 people where I got a hundred bucks. I did a cover band gig out at the airport somewhere. That was a crazy one. But, my expenses were low at the time. I was young and had no responsibility really. I basically went and played as much as I could and gave lessons here and there. But, I think getting into Splender happened pretty quickly after college. I was piecing it together for about 4 or 5 months. At the same time going on auditions and asking around “Does anyone need a drummer, does anyone need a drummer.” I was a little bit of a pest about it, I suppose. But, if you had asked me in my senior year of college when I was studying with Kim Plainfield that a year later I would be in a band called Splender with a record deal, touring with Third Eye Blind and completely changing my drum style, I would have said your crazy, that’s not me. If you had asked me that I would have told you that I wanted to get into the Jazz world because that’s what I had been into most of my life at that point.
E - So how did you land that first major gig as a member of Splender?
MS - I ended up hearing about a band that needed a drummer and they were about to get signed to Columbia Records. At the time I knew getting a record deal was a good thing but I didn’t know exactly what that meant and I didn’t understand what the magnitude of that would be. So I went on the audition and I had to come back 3 or 4 times. I was into it, but I don’t think that I had this idea that I wanted to be in a rock band at the time. I got into the band and we did end up with a record deal with Columbia Records. Like I said, it was only 4 or 5 months after I graduated college and I didn’t expect that to happen at all. Then I really focused hard core on being the best band member I could. I remember letting go of a lot of these ideas that I had about the kind of drummer that I thought I wanted to be or things that I had learned from teachers that I had studied with. I let all that go deliberately to focus just on this band that was about to go into the studio with Todd Rundgren to produce a record. I was really passionate about that band and I got heavily into the great Rock drummers like Dave Grohl, John Bonham and Ringo and really got into understanding what it was to be a great drummer in a band. Not only just playing solid but coming up with creative parts for songs and things you think about as a drummer in a band trying to make a hit record. There was a whole movement of bands that was on this whole Pop Rock trip and I soaked it up for those years. I went back to playing matched grip and was hard hitting. These days I’m playing both traditional and matched.
E - Did you get to write your drum parts in Splender or were the parts given to you to play.
MS - The drummer that was in the band before me, Nir Z, was in the band for 5 years and he quit the band for whatever reason and they had demoed some of the songs that ended up on the first Splender album. So when I was auditioning for the band and when we were in the early stages of the band, they weren’t called Splender, they were called the Hidden Persuaders when Nir was the drummer, when I joined the band we became Splender, but there were still some left over songs from the Hidden Persuaders that they wanted to still do. So they gave me a tape of some of the demos to base my ideas off, and Nir is a great drummer so I had no problem using some of his parts. It was only a few songs, like 2 or 3 songs that made the 1st Splender album from the Hidden Persauders era. The rest of the songs we worked on as a group and came up with our own parts. I remember Waymon would come in and say “I’ve got this song, what would you play on this?” Waymon and I had a real connection. We spent hour and hours together working on the arrangements and drum parts. We all worked really hard on that record. It was a great time. The creative process was completely different on the 2nd album. We all started from scratch so there were no blueprints for anything with the exception of maybe 1 or 2 songs. We had some success at that point so it was approached in a different way. There was pressure to get the record done. We couldn’t rehearse for a year before going into the studio. Waymon was living in Canada and sending us demos. It was not put together with the same passion or innocence that the first album was. A lot of the drum parts were worked on in the studio with Mark Endert (producer) and I. He’s a super talented producer. It was a good example of working with a non drummer with really great drum sensibility.
E - You toured with a some great bands throughout your career, do you have a favorite tour?
MS - I know it’s fresh because it is my latest gig but touring with Hugo has been really great. I say that for a number of reasons. The guys in the band are easy going and great players. Any musician will say that the people you are with is a big part of the touring. Hugo is a great guy too, laid back, open minded and super talented. The band is made up of a group of guys from New York that I have been playing with for years especially Jon Cornell, the bass player. Over all, touring with Hugo has been great. I think the Splender tour with Third Eye Blind was exciting too.
E - Besides touring what was your favorite moment in your career as a drummer?
MS - Its funny I was talking to a drummer friend of mine from college earlier today and he asked me a similar question and I am going to answer you the same way I answered him because it just happened recently. Its hard to say, being in it, It is hard for me to know what my favorite moment was because a lot of the times I am also working. I mean, I love what I do but it is also work. So it’s hard to say, but there have moments if think about it. I really enjoyed playing on the TV talk shows that I did. With Splender we played on Jay Leno and recently I played on David Letterman. I also played on The View and bunch of others. Those experiences stand out because they’re intense. You being relied on by an artist who’s career is possibly riding on this one performance. There’s really no re do’s either, so you get one shot and its on the air. Personally, I like that pressure. So I would say the TV shows stand out.
E - Do you ever sweat that maybe you will drop a stick or something crazy could happen?
MS - I think it does cross your mind maybe slightly. It’s not even just your stick, it could be anything. You know how it goes. One of your floor tom legs, the screw could be loose and your floor tom falls or the worst is your bass drum beater falling off your bass drum pedal. You think about malfunctions and I guess dropping a stick falls in that category. Obviously you have your stick bag attached to your floor tom so you can grab another stick. But, for me, and I think this is a personal thing, I enjoy that pressure and as soon as David Letterman or Jay Leno says “and here is So-N- So” and I count it off and that’s it, and once that second happens a switch goes on and I don’t sweat a thing. It’s important to not lose yourself and always try to stay in the moment. I do believe it’s an acquired skill.
E - What sort of process do you have in place to make sure that you have everything ready for a show?
MS - I definitely have a process; it’s interesting because I am actually doing a one off Warped Tour show on July 22 in Pittsburgh. It’s not with Hugo. I just got the call and I am in preparation for that and I will tell you the process I am going through. In this case there is only one rehearsal and the very next day we are going on stage at Warped tour. There is a system that I have come up with for myself and I think every drummer has their own system for learning songs quickly. For me, I make sure to listen to the music thoroughly before hand, and I make drum charts or cheat sheets, especially if I don’t have time to rehearse. Lets say it is a 10 song set, I write down the arrangement in my own fashion for each song. Sometimes if it’s a simple arrangement and I wont use music notation at all. I just write verse 8 bars, chorus 8 bars plus one extra bar, or bridge. I may notate the actual kick and snare patterns for each section if necessary. If there are unison band figures I will write that out in notation for sure. Then I tap tempo on my metronome to get the exact tempo of the song. Most modern records are done to a click and there is a very specific BPM you can detect. Even if you don’t know the song all that great, I almost think that if you count the song off at the right tempo (and you keep that tempo) the song will sound good, assuming the band knows the tune. But if you are just getting tempos out of thin air on stage, it could be a disaster. Getting the correct count off tempo is critical in my opinion. So on the chart I will have the song title, the arrangement in words or notes depending, and then next to the song title I have the BPM number. So I’m going into the first rehearsal fully prepared to play the songs just like the record and at the correct tempo. If anything changes (in rehearsal) from the recorded version to the live version or if an ending is different, I pencil it in on my chart. I do this for each song in the set. Now if I’m preparing to do a show with well rehearsed band and everything is memorized its totally different. In this case I might just warm up on a pad back stage and that’s it. Lately I’ve been going through Tommy Igoe’s “Hands for life” warm up chart before shows. By the way I highly recommend that.
E - Lets talk about your kit set up with Hugo. I saw you playing and I noticed that you have a floor tom next to your hi-hat and some interesting electronics on your kit.
MS - I’m glad you asked that question because that is one of the things that I really enjoyed about the Hugo gig at the very beginning stages. I knew that I would be facing some challenges that I had never had to deal with before when i started playing with Hugo. One of them was my set up because they wanted the modern Hip Hop aspect of the drummer hitting drum pads and triggers, if you listen to the album there’s a lot of electronic drum sounds happening, But, I also knew that Hugo is very much an organic kind of artist and guy. I knew that I would have to combine my normal acoustic drum kit with electronics in a creative manner that worked smoothly. I didn’t want anything to be forced and I wanted to play the acoustic kit as much as possible. So that was kind of fun in the beginning coming up with the set up. I started out with a 4 piece kit without the extra floor tom. But as things evolved; I would listen to the record and I would realize that there was hand claps on the 2 and the 4 with the snare drum on a particular song. I had the protools sessions of all the songs, so I was able to isolate and solo any sound I wanted to. I came into rehearsal the next day with the hand claps on a pad. I would present it to the band and everyone was like “cool”. It wasn’t all in one day that it all came together. It was an intense 5 month rehearsal process before we started touring. As we rehearsed I was taking ideas from Hugo and the band.
Note: at this time Marc’s cat jumped up into his lap. He broke from the interview for a moment and introduced the cat as “Crash” as in cymbal.
But my kit evolved in that situation, not only because of me but because Hugo and the guys would have ideas and I would figure out how to make it work, it was a very collaborative effort. The end product was the set up that I have now. The left floor tom idea is because of the song Bread And Butter. The main beat in the verse has a floor tom in it. The only way to play that pattern properly is to play it from the left side of the kit, because I found that the sticking didn’t work smoothly from the right side.
E - Are you writing those beats for Hugo? I am just wondering if you wrote the parts, why you didn’t just write the parts to incorporate a normal 4 piece kit or if somehow you just had to have a particular beat for those songs.
MS - The Hugo story is interesting because his album was already finished before I met him. So I had to recreate the drum parts for a live setting. A lot of those songs (on the album) don’t even have real drummers playing on them. A lot of them were programmed or they were real drums combined with electronic sounds. So I had to listen to the songs many times and come up with ways to make it work on a real drum set and make it humanly possible without sacrificing quality and including the electronic element. Some songs where harder than others but it all came together in the end.
E - I like to end my interviews with this question, is there anything that you would tell young players to do or not to do in order to become successful drummers in the working world? What is the Marc Slutsky, quick school of hard knocks to become successful?
MS - Well, I really do believe in getting a solid foundation. I know it sounds cliché but its true. Having the ability to go into different situations is the reason I have consistently worked over the years. Listening to lots of music and having good technique is important too. Also, I believe in studying with a good teacher. My teachers have been pivotal to me. These days, as a session drummer, I find myself playing brushes with a band and a week next later playing “quirky” inde rock stuff with a completely different attitude. This is being a session musician in today’s world, but I think even if you only want to be a guy in a band you’ll have much more to offer if you have a solid foundation. This applies to all musicians not just drummers. You will have more sophisticated ideas to bring into the song writing of your band and you will be able to pick up things much quicker. I have been on both ends (band guy and session guy).
E - What about professionalism?
MS - The standard things like showing up on time, preparing for gigs as we spoke about earlier in our conversation, and being open to suggestions is a biggie. People will like working with you if you are open to their ideas. When you’re the drummer your kind of in the hot seat because everyone has ideas for the drums. I generally like to say “yeah lets try it”.
If you want to check out more information on Marc then please click the link below for his official web site or click the link for his latest band project with Hugo.
Comments