Chris Adler Explains the Difference Between Drumming In Lamb of God and Megadeth
It’s safe to say that Chris Adler knows a thing or two about drumming. When you’ve played for both Lamb of God and Megadeth, you can make that claim. But how is playing with the former different than the latter? In a new video questionnaire, Chris explains just that.
Speaking to metal podcast Sobre Los Dosis via Cameo, Adler answered the following questions:
- Tell us about your musical journey? Chris’ answer is long and complicated, but apparently he played saxophone as a kid? Cool tidbit! Let’s get a Lost Boys cover performance going, dude!
- What are your three favorite metal records? This one actually comes last, but Chris answers: Megadeth’s Rust In Peace, Meshuggah’s Destroy Erase Improve, and Queensryche’s Operation: Mindcrime.
- What’s the technical difference between playing Lamb of God material and Megadeth material?
For the last one, here was Chris’ answer, which makes a lot of sense and shows how much he thinks about what he does:
“It’s an interesting question. When I was growing up…again, I started with guitar, I didn’t play drums until much later. And even when I started playing drums, I wasn’t a fan of drumming, I wasn’t a fan of drummers, I was always a fan of guitar players.
“And when I was growing up, after finding rock and roll and quickly getting through Aerosmith and Zeppelin and stuff like that, I found my way quickly to Megadeth. Became absolutely my favorite band, still is, of all time, to this day. And I loved it because of what was going on with the guitars.
“A band like Lamb of God — and I’m not comparing it to any other band — was very influenced by a more rhythmic approach, where…I wouldn’t say the drums were necessarily more important than they were with Megadeth, but they were more prevalent in the concept of the song. We weren’t writing a five-minute song around three minutes of guitar solos. It was very much more the beat-oriented kind of thing.
“So technically, coming from the band I started, Lamb of God, going into Megadeth, it was certainly, for the time and what Megadeth is, was not easy to play any of those things. It was a totally different approach, though, where the drummer can, even if it’s a difficult thing, you can do that same difficult thing for two to three minutes. As opposed to Lamb of God, where I was constantly switching, constantly flipping, constantly moving around, which made it a lot more difficult…
“Of course, it’s not easy to learn and properly play anybody’s parts other than my own. I’ve never had a really easy time doing that. I don’t do many cover songs.”
Check out the full video below:
