Do you remember hearing the Zac Brown Band for the first time? Chances are you were introduced to the band through a little song called “Chicken Fried.” Or maybe you leaned more on the tropical side and heard their beach-themed collaboration with Jimmy Buffett titled “Toes.” You know… the one that talks about a***es being in the sand and what not.
There’s a first time for everything, and in the latest video from Drumeo, we got to see the drummer from Papa Roach hear Zac Brown Band for the very first time. If you’re not familiar with Drumeo, its a great tool for drum nerds, full of instructional material and entertaining drum content.
Tony Palermo has been with Papa Roach for 16 years, and hails from the punk rock era. The band he plays with is considered to be a rock/alternative metal/nu metal/hard rock group… it’s really whatever you prefer to call it. And with Drumeo, he got a bit out of his musical comfort zone participating in a little game they liked to call “Guess that Drum Arrangement.”
Here’s how it works. First, the guest drummer gets a song that they haven’t ever heard before, but they only get to hear it with the drum portion taken out of it. Then, they have an endless amount of time to come up with what they think is the actual drum part. After the drummer does that, and lays down their very own drum beat, they get to hear what the song actually sounds like (it’s original composition) to see how close they got.
It’s actually a really cool drill for drummers, and they typically get challenged with songs that are outside of their normal genre. We saw Luke Combs drummer, Jake Sommers, take a run at French metal band Gojira, and he absolutely crushed it. Palermo got the song “Uncaged” by Zac Brown Band, which proved to be that much more difficult to figure out because it’s in odd time. That just means that it’s one of the more unique songs where there is an “odd” number of beats per measure (5/4 or 7/8 for example), as opposed to your more standard 4/4 time. Most songs you hear pick a standard time and then stick with it throughout. But enough theory talk…
When the Papa Roach drummer first heard it, and was given the clue that it was a country song, he had this to say about what he was hearing:
“They’re getting proggy now in country, huh? Yeah, it’s a thinker.”
Proggy just means “likened to or resembling progressive rock.” And whether or not you’ve heard that descriptive word before… the Zac Brown Band is certainly proggy. The rocking drummer went on to say that he didn’t think the song was very much of a country tune at all:
“That’s just not a conventional country groove. I mean, people are going to be losing their s***-kicking boots on that song.”
People probably did when the song came out in 2012.
Then it got to the fun part. It was Tony Palermo and his musical imagination versus the strange stylings of Zac Brown and his band. He laid down a really impressive drum recording, and he wasn’t too far off of the verse beat. But there are just portions of the song that get strange, and the Papa Roach drummer missed out on a couple big things (like a drum solo in the middle of the song).
All in all, it was still mind blowing to see Palermo’s instincts kick in. What he did didn’t match up with the original, but it also didn’t sound half bad.
Check it out:
Pretty cool, right? And how about Chris Fryar coming in at the end to give a review… does that dude just have the best vibes on planet Earth?
I myself am about to fall into a YouTube rabbit hole of these types of videos. Maybe you are like me and plan to do the same. Or you wish to hear “Uncaged” once more all the way through. If that’s the case, I went ahead and linked it below:
“Uncaged” by the Zac Brown Band
