Rich is one of my favorite drummers of all time, and I couldn't pass up the chance to talk drums with him. He is a nice, chatty young man.

I talked to Kevin a few days ago and he said "Well, with his drumming, Rich kinda goes for the sound of organized drums being thrown around." Where would you say you came up with the idea for that kind of sound?
Well, I don't know... The way I play drums has always been kind of intuitive. I really never took any kind of lessons or anything like that. I just kind of play along with the bass and guitar, you know? And with Brutal, we're moving so fast, that if I leave a big empty space there, it sounds like a big empty space, so I just kind of keep my hands and feet moving to fill it up, just stir the soup and see what comes out. A lot of times I don't plan to play something. I just play along with the other instruments and let my hands and feet do it on their own. Just if something comes out that strikes me, a lot of times I can remember that riff or measure or whatever you want to call it. I just comes out like flickin' the switch and playing, you know?

What I think is distinctive about the way you play is that although you're almost always playing fast, you're rarely playing a straight blast or straight 16ths on the double bass.
That's something that me and Dan talked about, and we tried to go for that. Like back on the first Brutal Truth record, and even a little bit on "Need To Control," the blast beats are kind of stilted, like an eight beat blast, the snare will go "tat tat tat tat tat tat tat tat," where as I'm playing a blast, and it might be eight beats, but if the musical form has an accent on the third and fifth beats, then I'll try and accent that with the snare. Instead of it just being straight, with each note consistent, the blast will go "tat tat tat tat tat tat tat tat."

Death metal drummers, as fast as they are, are usually not that creative. Is the way you play a reaction against that at all?
No, because I'm not really from the death metal school. I don't really... I guess I don't really pay a lot of attention to what a lot of death metal drummers are doing. I have an idea of what they do in my head, and sometimes I try to recreate that, or play towards it, when I think it's appropriate for a particular part, but other than that, I'm just trying to keep up the speed, and keep it musical. That's where it comes in mostly, because the guitars are really chaotic, so why should the drums be just straight 4/4 or whatever? I try and let it flow, you know?

From what I've read in other interviews and listening to other bands you've been in, it must have been a pretty big departure going from what you were doing before to doing Brutal Truth.
Yeah man, I had to learn a whole new style of music. After I joined Brutal Truth, we went to this cabin in New Hampshire where we stayed for like 2 or 3 months, man. That's all we did, was practice all day, for like 6 or 8 hours a day.

Pretty intense.
Yeah, it was. When I went to audition for Brutal Truth, I had to call Danny up and ask him how to play a blast beat. I thought it might have been a roll, with two hands on the snare... I didn't know! I wasn't sure at first that it was just one hand flicking like that.

Did you have any double bass experience beforehand?
I had just started playing a double kick before that. There was a little bit of that in Ninefinger, but most of that I've learned from Brutal Truth. Did you change your setup, equipment-wise, at all? No, I still have basically the same drum set as before Brutal Truth. I'm still playing the same drum set I bought in 1988!

What brand is it?
Uh... total crap, man! It's just a junky drum set that some guy in a music store conned me into buying when I was a kid out buying my first drum set. It has decent sounds, but all the hardware's been replaced, cause it was total junk. Still the same set up: One rack tom, one floor tom, kick drum with a double pedal, a snare, hi hat, two crashes, and a ride cymbal.

I would think it would be tough to play so many crazy fills and stuff without getting repetetive on such a sparse set, just a four piece.
I don't know, man. I haven't had any problems yet. I just haven't seen the need for any more drums or cymbals.
It seems like the metal drummers with the 12 piece sets and so forth are often the least creative. Those people have a cymbal that they use for two parts of one song, you know?

Like splashes. Most people, you watch them, and they'll hit it twice during their whole set.
You've got a cymbal and you hit it and has a sound. But there's more than one way to look at that. You can hit that cymbal on the bell, right next to the bell, on the very edge, and you can hit it hard or soft. I can get a lot of sounds out of one cymbal. That's where a lot of these guys don't take advantage of this stuff. To me, sitting at a drum set like that, there'd be too much stuff in my way. With the small kit that I have, I can play fast, I don't have to worry about which drum I'm going to use, I can just go for it. It's all small, compact, right there. It's easy to carry, too. I've got to set up my drums every night, as well as pack it up, carry and load it into the van.

Tell me about recording "Sounds of the Animal Kingdom. How much of that it live, and how much of it is you guys playing in separate rooms at different times?
Well, it's done like this: What you hear on the CD, the drums are live, the bass is mostly live, and there's a scratch guitar track buried in there somewhere. we sit down, set the drums up, get a good drum sound. The bass amp is in a little room by itself being miked, same with the guitar amp. We get good sounds from them, and we and we actually recorded the bass and drums together, along with the scratch guitar track, which gives it a live feel. Our amps are all isolated in different rooms, but you can hear it all through the headphones, and we're all standing in the same room looking at each other. So essentially you hear us playing live. Granted, it's got all the layers of guitar and vocals and special effects over it. Like on "Extreme Conditions," a lot of the drums you hear on that, Colin Richardson went over them with a computer and programmed them. He would take aperfect blast and repeat it four times, instead of what Scott actually played. On "Sounds," everything you hear is my stick hitting the drum, and my foot hitting the pedal, you know?

So you didn't use any triggers at all, then?
We use a trigger on the kick drum to give it a better sound. That's a mix of about half trigger, half kick drum. We trigger the trigger, if that makes sense, through the microphone on the kick drum. So it's a natural sound which triggers the trigger. It's not like a trigger where it's one on every four beats, it comes up where ever I hit my foot. It's just a sound quality thing. We use that mostly live, but in the studio you have to use it too. Some bands, they trigger everything. Like if you were to look at Danzig or Marilyn Manson's drum set, you'd see these tiny little wierd microphones. They have an artificial sound, and you probably don't hear that dude playing drums at all, except maybe a little bit of room for the cymbals.

How was the studio?
It was Baby Monster, the same one where we did "Need To Control." So you must have been pretty happy with it? We went with Baby Monster cause it's got a good live room, with hardwood floors and walls, just a good acoustic sound. Then we mixed it at the Magic Shop, which is just a basic high-tech studio. It has all the mixing machines and all the gear. You've gotta have like a hundred effects so you can put a little reverb here, a little EQ there, whatever.

Was it all digital this time, or did you go analog like the old stuff?
Oh no, we record analog. We always go to tape, man, that's how you get that warmth. Granted, you lose it when you put it onto a CD, but you'll hear the difference if you listen to it on the vinyl. We always record on an analog tape, as wide as we can get it. I think it was like a two inch wide, 48 track or 24 track tape or something...

Kevin was telling me that you recorded a lot of "Machine Parts" yourselves.
Yeah, we did that in the rehersal space on Danny's four-track. The "Machine Parts" 7", you mean, right?

Yeah.
That, the stuff on the Spazz split, and maybe four or five compilation tracks that are here and there. That was a demo, because we were like "Well, it looks like we're done with Earache, we better make a demo so we can find ourselves another label." And it didn't look like we were going to find another label that quick, so we were just like, "Fuck, this demo sounds great, let's put it out ourselves." Why did you re-record a lot of those songs? Well, they were the songs that were supposed to be on the album, and we wanted to give them their just treatment. Plus, we think they're good songs. Putting them out on a 7" is cool, but only 2,000 people get the thing. We wanted to make the stuff for real, and get it out to everybody.

So are you pretty happy with the way Relapse has been treating you?
Yeah man, they rule. they give us the psh that nobody else has before, they're totally into our music, and everything else falls into place after that.

Other Brutal Truth related activities for bored chimps:
--> I think you can email Rich at [email protected]. I forget his regular mail address but it's in their records.
--> Also you can check out their web site on the Relapse site, includding a discography.
--> Listen to "Dimentia," off their new record, Sounds of The Animal Kingdom (You'll need Real Player for this. Get it here.)