Back in 2019 when Zildjian announced the Zildjian LIVE! project on YouTube and released the roster of drummers I got VERY excited for one name on the list: Thomas Pridgen.

Why? Because every performance I’ve ever seen from Thomas Pridgen is full of energy, chops, and holding NOTHING back. When they released his performance for the Zildjian LIVE! project, I was blown away. This performance is filled with speed, power, but also GROOVE – and seeing as the original performance video (as I write this) has over a million views on YouTube – it seems I’m not the only one who thinks this.

In the video above, and in the free transcription download below, you’ll find note-for-note notation of Thomas Pridgen’s performance. I decided to do a drum transcription of his playing because I feel like Thomas has proven that he has a very signature approach to music – especially music with complicated time signature changes. I was first introduced to Thomas’s playing when he joined the Mars Volta and when I sat down to learn some of the songs off “The Bedlam in Goliath” I was taken aback by how many meter changes there were in those tunes, and how Thomas was able to drum seamlessly through all of them.

This Zildjian LIVE! performance is no different. Although there are many meter changes and complex syncopated unison figures the whole band is playing – Thomas navigates them with ease and adds a cohesion to what (if a lesser drummer were playing) could be a very herky-jerky piece of music. A note about my interpretation of this transcription – the main “A section” riff (measure 1/2) could easily be thought of as 7/4, instead of 4/4 and 3/4 like I wrote it. However, it was impossible to fit two dense measures of 7/4 on one system without it getting hard to read, so splitting the 7/4 bar into a bar of 4/4 and a bar of 3/4 made it easier to rearrange the notation in a more legible way.

So download the notation PDF below for this entire 11 page transcription and get to drumming!