Jay Weinberg Talks Drumming, Slipknot & Double Bass Power
Jay Weinberg is an American musician and drummer best known for his role as the drummer for the rock band Slipknot. You may also be familiar with Jay’s dad, Max Weinberg, the longtime drummer for Bruce Springsteen’s E Street Band. Winner of countless awards, including “Best Metal Drummer” five times by MusicRadar, and “Best Metal Drummer” and “#1 Rock Drummer” in Modern Drummer’s 2017, 2020, 2022, and 2023 Readers Polls, Jay is metal’s drum hero. His
talents extend far beyond the kit, however. In the world of music and beyond, Jay Weinberg stands out not only for his exceptional drumming but also for his creative spirit, generosity, and dedication to making a difference.
Please enjoy excerpts from Jay Weinberg’s Lombardi Live! interview with Don Lombardi. You can watch the entire interview HERE!
Your double bass chops are amazing. What is your practice routine for building that endurance?
It’s nothing that would necessarily blow people’s minds other than just staying consistent and having a practice schedule or a routine that allows me to identify the things that I like to work on – the things that get my blood going, especially on a show day. A lot of it is staying limber. One thing I didn’t realize until my mid-20s was how much hydration is such a key part of drumming. If I’m not well hydrated at the end of the night, I feel like my arms and legs are cement blocks, and I can hardly move them correctly. A consistent routine of mine is warming up to the metronome, starting out slow and ramping up from, let’s say, 110bpm 16th notes all the way up to 200 or something like that. Some guys go crazy, like 500 beats per minute. That’s not the music that I play. I admire that talent, but the double bass that I play suits my style and the history of Slipknot’s music, and that’s a necessity that’s there. So, practice, keep those chops up, and keep that consistency up. It’s also important to understand the know-how of doing this stuff and meeting that with your ambitions as a musician, along with your energy and tenacity, because so much of what we do is very instinctual and emotionally driven. It’s not necessarily mathematically driven like a lot of modern metal. Ours is more from the gut and the heart, so it’s very raw and rough around the edges. It’s one of those things where you try to bring your technical proficiency and vibe together, making for something engaging and exciting to listen to.
What age were you when you started playing the drums?
I started playing drums when I was 14 years old, in my freshman year of high school. That’s when I began to really identify with the subculture of music in metal, punk rock, and hardcore. I wanted to be in a band. I wanted to be around bands. That’s when that really started for me. Obviously, you know, with my father being a drummer and being on tour with them a lot when I was younger, I had exposure to musicianship at a high caliber. But it wasn’t until the Ramones and punk rock really stripped everything down to raw energy that translated something to me.
Drums weren’t your first instrument, right?
You’re right. I started on guitar when I was about nine. The thing was, though, at the time, I didn’t want to take lessons. I was swamped with schoolwork, and I wanted to have something other than additional schoolwork in my music after school. So, I started on guitar because I was really drawn to the instrument. But then, taking lessons, I said, “Ah, it’s just like school. I don’t want to do it.” So when it came time to play the drums, even though I had a fantastic teacher in my dad, who showed me many things off the kit, I didn’t want to take lessons. I said, “I just want to do this for myself. I want to teach myself by playing along to the Ramones, Metallica, and Slayer, and teach myself what I love about this music,” which was similar to his experience. That freedom allowed me to discover what I wanted to do with the instrument myself.
My dad said I’ll let you teach yourself on one condition. You have to practice to a metronome and keep really good time. He didn’t want his son to be a drummer out in the world with bad time and have it reflect on him like, “Oh, what happened to your kid? He doesn’t keep good time.” So that was our deal. He said you can play along to your Ramones and Mastodon records, but you must practice to a metronome and understand what pocket and groove are and what keeping a sensible and responsible meter is. That was a huge part of his career as well.
I think his plan really took off in the late ‘70s, maybe in the early ’80s, when he started working with a metronome. They would tell me stories about how my mom was a schoolteacher and would come home and hear the metronome from the driveway because that was my dad finding what it meant to have a responsible meter for the music you’re playing. And that transcends all genres. My dad and I play very different genres, but we share a commonality in wanting to keep that responsible meter for our bandmates because that’s what makes impactful music. If you’re all over the place, you start to lose the plot.
Do you use a click track with the band?
We don’t use a metronome live. Often, we’ll build songs in the studio with a metronome with a tempo map, even as we’re analyzing the granular changes in a song. For example, maybe it should dip in one or two BPM in this part; let’s see what that feels like and if that gives the riff or the cadence of the vocal more of a feel for what we’re looking to do. It’s a helpful tool.
On our album, We Are Not Your Kind, which came out four years ago, we practiced those songs from start to finish. We had vocals in mind with it, and we were able to get a sense of the whole song as a composition. And then, once we felt comfortable, we would throw the metronome away. We would remember those kinds of shifts like, “Oh, really lean back into the pocket in this part, really charge forward in this part.” And then that gives the push and pull we have with each other on stage because we don’t use a metronome live on stage.
I think we like capturing what we call the show’s temperature, the specific volume of that night. So we’re really catering to the experience that we’re all sharing. It’s a one-of-one moment. You’re not going to see another show quite like it. Even if you come to two shows in a row, they will be somewhat different. That’s the impact we’re trying to deliver on unsuspecting audiences.
I have the guitar players quite loud in my in-ear monitors during a show. We’re blessed with two of the best guitar players in our band who’ve ever walked the earth, but they’re incredibly different players. Mick, who’s on my left, is a very death metal, intensely metronomic player. You can hear the articulation in every note. It’s very intense and rigid in a good way, where it delivers a very different sound attack. Jim, who’s on my right, compliments that in a really great way, with a lot of dancing around those notes and more fluidity in his playing. So there are two incredible styles together in one band, and I fit kind of right between the two. If I find my way in between them, it often results in a note that’s a lot fatter than if we were all just metronomically on the note together.
We enjoy the impact that we deliver. It’s a lot about listening to each other. I’m listening to our vocalists as well in that cadence. You have to be constantly computing as you’re playing, understanding this guy’s pushing, this guy’s dragging, this guy’s right in the middle, or whatever. We are kind of all over the place, but that’s a little bit of the charm of Slipknot. We have all these lanes that sync up, but it’s an incredibly fat kind of sonic space that we take up because we fit around each other in artistic ways, and we take from each other’s strengths in certain ways.
More about drumming for Slipknot…
With Slipknot, we had a long history. We had been friends for 13 years or so when I auditioned for their band. They had seen me grow up. They knew that I knew everything about the band. When we sat down to play with each other, they said, “What songs do you know?” I was like, “I know all of them.” I think for them, that seemed reassuring and kind of exciting. It was like, here’s a guy we don’t need to teach about our band, and we don’t need to walk him by the hand and ask him to learn a bunch of stuff; he knows it. That has always felt very important to me.
To be a ready and active participant in this music scene is to do the homework. Enjoy the homework of going to shows, watching the band, studying the records, understanding where their songs come from, and the minutiae of all those things, and not with the expectation of one day I’ll play those songs, but just because I get the sheer joy of being a participant in this music community. I think that having that as my day-to-day practice has led to some interesting moments and opportunities.
If I’m asked to come into the studio to play with somebody, I don’t want to just come in the door. I want to knock the door down. That’s what I feel is my prime directive as a musician. Maybe that was the way I was raised. I saw the intensity of the E Street band at an early age, and that’s the only way I know how to do it, and it’s yielded some interesting musical moments along the way.