Heikki Malmberg
Q; What drew you to the drums? Was it a particular drummer or a genre of music?
Heikki Malmberg; The first time I tried out a drum kit was in my school’s music lesson when I was thirteen years old. Every student had to try out every band instrument, and for some reason drums just clicked with me. I’d say my first real big influence was Terry Bozzio. The drummer of my big brother’s band lent me the July 1994 issue of Modern Drummer magazine that had Terry on the cover. What he was saying was so different to everybody else that I just had to learn more. Other early influences are Simon Phillips, Mike Portnoy, Pat Torpey, Vinnie Paul and Tomas Haake.
Q; Are you self-taught or did you receive some form of instruction? How did shape your playing style to this day?
Heikki Malmberg; I’m 99.99% Self-taught. I did take lessons for a couple of months from a Finnish rudiment guru Risto Skrikberg and a bit later from a great Finnish drummer Lacu Lahtinen, but I didn’t study very long under either of them. The rudimental approach with Risto just didn’t feel like my thing, and Lacu kicked me
out of the nest quite soon.
Q; Please explain your set up. It seems to resemble Mike Mangini’s set up. What led you to go in this direction and how did it impact your playing?
Heikki Malmberg; At one point my kit was very similar to Mangini’s. How that came about is actually a little bit funny.
Like I said earlier, I was heavily
influenced by Terry Bozzio. I was
trying to copy his melodic style
of playing and set up my crashes and splashes so that I could play through an ascending or descending ”scale” with alternating hands, you know, every other cymbal on each side of the kit. That’s how I thought Bozzio had his cymbals set up. Then later on I thought to myself that, well, why couldn’t I do this with the toms too? I was broke, so couldn’t afford all the gear necessary to actually set myself up like that. Fast forward maybe a year and I see that Extreme has a new drummer that has his toms set up exactly the way I was thinking of. That was the definite signal for me that yes, you actually can do that, so I set myself up similarly when I had the means. Then later on I learned that Bozzio actually didn’t set up his cymbals the way I thought he did, so the whole thing started from a misunderstanding, haha! But after setting my toms up like Mike, I copied the mirrored remote hi-hat thing, where a pedal on the left connects to a hi-hat on the right side of the kit, and a pedal on the right connects to the left side hi-hat. I did that “Mangini-thing” for maybe about ten years. At some point when I started improvising a lot more even in the context of the songs, I just had to admit that I most definitely am right handed, and that my improvisation just flows way smoother when I play with the more natural right hand lead. I scrapped the left handed hi-hat and moved the toms a bit to the right to make it more comfortable to play mostly right handed. I still do lead with my left side occasionally, but not even close to the amount I did back in the day. Later on I’ve added stuff on to the left side of the kit, e.g. Rocket Toms, a crasher and a second snare, to play ostinatos on the left side while the right side improvises. As for the latter part of the question about how did it impact my playing, I’d say that in no way. I’ve always set my kit up so that I can make the ideas in my head a reality. I’ve always had a vision of what I want to do and what kind of a set up would allow me to do that first, and only then I’ve actually put up the gear.
Q; Tell us a bit about your work with bands. What is your favorite kind of music to play? What advice would you give to those who want to work in bands?
Heikki Malmberg I don’t really have a favorite genre, but I really like the energy of metal and rock music. Other than that, I’ve played all kinds of stuff from African music to indie pop. I like it all. As an advice I’d say that practice your balls off and be prepared. Unfortunately one always needs luck to be in the right place at the right time to find a good band, but be prepared when you get the chance. Other than that, try not to be an asshole. Nobody wants to work with assholes, haha!
Q; You have a wealth of knowledge that you share on your YouTube channel. What led you to start doing that and how has that impacted your playing and your teaching?
Heikki Malmberg; I guess I do it partially because that’s just an easy outlet for anybody to get their stuff out. I don’t think it has impacted my playing or teaching at all. I do my stuff in the real world, and if something nice gets caught on tape, I upload it. I feel that I’m not a very good YouTuber. I don’t want to spend my time editing videos and mixing audio. I want to practice and play. I try to keep most of my videos with just one camera and one mic. That’s how the viewer knows that what they’re seeing and hearing is exactly what went down. If the audio is all close mics and the visuals have a zillion different camera angles, it’s probably not one take, and some hits are probably corrected too.
Q; Many of your solos are absolutely fabulous. How do you structure your solos and what makes a good solo to you?
Heikki Malmberg; Thank you. I usually just do variations of the very basic verse, chorus, verse, chorus, bridge, chorus structure. I’m actually not a huge fan of drum solos. I can’t stand it when there’s a trillion notes happening with no sense of direction. I like music, and if one can make music with the drums alone, that to me is a good drum solo.
Q; Your knowledge of polyrhythms is off the charts. How did you first become interested in them? How did you learn them? What advice would you give to someone who wants to learn more about polyrhythms?
Heikki Malmberg; I guess I should say Meshuggah got me interested in “polyrhythms.” I say that with quotation marks because back in the mid-nineties when I got into them, most people were referring to both polymeters and polymeters simply as polyrhythms. But anyways, Meshuggah was the beginning of my interest. Then Mike Mangini’s Rhythm Knowledge books opened the door for actual polyrhythms for me. I remember when I first learned to play, and even more importantly to hear, a simple sixteenth-note quintuplet, suddenly I was hearing them everywhere. That made me realize how much our senses lie to us. If we don’t have reliable data of what something sounds like or tastes like, our brain picks the closest match from our memory and tells us that what we’re hearing or tasting is that thing that we already know. When I started internalizing the sound of note groupings and polyrhythms, I started to hear them even in songs that I had listened to countless times, but hadn’t had the capacity to understand what was actually going on. This is one of the hardest thing to communicate to students. To try to make them understand that it requires practice to even hear polyrhythms, and if you can’t hear them, they simply don’t exist for your brain, i.e. you. I personally practiced all of the note groupings from 2 to 19 like they are presented in Rhythm Knowledge 2. Then I programmed all the possible combinations of the groupings on top of each other in a sequencer and tried to learn as many as possible. I took it slow. I kind of did it on the side of my normal practice. Just tapping away at home, not even using a kit. Personally I think that learning all the subdivisions that one needs first, and learning to superimpose them second is the easiest way to go. When you know the subdivisions well, you can feel them and just pick notes from the given subdivision to form a polyrhythm. A simple example is that if you want to figure out how to put three notes on top of four notes, take the four notes and feel three subdivisions inside each of the four notes and then just play every fourth of those subdivisions. You’ll end up with a three over four polyrhythm. Of course when you’re thinking of it like that, you’re not yet hearing the actual polyrhythm, the pure polyrhythm if you will, but this way you can get started on practicing it. Then you just need to chip away till you’re not counting anything or thinking of the subdivisions anymore but just hearing to new rhythm, the actual polyrhythm that the two subdivisions create when put on top of each other.
Q; What are some of your current projects? What is the best way to find you online?
Heikki Malmberg; I’m still active with Diablo, going on for my 24th year in the band. I’m also playing in a band called Humavoid that is heavily polymetric. I have some other projects too in the works, but those will be revealed in time. I don’t have much of a presence online, but I’m somewhat active on Instagram. There I post with a bit of a lower thresh hold, many times uploading stuff that I’m just figuring out myself. It gets you a bit closer to my daily practice stuff than other outlets. I occasionally post on YouTube too, and if anybody wants to ask anything, just send me a message on Instagram or Facebook.
Audio Video
Audio Video
Audio Video