For live you need a microphone for the snare and the high hat, the kick drum, a nice stereo overhead and one for the toms - you can get away with using four mikes.

Sometimes one of us will have a riff or a bass line from home but it really gels when we come together. We really have a strong special chemistry that we take advantage of when we get together.

For live you need a microphone for the snare and the high hat, the kick drum, a nice stereo overhead and one for the toms - you can get away with using four mikes.

Playing well with others is important - not being too flashy, just keeping good time and of course coming up with cool beats. A good snare drum, kick drum, high hat. Just getting good at the hand feet coordination.

Drums all have their own particulars - each drum has a place where they sound the best - where they ring out and resonate the best, and the head surface isn't too loose or too tight, mainly so you get a good rebound off of the head.

We always feel pretty creative as far as writing songs. We write them together; we just get in a room, or on occasion in Flea's garage. We just sort of improvise, like jazz musicians.

Its very sort of spontaneous and organic, not a preconceived sort of jamming. Now we record everything, cause sometimes you'll forget, you know, 'what was that thing again?' So we record everything.

I was in every band class I could get in, like after school jazz band and marching band, and that's where I really learned to read music from elementary all the way through junior high and high school.

I met the guys through a friend of a friend, and their former drummer had quit. I wasn't too familiar with the Chili Peppers before that, so I joined at the end of 88' and we finished recording Mother's Milk at the end of 89', next thing I know I'm in Spin with a sock.

I took a private lesson, but it didn't really work out, so I went back to playing along with records. That's really the thing that got me into playing a lot - getting excited about playing along with my favorite bands like Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

I had sort of exhausted all the avenues playing in Detroit. So again, through the stewardship of my brother, I ended up in California and went to the Musicians Institute in L.A. I wanted to get better as a player.

Playing along with records is key. And as far as equipment goes it has gotten so much more affordable and the drum sets are of great quality. I play Pearl; their Export Series is great for a beginner.

Flea and Anthony are into funk, like old school Meters and stuff like that.

Edible names are what drives me as a musician. My next band will be called the Hot Dogs.

Family time is really important to me.

Going up north with the redwoods and driving along the coast, it's got everything, man. It's got the desert, the mountains, and the ocean. It's beautiful.

I just love to play and I get a chance to play with other musicians and I jump on it.

I just played at a club in L.A. called the Baked Potato. It fits like 90 people. It's like playing somewhere in a basement in, like, Indiana or somewhere where all your friends show up. It's really fun and there's a very different energy to that than to play to 50,000 at a Tokyo baseball stadium.

I just try to approach and serve the music in the way that I think is right for the band I'm in at the time.

I'm a little more of a lead instrument in the Meatbats.

I'm a musician. It's what I do! I wouldn't be too good at anything else.

Jazz can be so serious, no sense of humor.

People who come up to me are drummers or fans of the band. I don't get it too much, but I'll be somewhere and someone will have me take a picture or something.

That's really the thing that got me into playing a lot - getting excited about playing along with my favorite bands like Zeppelin and Black Sabbath.

The Chili Peppers do a lot of improvising, but it's within the framework of song structures. The Meatbats is from a purely instrumental standpoint. But when you hear the term 'instrumental music' you think it's real serious stuff and everybody's playing a million notes and it's about playing fast. That's not what we do.

The Meatbats are a throwback band.

There's something about the rawness of the live thing, there's no rhythm guitars behind the solo, nothing other than what you hear the people playing at that moment. It's exciting, it's about the performance.

Drums all have their own particulars each drum has a place where they sound the best where they ring out and resonate the best and the head surface isnt too loose or too tight mainly so you get a good rebound off of the head.

When a gifted team dedicates itself to unselfish trust and combines instinct with boldness and effort, it is ready to climb.

I like girls who are funny with a warped sense of humor.

All phenomena are empty.

There's a lot of terrible things goin' on all the time, but you gotta try and have some fun in the end.

Well, I was always a bit of a political junkie. Even as a kid I would read biographies of presidents and of civil rights leaders like Martin Luther King and Frederick Douglass and Booker T. Washington.

I don't listen to music when designing. We create in silence. I go through a torturous process because everything has to be precise and right.

I don't need any more motivation. I'm fighting Canelo Alvarez. If that can't get me motivated, then I'm in the wrong sport.

What we call rational grounds for our beliefs are often extremely irrational attempts to justify our instincts.

I was born in Jackson, Mississippi, in 1969, in a time and place where no one was saying, 'Look how far we've come,' because we hadn't come very far, to say the least. Although Jackson's population was half white and half black, I didn't have a single black friend or a black neighbor or even a black person in my school.

You can get along very well in this world by simply coming up with a quantity of reasonably valid statements.

The ribosome is a machine that gets instructions from the genetic code and operates chemically in order to produce the product.

I don't blame other people for the rap that Christians have. A lot of Christians are just mental. A lot of Christians are more concerned with telling you where you're gonna go when you die than what you can have while you're here.

I might lack in technicality, I might lack in strength, but there's no quit in me...I don't give up.

I don't spend sleepless nights over getting very bad reviews.

Teachers, I believe, are the most responsible and important members of society because their professional efforts affect the fate of the earth.

For the saddest epitaph which can be carved in memory of a vanished freedom is that it was lost because its possessors failed to stretch forth a saving hand while there was still time.

Many of the less prolific killers' stories go unheard because they simply don't make good books.

All the information in the world has been pretty dispersed, but Google's mission has been to organize it and make it universally accessible.

May your choices reflect your hopes not your fears.

I always admire the French and the Italians who are very devoted to their marriages. They take them extremely seriously, but it is understood that there might be other visitors at 5 o'clock in the afternoon. You just never boast about. They never say anything, but that's what keeps marriages together.

Adversity is a stimulus.