Gregg Bissonette | Ringo Starr's drummer
Gregg Bissonette played for David Lee Roth, Santana and Ringo Starr, and teaches everywhere. His versatility, and his Dixon and Sabian rig explained.
Being the drummer in Ringo Starr’s band is a job with a particular difficulty attached: you have to play Beatles drum parts, correctly, in front of the man who wrote them.
Gregg Bissonette has done it since 2008 and made it look like the most enjoyable job in music — which, from the evidence, it might be.
Before that he spent twenty years as one of Los Angeles’ busiest session drummers. Here is one of the great utility players.
Who is Gregg Bissonette?
Gregg Bissonette was born on 9 July 1959 in Detroit, Michigan, into a musical family — his father a drummer, his brother Matt Bissonette a bassist who has played many of the same gigs.
He studied at North Texas State University, home of the legendary One O’Clock Lab Band, which is where a great many American session players learn to read and to swing.
Then he went to Los Angeles.
The career
- David Lee Roth, from 1986 — the Eat ‘Em and Smile band with Steve Vai and Billy Sheehan, and one of the great virtuoso rock line-ups.
- Santana, Joe Satriani, Steve Vai, Maynard Ferguson, Toto, ELO, Spinal Tap.
- Session work across film, television and records in volumes that are difficult to count.
- Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band, from 2008, which he has held ever since.
Drumeo’s panel gave him the Dom Famularo Award for Education — the Legacy award for teaching — in 2024.
What Gregg Bissonette actually does
He can play anything, idiomatically. Big band, hard rock, Latin, funk, country, orchestral. Not “can cover it” — actually correct in each.
He reads. The North Texas grounding, and it is why he gets called for sessions where a chart lands in front of you and rolls.
He serves the song, obsessively. In Ringo’s band the job is to play Ringo’s parts, which are famously specific and famously unusual — and Bissonette plays them as written rather than tidying them up.
He is a terrific big-band drummer. Setting up ensemble figures, catching a section hit, driving a horn line. That skill turns up in his rock playing as an unusual sense of arrangement.
He is a teacher by temperament. Clinics, books, videos and instructional material spanning decades, all of it warm and jargon-free.
Gregg Bissonette’s drum kit
His endorsements have moved over the years, which for a session drummer is normal.
- Drums. He played Mapex Orion for the early All-Starr Band years — a 24” kick, 12” rack tom, 16” floor tom and a 14”x5” snare, a deliberately plain configuration for playing Beatles material. Since 2014 he has been with Dixon Drums.
- Cymbals — Sabian currently; Zildjian in the earlier All-Starr years, with a setup built around 14” K Mastersound hi-hats, an 18” K Dark Crash Medium Thin, an 18” A Medium Crash and a 21” A Rock Ride.
- Pedals — DW.
- Heads — Remo.
- Sticks — Vic Firth.
Every era, with buy links, is on Gregg Bissonette’s Rig Vault page.
Want the sound without the rig?
The All-Starr kit is the interesting lesson here, and it is a lesson in restraint.
One rack tom, one floor tom, a 24” kick. That is the kit for playing sixties and seventies material properly, and it will make you a better arranger than a six-piece will.
Tune it up and let it ring. Beatles drum sounds are open, warm and only lightly damped — much less muffled than most people expect.
Then learn to read. Not romantic, extremely useful, and the single thing most self-taught drummers wish they had done. Our rudiments guide is the start of that road, and the Gear Guru will spec a simple four-piece to a budget.
Where to start listening
- David Lee Roth — Eat ‘Em and Smile (1986). The rock chops, unleashed.
- Ringo Starr & His All-Starr Band, any tour. Him playing somebody else’s parts perfectly.
- Santana — anything from the period. Latin feel, done properly.
- Maynard Ferguson. The big-band side.
- His instructional material. Decades of it, all worth having.
Final thoughts
There is a category of musician who never has a signature record and is on hundreds of them. Bissonette is the archetype: a player whose whole value is that he turns up, plays exactly what is needed in whatever style, and is pleasant enough that people keep hiring him for forty years.
The education award is the right one. Half his career has been spent explaining to other drummers how to do the job — which, when the job is “be able to play anything”, is a genuinely useful thing to teach.
See Gregg Bissonette’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Dom Famularo — the man that award is named after.