Larnell Lewis | The one-listen Enter Sandman drummer
Larnell Lewis learned a Metallica album in one listen and recorded it. His Snarky Puppy work, his teaching, and his Yamaha and Zildjian rig explained.
In 2018, Drumeo sat a jazz drummer down, played him Metallica’s “Enter Sandman” once, and asked him to record it.
He did. On the second take. The video has been watched tens of millions of times and it remains the single best demonstration on the internet of what a top-level professional musician actually does.
That drummer was Larnell Lewis, and the party trick is roughly the fifth most interesting thing about him.
Who is Larnell Lewis?
Larnell Lewis is a Canadian drummer, composer, producer and educator from Toronto.
He came up through the church and through the Canadian jazz education system, and has been a Yamaha artist since 2005.
His best-known gig is Snarky Puppy — the large, shape-shifting American instrumental collective — where he is one of a rotating cast of drummers and has been since the mid-2010s. He played on Culcha Vulcha (2016), which won a Grammy.
He also leads his own bands, releases solo material (In the Moment, Relive the Moment), and teaches extensively.
Drumeo’s voters gave him Contemporary Drummer Of The Year in 2021, the year he also performed at PASIC.
The Metallica video, and why it matters
It is worth being precise about what happened, because the headline undersells it.
He was played the track once. He then sat down and recorded a full performance — correct arrangement, correct fills, correct feel — with no chart and no second listen.
What that demonstrates is not memory. It is structural hearing: the ability to hear a piece of music once and immediately understand its form, where the sections change, what the drums are doing and why. Every high-level session musician has some version of this skill. Very few have it that developed, and almost nobody has demonstrated it on camera so plainly.
It also, incidentally, made a great many rock drummers take jazz musicians seriously.
What Larnell Lewis actually does
He is a groove player first. For a drummer with this much technique, the striking thing is how simple most of his playing is. Snarky Puppy material is dense; he holds it down.
His touch is extraordinary. Dynamic range from a whisper to a stadium, and the tone stays good at both ends.
He phrases like a horn player. Fills are melodic statements with a beginning and an end, not bursts.
He is a genuine polyglot. Gospel, jazz, funk, Afro-Caribbean, rock. Not “can get through it” — genuinely idiomatic in all of them.
He teaches brilliantly. The educational material is clear, patient and entirely free of mystique.
Larnell Lewis’s drum kit
- Drums — Yamaha, and he has been an artist with them since 2005. Absolute Hybrid Maple is his main kit, in fusion-ish sizes.
- Cymbals — Zildjian.
- Heads — Evans. He is an Evans artist, and uses UV2 heads, plus a hydraulic head — two plies with a layer of oil between them — on some drums, which is where the very dead, thuddy sound in his more modern playing comes from.
- Sticks — Promark, a 5A hickory teardrop wood tip.
- The “snare-tom”. One genuinely idiosyncratic thing: he keeps a tom with a snare wire arrangement in his setup, giving him an extra voice that is neither one nor the other.
Every era, with buy links, is on Larnell Lewis’s Rig Vault page.
Want the sound without the rig?
Two ideas, and one of them is nearly free.
Try a hydraulic head. Two plies with oil between them: no overtones, no sustain, all thud. It is the fastest way to change a kit’s character and it costs the price of one head. Our drum head buying guide covers where they fit.
Then build a snare-tom. A floor tom with a snare-drum sound is a genuinely useful extra colour and you can improvise one for very little. We wrote about the broader idea in our floor snare drums guide.
And the actual lesson: listen to a song once and try to play it. You will be terrible. Do it weekly for a year and you will not be. The Gear Guru will handle the shopping.
Where to start listening
- The Drumeo “Enter Sandman” video (2018). Obviously.
- Snarky Puppy — Culcha Vulcha (2016). The Grammy winner.
- Snarky Puppy — “Xavi”, live. Him holding down something enormous.
- Larnell Lewis — In the Moment (2018). His own record.
- Any of his teaching material. Unusually clear.
Final thoughts
The Metallica video is a brilliant piece of content and a slightly unfair legacy, because it makes Lewis sound like a stunt drummer. He is the opposite: a deeply serious musician whose defining quality is that he listens better than almost anyone.
That is also, not coincidentally, the same skill the video was demonstrating.
See Larnell Lewis’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Nate Smith and Mark Guiliana — two more drummers working the border between jazz and everything else.