Matt Garstka | Animals As Leaders' linear brain

Animals As Leaders had already redefined what an instrumental metal band could be before Matt Garstka joined. Then he arrived and changed what the drums in one could do.

He plays a genre built on eight-string guitars and polyrhythmic riffs using a vocabulary borrowed almost entirely from gospel drumming — linear phrasing, ghost notes, hi-hat foot splashes — and the collision of those two things is one of the more interesting sounds in modern music.

Here is the drummer half of progressive metal has been transcribing for a decade.

Who is Matt Garstka?

Matt Garstka was born in 1989 and grew up in Massachusetts.

He studied at the Berklee College of Music, which matters here more than it usually does — his playing is full of things you learn in a practice room and almost nowhere else.

In 2012 he joined Animals As Leaders, the instrumental band built around guitarist Tosin Abasi, replacing Navene Koperweis.

The albums since: The Joy of Motion (2014), The Madness of Many (2016) and Parrhesia (2022).

Drumeo’s voters gave him Progressive Drummer Of The Year in 2021.

What Matt Garstka actually does

He plays linear. Almost nothing lands at the same time as anything else. The kick, snare and hats interlock into a single stream rather than stacking into a backbeat — which is a gospel and fusion idea, transplanted into metal.

He ghosts constantly. There is a permanent quiet conversation happening on the snare underneath everything. Turn a Animals As Leaders track up and you will hear a whole second layer you had missed.

He plays against the riff. Where Mario Duplantier locks to the guitar, Garstka often does the opposite: Abasi plays a 7-beat cycle and Garstka plays something in 4 across it, so the two drift and resolve.

His hi-hat foot is a third hand. Foot splashes and open-close accents used as actual notes rather than timekeeping.

He is astonishingly relaxed. The famous clip is him playing an entire piece with his eyes closed, barely moving. There is no tension in it anywhere, which is why the fastest passages still sound musical.

The teaching

Garstka is as much an educator as a performer. Clinics, online lessons, streams, and a signature sample library with GetGood Drums that put his kit sound into other people’s records — the same route Benny Greb and Tomas Haake took.

He is also unusually good at explaining what he is doing, which is not a given at this technical level.

Matt Garstka’s drum kit

He moved from Tama to DW, and his cymbals are where most of his personality lives.

• Drums — DW Collector’s Series, a custom kit in moderate sizes. Nothing enormous — this is not a double-kick monster.
• Cymbals — Meinl, hand-selected, including his own signature models. Byzance Vintage Trash Crash and Extra Dry models, and Equilibrium hi-hats — papery, with a crisp tip attack, which is exactly what a linear player needs.
• Sticks — Vic Firth.
• Hardware — DW 9000 series, with a Tama Iron Cobra hi-hat stand — a small detail that tells you how much the hat matters to him.
• Electronics. Yamaha DTX silicone pads for feel, and a Roland KT-10 kick trigger.

Every era, with buy links, is on Matt Garstka’s Rig Vault page.

Want the sound without the rig?

Two purchases and one habit.

Buy dry, papery hi-hats. The Extra Dry and Equilibrium end of the Meinl range, or anything similar — a hat with a short, defined chick and no wash. Linear playing falls apart under a big washy hat. Our cymbal buying guide covers dry versus traditional.

Then get a trash crash. Short, ugly, no sustain — the accent sound of this whole genre. We wrote about the Meinl Byzance Trash Crash specifically.

And practise linear. Play a groove where no two limbs ever hit together. Start at 60bpm. It will feel wrong for about a week, and then it will change how you hear fills forever.

The Gear Guru will handle the rest of the shopping list.

Where to start listening

• “Physical Education” (2014). The one everyone transcribes.
• “The Woven Web” (2014). Ghost notes as an entire layer.
• “Arithmophobia” (2016). Him and Abasi pulling against each other on purpose.
• “Monomyth” (2022). The most recent statement, and the most controlled.
• Any clinic footage. Watch the shoulders. Nothing moves.

Final thoughts

Garstka’s contribution is easy to state and hard to overstate: he proved that a technical metal band does not need a technical metal drummer.

The gospel and fusion vocabulary he brought in has since spread everywhere, and a decade on you can hear his influence in players who have probably never listened to a gospel record in their lives.

He is also, for a player at this level, refreshingly uninterested in showing off. The chops are there. He just keeps burying them under the music.

See Matt Garstka’s full rig in the Rig Vault, or read about Anup Sastry and Alex Rudinger — two more drummers doing serious work in the same corner of the genre.