I have great samples of my drums and I try to program them pretty much how I want to play them, try and make it feel natural even though it's programmed.

There are things I've kept over the years and then someday I might pull up a program of some tune that I've done and I go "Wow, I know what to do with this now".

If it's something that I just can't get anywhere with, even if I think this could be a hit, I just drop it and it doesn't get developed.

From the time I started playing solo drums, doing clinics and stuff, you know I think one of the largest selling clinics I ever did was in Chicago.

I had been composing just for myself, and people would say I played so orchestrally, and wondered if I thought about having someone write a piece for me for an orchestra. And I thought, I don't want someone else to write that. You know I finally had made an overhead chart of my drums and what pitches the cymbals and toms were tuned to, and what have you. And I started to compose just with what I had for my solo drumming.

Money and fame are very inconvenient and very problematic.

I'm not a haiku artist, but I wanted to use the phrase 5, 7, 5 in the melody that flows over time. So the string melody, the first one is five notes, the next one is seven, and then the third one is five.