I recently heard a gig horror story involving a drummer who failed at his job in more ways than one. The sad thing is, he may not have realized how badly he was failing and wreaking havoc on the band.

Now my point today actually isn’t to share with you all the details of how this guy failed miserably. It’s really to give you some preface to today’s video, which highlights the “5 Toxic Drummer Habits You MUST Avoid.”

This particular drummer actually excelled at all the usual “drummer skills” that come to mind, like solid timekeeping, appropriate playing (playing for the song), arriving on time prepared, and in general “sounding good” on his instrument.

So what went wrong?

The drummer on this gig had an ego problem, and his lack of respect for the bandleader and overall arrogance led to a whole host of issues that good timekeeping and proper playing couldn’t solve. He failed to have the vocalist's best interest in mind,...

Don’t tick off the sound guy.

I recently saw what happened when a band made this fatal error.

I was playing a show with an original band I play with often, and we were opening for another band traveling through from out of town.

The venue asked us to arrive at 2pm for sound check for a 7pm show. This kind of schedule definitely isn’t ideal, but we’d scheduled our day around it and it wasn’t a big deal. We arrived, set up our gear, and we started soundcheck. We have a good relationship with the front-of-house engineer at this particular venue, and he’s always done his job well and gone out of his way to make sure everything’s working well for us. We checked every instrument, got monitor mixes fine-tuned, and we played through a tune. This was a super thorough sound check, and we were glad. Everything sounded and felt great, and we were pumped for the show that night.

Something seemed weird though... Where was the headlining band? Where was...

I made the worst mistake of my music career a few years ago when I was in college. This wasn’t a “musical” mistake or a performance mistake. This was a huge no-no that violated all the rules of Professionalism 101.

I attended a small in-state school, and I was blessed to have lots of scholarship opportunities that paid my way through college. Though small, this school had a fantastic, accredited music program with world-class faculty. We had all the standard ensembles that music schools have, from jazz band to wind ensemble to orchestra, musical theater, marching band, choir...you name it.

Because the school was fairly small and there were only a handful of percussion majors, most of us percussionists were involved in nearly all of the ensembles to some degree. Wind ensemble was the big one, which all scholarship music students had to be a part of. (For those unfamiliar, “wind ensemble” is basically an orchestra without the strings. AKA...