Aaron Sterling’s Pedalboard Approach to the Drums

Wong Notes

Premier Guitar

Music, Music Commentary, Music Interviews

4.9 • 587 Ratings

🗓️ 6 December 2023

⏱️ 64 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Session drum ace Aaron Sterling might have fusion roots, but his bread-and-butter work lives at the top of the charts, where’s he’s featured on tracks by artists such as John Mayer, Taylor Swift, Harry Styles, and Lana Del Rey. He tells Cory what brought him to Los Angeles, why he’s “meant to be in the studio” instead of the stage, and he shares the surreal story of playing with EVH in a florist’s parking lot for Tracy Morgan.

Sterling defines his approach to recording in his studio as a “pedalboard approach” and explains:

“When guitar players started getting more pedals, in the old days, and then they started getting a pedalboard. And then there’s the rack. This was this evolution where you guys started controlling more and more of your sound and it was less waiting for a mixer to do interesting things later. And you were just like, ‘Here’s the sound.’ You have your own plugin, you have all this stuff that you’re doing to control your sound so that there’s less work later.

I got inspired by that concept when I started recording, even before I had my own studio, to give an engineer the most amount of stuff that’s done. So that when I started recording myself, my philosophy was always the pedalboard philosophy, which is I’ll give you the sounds, I’m not just gonna play the drums and let you do stuff later. I don’t wanna think of myself as a drummer. I’ll think of myself as a creator using drums to give you sounds that hopefully are the right thing for the song.”

Stick around for the drummer’s opinion of the Beatles’ “Now and Then” and learn why he prefers large cymbals.

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Produced by Jason Shadrick and Cory Wong

Additional Editing by Shawn Persinger

Presented by DistroKid

Transcript

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0:00.0	What's happening? Welcome to Wong Nodes podcast. I'm your host, Corey Wong. I'm chilling here in New York City.
0:09.2	I'm in my hotel room. Hotel rooms are a little smaller here than a lot of other places. Not going to
0:13.3	lie. Maybe it's just the rooms I stay in, but my desk chair is buttoned up against the bed right now.
0:19.5	That's fine. Why want to know why?
0:39.9	Because I'm having a good time. I'm chilling. I'm in New York because the fearless flyers are doing a four-night run. Eight shows at the Blue Note. Very excited for it. They're all sold out. So if you didn't get your tickets, well, don't sleep next time. Speaking of things that are sold out that I'm really excited for, I'm doing a camp, a rhythm section camp.
1:45.4	Focus mostly for guitar, bass, drums, keyboards next summer, August 5th through the 8th in Nashville, Tennessee at the Lowe's Hotel. Today's guest is going to be there as one of my special guests. You know what? I was going to save this episode for this week because it's like, oh, yes, Sterling's going to be on and he's going to be an instructor at the camp. Let's do the episode this week because I'll promote the camp and it'll maybe help sell tickets to the camp. Guess what? The camp sold out. That's amazing. It's my first time ever doing this camp. I'm very excited. It's limited to like around 200 people. So we're going to, we got a bunch of instructors, a bunch of rooms. We're going to be doing concerts, all that. But we did open up, just today. We are yesterday. We opened up like 20 commuter pass tickets. For those that don't need the hotel room, if you're living in Nashville, whatever. So get those. They might be sold out by now, too. But anyways, you know what? That's the good thing. Because there's going to be people there. It's going to be fun. It's going to be exciting. And honestly, it's like, well, why don't you just sell more tickets or just like, do a bigger thing? Why? Because I want to keep it a little more intimate.
1:49.4	Want to make sure that it's a really special experience for everybody that's there.
1:52.8	And if you're coming, thanks. It's going to be a great time.
1:57.2	We got sick concerts. Larry Carlton, Theo Katzman, fearless flyers.
1:59.9	Sterling's going to be there. I mean, we got all this.
2:01.4	This is going to be sick.
2:02.2	Ariel poses. Come on. All those good. For the guitar players. This is a guitar podcast. Ariel, Mark LaTierry, myself. I got a couple other special guests coming. Don't worry about that. Nice little surprises here and there. Larry Carl, and that's the one that I'm looking forward to hearing. Larry's one of the kings.
2:18.5	Come on, Steely Dan.
2:20.6	Come on, Steely, in there. Larry Carl, and that's the one that I'm looking forward to hearing. Larry's one of the
2:17.5	Kings. Come on, Steely Dan. Come on, Steely Dan. Anyways, on to this week's guest, Aaron Sterling. You might
2:26.7	know him as a drummer for John Mayer. You might have heard him with Harry Styles, Marin Morris,
2:31.6	Taylor Swift. The list goes on.
2:35.1	Okay, this cat is one of the dopest drummers to exist.
2:39.3	And my goodness, what an incredible session musician.
2:43.5	This cat just gets it.
2:45.6	What does the song need?
2:46.9	How does the momentum need to feel?
	...

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