SMOT

If you have been following my channel for some time now, you must have stumbled upon SMOT before. I did a bass cover of one of their tracks, I did a drum cover too and now they let me replace their own drummer for one of their greatest Original songs. Why is that? Why do I keep coming back to their music? And how come they let me? Is this because their own drummer is so bad?

Most of you know the answer already. The ‘real’ drummer and founding member of SMOT is my first and my long-time drum teacher Oliver Griethe. I started taking lessons at Schlagzeugschule Drummer’s Inspiration in Krefeld at the age of 10 and I continued up to the age of 16. Oliver has been my drum teacher for 6 years and most likely he knows more about my strong and weak points in regards of drumming than anybody else.

Fun fact: One year after I started drumming, Milena joined me at Drummer’s Inspiration and Oliver taught both of us. Milena did reasonably well, in fact, she was better than me at certain stuff (reading!!) but she just wasn’t 100% into drumming, so she quit after a year or so.
Another fun fact: Oliver is a full time drum teacher and he teaches younger and older pupils as a day time job. I do not know if he only said this because he’s polite, but I think he mentioned that he was always looking forward to the weekly lesson with little Sina because he considered those more challenging than other lessons. I think he said that after I got into Dream Theater.

Back to SMOT and ‘Dead Man’. They recorded this track already some years ago for an unofficial EP which was never released. Right now, the Band is in a Studio, recording a proper Album to be launched worldwide very soon. Of course I’ve got their EP at home and ‘Dead Man’ was one of my favorite tracks off that EP. After they agreed to the plan to launch the track on Chi Might II, I did the drum part, roughly based on Oliver’s previous part and I also did the bass part (I really like SMOT’s bass parts!)

So we only needed Silja Steffestun-Gottschalk and Martin Smeet to come to our basement and lay down their vocals/guitar. Glad they did. It was a very hot summer day and it was another unforgettable summer-basement-session. The lyrics were written by Silja, the music was composed by SMOT.

Thanks guys for having me!!