I’ve always been more than hap­py to admit that I think Ringo Starr is a fan­tas­tic drum­mer and don’t find it much worth argu­ing over. Then again, more and more peo­ple seem to have come around to that point of view. Or at least that’s been my expe­ri­ence. Maybe it has some­thing to do with the length of expo­sure. Once you’ve lived with the Bea­t­les’ music for, say, twen­ty to fifty years, you’d had a lot of time to reflect on your favorite songs, or favorite moments (like the break­downs in “Hel­lo, Good­bye” and “Straw­ber­ry Fields,” for exam­ple). A lot of time to appre­ci­ate just how well so many of those songs, and Ringo’s drum­ming, have aged.

But not all of them. I haven’t always found the very ear­ly Bea­t­les albums to hold up well for me. There’s some­thing about… well… okay, maybe Ringo wasn’t always a great drum­mer. But he became one. The thing about a ret­ro­spec­tive appre­ci­a­tion is that it’s high­ly selec­tive.

How­ev­er, if we were to select ele­ments of Ringo’s tech­nique from songs span­ning the whole of his Bea­t­les career, we would be able to see how his play­ing refined from 1962 to 1995, when he made his last record­ings with George, Paul, and John—who left sev­er­al home demo tapes over which his band­mates lay­ered har­monies and rhythms. (Hear “Free as a Bird” from those ses­sions here.)

You could take the time to edit togeth­er sev­er­al sec­onds, chrono­log­i­cal­ly, of famous Bea­t­les songs through­out the six­ties and sev­en­ties. Or you could do that and play all those parts your­self, and shoot and edit a thor­ough­ly engag­ing, high-qual­i­ty video of your­self play­ing them. That’s what Kye Smith does in the videos here, part of a long series of 22 exer­cis­es he calls “5 Minute Drum Chronol­o­gy.” As you’ll see in his Bea­t­les video at the top, Smith has made some very thought­ful selec­tions from the canon, show­ing how thor­ough­ly ver­sa­tile Ringo’s play­ing became; how well he came to under­stand nuanced dynam­ics: when to attack and when not to play at all.

In his Nir­vana “5 Minute Drum Chronol­o­gy,” above, Smith not only dupli­cates the huge, boom­ing sound of Dave Grohl’s drumk­it, but he also per­fect­ly cap­tures Grohl’s tremen­dous ener­gy. With the focus square­ly on the drums, Grohl (through Smith) seems even more the hard­core punk drum­mer that he was for years before he joined Nir­vana. But by the time we get to “You Know You’re Right,” the last song the band record­ed in 1994, we see how he had dis­cov­ered a much lighter touch as well, one he devel­oped even fur­ther as a drum­mer for indie stars like Cat Pow­er.

Smith’s oth­er twen­ty 5 Minute Drum Chronolo­gies track bands who made it in the nineties, like The Off­spring, NOFX, Blink-182, and Foo Fight­ers. In many cas­es, none but ardent fans will know the drum­mers of these bands or have a sense of their full discog­ra­phy. But at least by the time we get to their break­out 1994 album Dook­ie, many of us will be famil­iar with a song or two from all of Green Day’s releas­es. And we’re like­ly to know the name and face of drum­mer Tré Cool. (The band’s first drum­mer, Al Sobrante, takes up the first 20 sec­onds of the video above.)

Is Tré Cool a drum­mer who has evolved over the years, devel­oped bet­ter feel and more finesse? At least the way Kye Smith plays him. Smith is such a tal­ent­ed drum­ming impres­sion­ist that one can look away and for­get that it’s him on the drums and not Cool. Which rais­es oth­er crit­i­cal issues with the impres­sive arti­fice of these chronolo­gies. These are, of course, inter­pre­ta­tions. And in any case, musi­cians have good nights and bad nights, great takes and not so great takes, and their style might vary more across a sin­gle album than between songs on dif­fer­ent records.

And in the case of a band like the Red Hot Chili Pep­pers, we’ve seen three dif­fer­ent drum­mers by the time the band released their fourth album, Mother’s Milk and took on high­ly skilled Will Fer­rell looka­like Chad Smith. Nonethe­less, Kye Smith gives us a lot to chew on as we watch, by proxy, these drum­mers adapt to the evo­lu­tion of their bands’ song­writ­ing. Some of those jour­neys are nat­u­ral­ly more inter­est­ing than oth­ers. See the com­plete col­lec­tion of 22 5 Minute Drum Chronolo­gies here, or down below.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

The Neu­ro­science of Drum­ming: Researchers Dis­cov­er the Secrets of Drum­ming & The Human Brain

Iso­lat­ed Drum Tracks From Six of Rock’s Great­est: Bon­ham, Moon, Peart, Copeland, Grohl & Starr

The Fun­da­men­tals of Jazz & Rock Drum­ming Explained in Five Cre­ative Min­utes

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Durham, NC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

If you come vis­it South Korea, where I live, you’ll more than like­ly pass through Incheon Inter­na­tion­al Air­port, and there quite pos­si­bly wit­ness a vari­ety of dis­plays of tra­di­tion­al Kore­an cul­ture, from acro­bat­ics to aris­to­crat­ic pro­ces­sions to a vari­ety of musi­cal per­for­mances. Since the rebuild­ing of the coun­try after the Kore­an War, atten­tion has turned to recov­er­ing the arts and cus­toms of the past and, in one way or anoth­er, mak­ing them rel­e­vant to the present. Plac­ing them in the mid­dle of an ultra­mod­ern trans­porta­tion facil­i­ty is one; inter­pret­ing the stuff of rel­a­tive­ly recent pop­u­lar cul­ture with them is anoth­er.

A few years ago we fea­tured the skills of Luna Lee, a play­er of the gayageum, a twelve-stringed Kore­an instru­ment dat­ing back to the sixth cen­tu­ry. Specif­i­cal­ly, we fea­tured her ren­di­tions of Jimi Hen­drix’s “Voodoo Chile” and Ste­vie Ray Vaugh­an’s “Lit­tle Wing,” meet­ings of mod­ern com­po­si­tion and tra­di­tion­al East Asian per­for­mance rem­i­nis­cent of what Japan­ese koto play­er June Kuramo­to and her band Hiroshi­ma pio­neered in the 1970s.

But the Kore­an musi­cal sen­si­bil­i­ty brings a dif­fer­ent set of emo­tions into play, and now you can hear them hybridized with the psy­che­del­ic, oper­at­ic, vir­tu­osic rock of Pink Floyd in Lee’s ver­sions of “Anoth­er Brick in the Wall,” “Com­fort­ably Numb,” and “The Great Gig in the Sky,” all of which must have posed a for­mi­da­ble chal­lenge to con­vert into gayageum music.

“My ances­tors played the gayageum in a small room, so the sound did not need to be loud,” writes Lee on her Patre­on page, “but my music is per­formed with mod­ern instru­ments such as the drums, bass and the gui­tar. So I had to rede­vel­op my gayageum so that the sound would match that of the mod­ern instru­ment. I had to increase the vol­ume and pres­sure, devel­op tone and increase the sus­tain sound. And hop­ing to express the sound of gayageum more diverse­ly like that of the gui­tar, I had to study gui­tar effec­tors and ampli­fiers and test them to see if they would fit to the sound of the gayageum.”

Lee’s work of push­ing the gayageum into new musi­cal realms con­tin­ues: in oth­er videos, she tries her hand at adapt­ing songs by every­one from the Rolling Stones to R. Kel­ly to Tiny Tim to the late Leonard Cohen. But some­thing about her mul­ti­ple vis­its to the ter­ri­to­ry of Pink Floyd feels right. Per­haps, should we find our­selves in anoth­er great pro­gres­sive rock era, the gayageum will be the first instru­ment to join the sub­se­quent­ly expand­ed field of instru­ments — in both a tech­no­log­i­cal and his­tor­i­cal sense — let onto the stage. Stranger things have hap­pened there, as the Floyd well know.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Watch Jimi Hendrix’s ‘Voodoo Chile’ Per­formed on a Gayageum, a Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Instru­ment

Ste­vie Ray Vaughan’s Ver­sion of “Lit­tle Wing” Played on Tra­di­tion­al Kore­an Instru­ment, the Gayageum

Hear Lost Record­ing of Pink Floyd Play­ing with Jazz Vio­lin­ist Stéphane Grap­pel­li on “Wish You Were Here”

Ultra Ortho­dox Rab­bis Sing Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here” on the Streets of Jerusalem

Based in Seoul, Col­in Mar­shall writes and broad­casts on cities and cul­ture. He’s at work on a book about Los Ange­les, A Los Ange­les Primer, the video series The City in Cin­e­ma, the crowd­fund­ed jour­nal­ism project Where Is the City of the Future?, and the Los Ange­les Review of Books’ Korea Blog. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.