I’m very excited when I get my YouTube subscription update and there’s a new Travis Orbin video link inside. In a sea of Internet “superstar” poseurs, this guy’s the real deal. It doesn’t hurt that the production of his videos is excellent either!

His influences are clear, and comparisons to Mike Mangini are inevitable, but he nonetheless has a very unique style. I’m particularly impressed with his dynamics, ambidexterity, and super-clean feet-and-hands runs around that cool Mangini-meets-Bruford set-up. There’s a lot of really inspiring stuff here that makes me wish I could lock myself in a practice room for a week straight!

Here’s a video of a session Travis did with Pete Peterson. It’s a really neat, complex tune in the vein of Zappa / Mike Keneally / Mike Patton (the Mr. Bungle, Fantomas, and solo stuff). I’d love to see a chart for this thing. It’s rife with meter changes, polyrhythms, and metric modulations—and that’s just the rhythmic stuff!

More Travis vids here.