Raymond is from a very musical family of which every member is an instrumentalist. He took lessons from Fred van Vloten, Rene Cremers and even Joe Pocaro in the US. He played with many great Dutch artists like Zinatra, Rene Shuman and Bert Heerink (former singer of Vandenberg - the band of Adrian van den Berg -Whitesnake). Currently Raymond plays in his band Manilla, a group of five experienced musicians. Besides his work as a teacher he is also a respected recording artist and can be found on numerous recordings.

One of his great masters is -like many others- Jeff Porcaro, drummer of the famous American band Toto, where Simon Phillips is pouding the drums nowadays. His journey through the art of playing of Jeff Porcaro led him in 1995 and 2001 to Los Angeles where he took lessons from Joe Porcaro (Jeff\'s father) and made him reside as a VIP at the Musican Institute.

Raymond is a drummer who proved himself fully and has a perfect control of technique on the drum set. The first time we wrote about him was in the review of his clinic at the Drumworld Festival of Adams Drumworld. During this big opening fest he gave a clinic that focussed on technique and hand-foot combinations on the drum set. This evening he demonstrated in half an hour what it takes to solo around a beat.

The idea is actually quite simple: keep the puls (the beat) steady and play any combination over the beat while you feel it. In the attached streams you find Raymond soloing in extreme forms around that puls in fast combinations. You\'ll see Raymond performing tracks of Dave Weckl just as easy as he is soloing around the puls.

This clinic was a perfect introduction for Luis and Chester with handy tips and explanations on how you can pratice this at home. You can find his itinerary on the web site of his band or you could just as easy take lessons from the virtuous from Geleeen.