Gregg Bissonette shares drumming tips with Harrisonburg musicians at workshop

Gregg Bissonette has built the kind of résumé working drummers study closely: more than four decades behind the kit, a steady run with Ringo Starr and His All Starr Band since 2008, and credits that stretch from David Lee Roth and Don Henley to Maynard Ferguson, Santana and Ray Charles. That kind of range was the real draw in Harrisonburg, where local musicians got a chance to hear how a first-call pro stays ready for whatever style walks through the door.

The workshop took place at Arts Incarnate in downtown Harrisonburg and was hosted by Hometown Music and Arts Incarnate. It was open to music lovers at all skill levels, which made the room feel more like a working drummer’s hangout than a formal lecture. The evening was designed as both a clinic and a conversation, with stories from Bissonette’s career folded around his approach to playing and practicing.

For drummers, that combination matters. Plenty of players can talk about chops; fewer can move cleanly between rock, pop and jazz-adjacent settings and still sound locked in. Bissonette’s name carries weight because his career shows what reliability looks like in real life: fit the gig, serve the song, and be able to do it again in a completely different band the next night. That is the kind of versatility that keeps a player working, whether the job is a stadium run, a club date, a teaching studio or a last-minute call.

The appeal of a night like this is not just that Bissonette is famous. It is that he represents usable expertise. The list of artists attached to his name reads like a roadmap for drummers who want to break out of a single lane, and his presence in Harrisonburg gave local players a rare chance to see how that flexibility gets built over time. In a city far from the usual drum-clinic circuits, the workshop put a veteran working drummer in front of musicians who could use the lesson immediately: learn the styles, stay musical, and make yourself the player people trust when the phone rings.