Luke Combs drummer Jake Sommers to host free Green Bay clinic

Luke Combs’ touring drummer is stepping off the arena-size stage and into a music store classroom in Green Bay, where Jake Sommers and bassist Mat Maxwell will turn the city’s biggest country weekend into a rare working-player clinic.

The free in-store session, Stories from the Road with Luke Combs, is set for Saturday, May 16, from 10:30 a.m. to noon at Heid Music Green Bay. It comes one day after Combs opens his two-night Lambeau Field run on the My Kinda Saturday Night Tour, giving the clinic a built-in audience of fans already in town for one of the year’s biggest country stops in Wisconsin.

Heid Music says the event is designed especially for drummers and bassists, but it is open to aspiring musicians from any background. The point is not a product pitch or an autograph line. It is a conversation about what it takes to survive and keep moving inside a major touring operation, from the grind of travel and bus life to the technical demands of the road and the day-to-day habits that keep a player employable at a high level.

That makes Sommers the central draw for drummers. Heid Music says he has been Combs’ touring drummer for 11 years and has also taught private lessons for the last six years. Maxwell brings nearly two decades of studio and touring experience, and Heid Music notes that he wrote Hired Musician: A Guide to Getting and Keeping Gigs. Together, they are positioned to speak less like celebrities and more like working rhythm-section players who know how a call list gets built, how a show gets held together, and how a career stays steady.

The clinic is being presented in partnership with D’Addario, Ernie Ball and Sabian, and seating is limited, with RSVPs encouraged through Heid Music. That setup gives the event a different feel from a normal weekend appearance. Attendees will be able to ask questions and hear stories from the road, which is exactly the kind of practical exchange younger players and gigging drummers usually have to piece together one conversation at a time.

The timing also fits the wider Combs story. Packers.com lists the Green Bay shows for Friday, May 15, and Saturday, May 16, with Dierks Bentley, Ty Myers, Jake Worthington and Thelma & James on the bill, while the Country Music Hall of Fame and Museum has described the Wild Cards as the band that stayed with Combs as he went from bars to international stadium tours. In Green Bay, that history lands in a smaller room, where Sommers’ role as the drummer behind the headliner becomes the lesson itself.