Olgun Cengiz's mother could have predicted it. As a toddler, he was already hitting pots and pans with spoons.
Decades later, Cengiz — a Senior Software Engineer at X-Team — posted a drum cover of Black Sabbath's Paranoid in X-Team's #club-music Slack channel. The playing was good enough to stop the scroll. It was also largely self-directed in his early learning, assembled from training CDs and practice PDFs and years of working at his own pace long before he ever set foot in front of a real kit.
In this story, Cengiz shares how he went from a small town with no music shops to a home office with an electronic drum kit, explains what makes tempo the hardest thing to master and names the drummers he has spent years admiring and learning from.
No Music Shops, No Problem
Cengiz grew up loving music — specifically the rhythms inside it — in a small town where there were no music shops or studios and no real drum sets to play. He didn't get his hands on an actual kit until university. What he had before that was determination and a makeshift solution: he built his own kneepad to practice bounces, single strokes and double strokes at home.
Before he ever took a lesson, he was working through resources like Back to Basics by Dave Weckl and Stick Control by George Lawrence Stone, bought on CD and PDF respectively. He spent over a year on strokes alone before moving to formal instruction for more advanced techniques. "I like learning at my own pace, with documents and videos," he says — and that approach has stayed with him. He still picks up new techniques and related instruments, including double bass speed-up techniques and the Cajon, a box-shaped percussion instrument.
If drums hadn't come first, he says he would have gone to bass guitar. He's drawn to rhythm and pattern — things he finds more accessible than reading traditional notation on other instruments.
Keeping Time
Ask Cengiz what the hardest part of drumming is and the answer is immediate: keeping a steady tempo.
"You need to have a good inner clock and a good ear to keep up with the rest of the band," he says. "You also need some simple math knowledge about tempo, beats, and bars too. The drummer is the backbone of a band. The tempo must be correct and should not change throughout the song."
It's not a romantic answer, but it's an honest one. The physical mechanics of drumming — coordinating four limbs, reading the kit, executing patterns — are learnable. The inner metronome is harder. It's what separates players who can perform with a band from players who can only play alone.
Cengiz has done both. Over the years he played with bands across multiple genres, performing both unplugged and plugged gigs. Finding a common schedule with different people gets harder as everyone gets older, so he's not currently in a band. He does have an electronic drum kit at his office where friends sometimes come to play together. He also records drum cover videos and uploads them to YouTube.
A Drummer's Listening List
Cengiz's list of favorite drummers runs long. He names Mike Portnoy — co-founder of Dream Theater — at the top, with the caveat that Portnoy's songs are beyond what he himself can execute. After that: Dave Weckl, Steve Smith, Steve Gadd, Dennis Chambers, Mike Mangini, Carter Beauford of Dave Matthews Band, Buddy Rich and Elvin Jones. He notes specific qualities for several of them — Weckl as a master of technique, Chambers for his grooves, Jones for his brush stick mastery — suggesting a listener who has been paying close attention for a long time.
His advice to anyone just starting out is brief and unambiguous: never quit. "Practice makes perfect" may be a cliché, but behind it is something real — the recognition that the inner clock, the coordination and the musicality that make a great drummer are not delivered at once. They accumulate, stroke by stroke, session by session, across years of showing up and playing.
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