I'd just like to add a thought to the conversation.
I'm not working on Lang's "Matrix" concept, and I'm deliberately not working on it for a very specific reason.
My reason is that it is a single concept, and in musical terms it sounds like a single concept. Given that, the return on time invested seems astonishingly minimal to me.
As an example of why I think it's an inefficient use of practice time, imagine a pianist learning to play every scale against every other scale in a manner similar to what Lang is doing with sticking combinations.
Sure, playing a random scale against another random scale in a different note grouping has a certain jarring, uncoordinated sound that might be cool once or twice in a set - it would provide another colour to paint with. But learning to do every scale combination seems ludicrous considering how few actual musical possibilities the exercise would develop in the massive time it would take to complete. It would seem more sensible to do what actual pianists do in real life and learn specific, musically purposeful combinations of notes rather than just trying to complete every statistical combination of what can be done with your fingers.
To extend the colour analogy above, painters fill out their palette by deliberately mixing colours for specific intended artistic use. Lang's approach just seems like taking every possible proportion of colours and mixing them together to get the largest possible palette. While technically it does give that result, it rather ignores the fact that 99% of the resulting colours are actually just different shades of the same kind of mucky, unattractive brown and offer little artistic interest in terms of contrast or compliment. And since what you practice consciously tends to inform your subconscious artistic decisions, you're going to end up playing with an awful lot of unattractive brown if this system becomes your bread and butter in the practice room.
If you ask me the job of an artist - and I tend to think musicians are artists and that drummers should aspire to be musicians - is to do more than just put together random combinations and hope the result is alright. It's to find the results that would take a million years of hunting in all the random possibilities, to find the systems that actually produce consistently good results rather than just systematically trying everything. If that was all art was about then computers would be infinitely better at it than people.
Now, funny enough Lang actually points out my complaint with his system himself on his DVD. He says something like "I believe that how you practice is how you will play" - maybe not verbatim, but words very much to that end. He's 100% right in that. But I'm puzzled how he can understand that and not also consider that if you dedicate hours every day to practicing combining repetitive phrases in short number values in regimented sticking combinations, your playing will start to sound like short numeric phrases put together in arbitrary layers. It seems the obvious conclusion even from his own words on the DVD.
I think the comment about practice and its influence on your playing is the most valuable thing Lang says on that entire DVD set, but unfortunately in my opinion the rest of the material he's presenting is working completely against that conception by suggesting the practice of thousands of hours of material that sounds musically undistinguished and largely impractical.
Now, I don't doubt that Lang's system will turn you into an absolute co-ordinational and mertic monster if you can finish it. The results in terms of pure co-ordination and mental understanding of number combinations are doubtless immense. But I also think it has a very narrow reward in terms of giving you things you can actually use to play the drums, because very little of the thousands of exercises worth of material that he's presenting actually sounds significantly different from the rest of it in musical terms. If you play his system for ten years you'll get astonishing at building combinations of limbs and short rhythmic phrases, and at quickly acquiring new co-ordinational patterns - but you'll gain next to nothing in terms of musical depth or expressive concept. If you want to be any good then you'll still have to put in time additional to Lang's system in order to develop some musical results. My argument would be that that additional time could - structured correctly - deliver many of the benefits of Lang's system without all the time wasted on artistically meaningless but logically consistent combinations practice.
Jojo Mayer said some things to this effect in clinic when I saw him too. He had quite a lot of disdain for what he described as practicing "statistically", and instead talked about how he'd tend to find one combination that he finds musically pleasing and then work through as many ways of delivering that as he could - varying accents, changing sticking patterns while playing the same actual notes, changing the dynamics, the tone, syncopating individual notes etc. He was suggesting starting in places you believe in your gut to be musically interesting and then expanding your playing from there. Which is what human beings do in everything. I recently moved to a new city. After moving here I haven't dedicated a huge amount of time to walking down every street in town. I just go the places that seem interesting, and learn my way around how those places connect. That seems a much more human and ultimately rational use of your life than trying to go everywhere that's possible.
Some of the people in this thread I don't know. Others I do know and I have massive respect for - Jeff Almeyda, for example. I'm not going to stand up and say "You're an idiot if you work on this" - I'm not that disrespectful or arrogant. But I'd want to add this question to the thread:
Does the stuff Thomas plays inside this particular singular drum concept actually excite you as a musician?
If the answer is yes then you have my respect for the dedication it's going to take to tackle this system: it's a monster pile of work. If the answer is no then you can join in with me in working on something else entirely guilt-free!