Drummers Quotations

You are never, ever gonna get a drummer to dis another one. It's part of the drumming rules, as important as being able to keep pace or smashing up hotel rooms. Drummers do not dis!

The drummer is stereotypically the dumb guy. Maybe that's why I always respect drummers who do more than drum.

The records that I grew up listening to had feel, and the drummers that inspired me - like Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart, Phil Collins and Roger Taylor - all had their own voice and individual style.

I usually speak with all my drummers so that I write my songs with them in mind, and we'll have bass sounds, choir sounds, and then you can multi-task with all these orchestral sounds. Through the magic medium of technology, I can play all kinds of sounds - double bass and stuff.

If drummers are 'anti-solo,' that's up to them. They're musicians, and they can play whatever they want. But my inspirations early on were people like Buddy Rich, seeing him on 'The Tonight Show', or Gene Krupa.

I fought it hammer and tong, but the drummers had inoperable bricks in their head about it. What's worse is that they now want to remove all Dead music from the Web.

We've been together playing for 15 years now. We've been going through different drummers throughout the years ... a bunch of different equipment, a bunch of different problems.

Piano players are all wacky, and drummers just like to make noise. The bass player has to be responsible.

Many drummers who get into that style of playing and writing often end up being known for only their technique and not their feel.

The advice I like to give to drummers is that there's no right or wrong way of playing the drums. I think the drumming community can be very antiquated and very stuck in the past of, like, this Neil Peart style, technical Guitar Center drum video kind of approach. That you need to have played for 15 years before you ever do anything worthwhile.

With every record, with each band, I just try to make a song good. I'm not so much focusing on my technique. There are a million better drummers than me. I try to adapt to the songwriter; I try to adapt to the situation and retain my sort of melodic power. My goal is for the band to be good.

I wanted to be like the guy from Duran Duran. I wanted to play 16th notes and 'four on the floor' so bad. I was listening to punk all day and my uncle used to listen to heavy medal, and I really started paying attention to what the drummers were doing. I didn't get my own set until my dad sprung for a Pearl kit for my thirteenth birthday. I got headphones and a Walkman and I was playing along with The Cars, Zepplin, AC/DC is the best way to learn how to play rock. They're the easiest drum parts ever, like they make you feel like you're king of the world almost right away.

You meet new friends and meet old friends. Dancers learn new steps, and drummers learn new songs.

It's not mechanical. People just let go. The drummers are animated. Their hands reflect every gesture the dancers do. There are a lot of quick steps with the feet, shoulders, waist, hips and breasts.

Don, now, is writing songs. He's never written songs before and he's adding a whole new aspect. I mean drummers are based around getting kids dancing, where I more worry about lyrics. So we're putting it together and writing more melodies for kids to sing along with.

That has really shaped us more than anything else over the past year. One of the goals for this new record was to lay down more grooves than we had on Katonah and make something truly danceable. Having two drummers on stage will reinforce that element for us.

I was a beginner again. I practiced hard and used to listen very closely to recordings of American jazz drummers such as Tony Williams and Kenny Clarke.

He's one of the most tasteful of all the drummers I play with. I like the type of tunes he selects and his writing, but mostly he's a very musical drummer. From a horn player's perspective, he plays the right things behind you.

The entire secret to the world is some drummers can play with click tracks and some can't,