Can the ignorant stranger qualify the crown?

The Wild and Funny Faces of Drumming

By Tim Kane Drummer, Educator www.kanedrums.com How many of us weekend and weeknight warriors work our behinds off playing the skins, only to have some fan tell us after a gig, “I loved your facial expressions”? Hearing this one too many times myself, I decided to research the anomaly further by examining 30 celebrity drummers [...]

Video tutorial: Tuning a drum set takes practice and patience

By Tim Kane Drummer, Educator www.kanedrums.com More mundane housekeeping aspects of drumming – like tuning – have become so instinctive and intuitive to me over the years that when I went to actually define the process for you, it was like to learning to play drums all over again. The reality is drum tuning is [...]

Drummers are musicians, too

By Tim Kane Drummer, Educator www.kanedrums.com “Drummer discrimination”, as I like to call it, is on my mind this week, and not because I am the subject of it with the fellow “musicians” I now play with. They all respect my ability and musicianship and likewise. I just see it around and hear about it [...]

What’s in your drum set emergency repair kit?

By Tim Kane Drummer, Educator www.kanedrums.com A lead singer in college once jumped unannounced during a live gig, full body first into my drum set and broke all sorts of critical components. While the most severe form of technical difficulty, we’ve all been there, whether playing in front of 500 rocking fair-goers or three subdued [...]

Applying more ‘Rubato’ (vs. ‘Mr. Roboto’) to the drum set

By Tim Kane Drummer, Educator www.kanedrums.com Drummers are first and foremost timekeepers, plain and simple. That is our core mission. But we are also the gateway to a band’s inner time machine. Like the planet we live on, time fluctuates. When playing live with other musicians, there is an unwritten ebb and flow of tempo [...]

Building endurance on the drum set

By Tim Kane Drummer, Educator www.kanedrums.com If you asked 10 drum set players how they warm-up before a practice or live gig, you would probably get 12 different answers. Some musicians don’t perform any warm-up exercises and still look relaxed behind the drum kit. They allow the sound check tunes or even early songs on [...]

Who are your favorite drummer inspirations?

By Tim Kane Drummer, Educator www.kanedrums.com Buddy Rich once said that there were 10,000 drummers trying to play exactly like their heroes. Little did Buddy know it was more like millions trying to play just like him. I can’t claim that Buddy was an early influence of mine as I am a product of the [...]

What should you look for when buying lacquer or wrapped drum shells?

By Tim Kane Drummer, Educator www.kanedrums.com What happens when your sound guy misses the tom clip and drops a mic right atop your nicely lacquered kick drum shell? How about when you leave your wrapped drums in a 100-plus degree car for several days? It usually means bad things for both types of drum shell [...]

What’s the right cymbal set up for you?

By Tim Kane Drummer, Educator www.kanedrums.com I have been experimenting with the location, angles and heights of my cymbals lately, so it naturally got me thinking about the larger drumming community’s approach. And there are some interesting trends developing (or re-emerging) out there. I am seeing more splashes positioned together in a row on single [...]