“Wow! You’ve got a drum set!” Actually I have not just “a” drum set, but what some people might consider a ridiculous amount of drum sets. (Not me, of course, and that’s a point I will readily defend with, I believe, good arguments. But that’s a story for another time.)

I’ve had kids visit the house who were awed when they saw a drum kit, and they usually utter that quote above. Not my own kids, though…

They think it’s totally normal to live in a house with a bunch of drums, not to mention guitars, microphones, and a whole slew of other instruments available for them to mess around on. And because it’s normal to them, they’re hardly impressed. They rarely even touch the gear that’s at their disposal.

One of my sons, Jay, does play drums in school and takes drum lessons. He enjoys it, but he doesn’t really do it for leisure. Playing falls into the chores category: “Gotta do my practicing so I can go play video games the rest of the day.”

While his passion doesn’t burn as deeply as mine, I do try to show him drum things I see that he might find interesting. So the other day I shared with him this YouTuber’s video about “drummer frustrations.” It was a humor piece, looking at drumming headaches through a tongue-not-so-subtly-placed-in-cheek lens. 

One of the segments in this humor video involved a skit where the drummer was informed of a last-minute opportunity for a gig that night. The drummer proceeded to pack up all his gear—which is undoubtedly a bigger ordeal than it is for many other instrumentalists. After he got the traps completely broken down and loaded up, the phone rings and he’s informed the gig fell through. So he laboriously unloads everything and re-set up the studio; a half-hour job, at least. And when the last of the gear is finally set up, the phone rings again, and hilarity ensues as the gig is back on, and it’s wash-rinse-repeat.

Jay didn’t see the humor in it, though. “Why doesn’t he just use another drum set?” It seemed to him like the vlogger was making a joke out of an unreasonable scenario that wouldn’t actually happen in real life.

Why was this is his reaction? Because there are more drum kits around here then you can shake a drumstick at, and he knows that I never breakdown the “house kits” to bring them out on the weekends. By design, I have a drum set in my studio/office that I leave set up, and one in his room he practices on… but the rest remain in their bags, ready to be grabbed for travel to shows. Loading up the car, and unloading at one in the morning, is still a total drag, but I never have to break down and set up my shells or hardware at home. But, of course, this is a privilege of middle age to have multiple sets of stuff, and it wasn’t always like this…

I had to explain to him that when I was young—and in reality still for many people who are not so young—there was ONE drum kit for everything, one set of hardware. 

Band had a show? Break it all down and load out. When you returned from the gig, exhausted, you dumped the gear on the floor in pieces. If the band wanted to rehearse the next day… *sigh*… it was set up time all over again. And then if there was another show a few days later or a rehearsal somewhere else? The whole ordeal was like being on a merry-go-round, but not nearly as much fun.

These days I have different sized drum sets with different purposes, and an assortment of equipment spread out around different rehearsal spaces on Long Island. But, again, this is not the norm for many, and certainly not the norm for me in my formative years, when simply accumulating one set of gear of extremely modest quality was a major, financially-burdensome chore. (The grind of 25-plus years of full-time working for a living does offer some benefits.) In many respects, defining the point in my life where I “became a drummer” is 100% tied to the point in my life when I was able to accumulate enough equipment to be one! And then once I had enough, upgrades and additions were very few and far between for many years.

“Why doesn’t he just use a different drum set?” Out of the mouths of babes, indeed.