Gear Reviews
Detailed assessments of the latest drum kits and accessories
Cool Percussion Goodies
Just as guitar players always seem to be on the lookout for new pedals, percussionists appear to be forever seeking unique things they can add to their armory of stuff to shake, hit, and slap. Many of the products profiled…
Donn Bennett’s Drum Vault
Logo Heads Several years ago, I made the decision to begin selling off my drum collection. I’d spent decades amassing one of the most extensive collections of rare and vintage drums in the world. One of the biggest factors leading…
Drum Show Roundup
Modern Drummer Revisits Two Pandemic-Era Drum Extravaganzas The past 20 or so months have devastated music tours, trade shows, club gigs, and just about any large gathering of humanity. The number of events cancelled or postponed during the global pandemic…
ROC Drums May 1986
Many years ago, a friend of mine told me these crazy awesome Stratocaster clones were being sold out of a storefront on Dorman Avenue in San Francisco. We decided to investigate, and a man who looked more like a teenager…
NEW GEAR - August 2021
Status Audio Between Pro Wireless Earbuds I have to dig that Status Audio was founded by a drummer, New York’s James Bertuzzi. Bertuzzi’s company was recently crowdfunded to the tune of $1 million (a very good sign, indeed), and he…
Gretsch
Classic Renown 57 I was immediately aware I was in two kinds of big trouble when I opened the initial press-release announcement for the Limited Edition Gretsch Classic Renown 57. Big Trouble Number One: The photos of the kit in…
Audix
DP7 Drum Mic Pack For any pro- or home-studio engineer, live-sound mixer, or weekend tone miner, the goal is to get the sound crisp, clean, and just right. A lot of the gig is having ears, knowing the ins and…
EAROS
EAROS ONE Decades of standing in front of guitar amps, drums, and mixing consoles has “rewarded” me with tinnitus, difficulty hearing some frequencies clearly, and if you’re sitting a few chairs away from me in a loud, ambient restaurant, you’ll…
Low Boy
Custom Lightweight Bass Drum Beater Customizing stuff is one of my guilty pleasures—I’m always “building” cars on manufacturer websites that I have no intention of actually buying—so the opportunity to design my own beater was what initially attracted me to…
Donn Bennett’s Drum Vault
Glen Sobel’s 2015 Green Snakeskin Mapex Kit Virtually any musician can tell you about the early influences they idolized, imitated, and obsessed about. The names change, but the story is usually pretty much the same: You listened to their recordings…
Yamaha Super Rack System, April 1990
When SimCity—a video game that allowed players to conceptualize and build simulated metropolises—debuted to the public in 1989, it became a phenomenon. Given the massive architecture of the 1990 Super Rack System, it appears a few folks in the Yamaha…
8 Affordable Home Recording Tools
There certainly hasn’t been a bucketload of good about pandemic lockdowns, but when you have ambitious and creative musicians stuck at home, they tend to figure out ways to get their music out there. Many creators upgraded their home studios,…
NEW GEAR - July 2021
ddrum Studio Class Isolation Headphones Conventional studio headphones aren’t specifically designed to save a drummer’s ears from furious cymbal crashes and hours of snare pounding. While many closed-earcup headphones provide some ear protection, it typically isn’t enough to combat fatigue…
7 Cymbals for Ringing In the Sounds of the Summer
Many years ago, the jazz-guitar teacher who had the misfortune of trying to teach me there was more to the art of guitar than Marc Bolan and Mick Ronson dragged me to a local drum shop to hear his drummer…
