Words matter. These are the best Drum Quotes from famous people such as Neil Peart, The-Dream, Bonobo, Joey Santiago, Evelyn Glennie, and they’re great for sharing with your friends.
If you’ve got a problem, take it out on a drum.
Every time you hear an 808 drum machine beat on one of my songs, it comes from Freaknik.
If something is done really well then the question of live vs. DJ vs. instruments vs. drum machines doesn’t matter – it’s all just about taste, really.
The saddest thing is that when I sat down to rehearse for the Pixies, I couldn’t believe that I had given up something that I loved. Now I hold the drum at night and I want to go to bed with it.
My first real foreign holiday was my honeymoon 20 years ago, and we went to Bali. It was particularly special for that reason, I enjoyed it very much – I had packed music scores and a practice drum pad, suspecting that I would be completely bored, but actually they remained in my case.
There is no dogma that the organ or harmonium can be used in church, but not the drum.
On the first album, it was me and a producer in a basement going though hundreds of snare drum sounds to find the right one.
I tour a lot and interview a lot. I’m on the Internet and doing stuff. I go out and promote. I’ve got a bass drum and a sandwich sign and a washboard. You just have to shout louder and louder that you’re still alive.
I felt like I plateaued at playing drums, like I wasn’t getting any better. I bought an electric pair of drums, sold my drum set, and got introduced to making beats.
I love the way Pharell is laying down great drum tracks. He is a great drummer.
I’ve always been good about interfacing with machines. But that never seemed like a gateway to being able to make music. I never made the connection that music could be made with machines – that was what drum and bass was for me.
DeNiro did a good job playing a catcher in ‘Bang the Drum Slowly,’ but he’s great in everything he does.
The heart jungle drum beat finds its voice in love and matchsticks.
I try to keep my ear to the streets without sacrificing who I am as an artist. If a song needs a drum machine I’ll use a drum machine. If it needs a drummer, I’ll use a real drummer.
Just because you can leap off a drum kit doing a scissors kick while hitting a chord, people expect you to be an extrovert socially. But I’m not always comfortable with the idea of small talk at a party.
When someone is playing drums, they aren’t actually moving around a space; they’re just moving their arms and limbs. They’re stuck behind the drum set. So to film someone playing the drums and make it feel as kinetic as a car chase or a shootout or a battle scene was the challenge.
When I was three years old, my dad bought me my first drum set.
In rap music, even though the element of poetry is very strong, so is the element of the drum, the implication of the dance. Without the beat, its commercial value would certainly be more tenuous.
I’ve always been into computers. When I was getting out of high school and forming my identity musically, all of it was really coming into the fold, computers and drum machines. It felt like, you know, I’m in the right place at the right time. I liked the collision.
Without Metallica, I wouldn’t be doing what I am doing. I have every Metallica record, of course, and I would spend hours on drums in my parents’ basement with the stereo behind me, cranking those records and learning Lars’ drum beats, beat by beat.
I’m not capable of wielding the guitar like Jimmy Page, one of my all-time favorite guitarists. My skill set is more based on the grinding, sort of human heartbeat – almost playing the guitar more like a drum.
As a musician, I don’t think I’m the greatest guitar player. I’m a bigger fan of the drums than I am the guitar; I just happen to play guitar. I play drums almost every day at my house. I wrote a lot of songs behind the drum kit, just having the music and vocals in my head and playing the rhythm.
I go out of my way to help people, but I don’t tell people. Goodness is not about beating your own drum.
Jeff and Mike had taken drum lessons at a young age. When the Beatles came out in ’64, we all wanted to play guitar.
Even on the drum level, it’s all about stating your theme, going back to certain things that need to be emphasized, not doing fills for the sake of doing fills.
The quad toms are a completely different animal than the standard drum set/trap kit. Playing wise and stylistically, they are two different beasts.
A lot of the time, I will write a guitar riff first. I don’t write drum riffs first.
A lot of artists are scared when they see trumpet players show up – they like, ‘Nah, that ain’t what I want.’ I try to tell them, ‘Dude, I’ll give you trademark Mannie Fresh, but it’s not about keyboards and a drum machine.’
When I was a kid, of course I wanted to be the fastest, the loudest and the one with the biggest drum set, but obviously my aspirations have changed a bit since then.
It’s interesting. I’ve known quite a few good athletes that can’t begin to play a beat on the drum set. Most team sport is about the smooth fluidity of hand-eye coordination and physical grace, where drumming is much more about splitting all those things up.
How did it happen that an enlightened country like Germany was pulled into Nazism? That question has occupied me since ‘The Tin Drum,’ my first book. The story also shows that we can never know how a person’s life will unfold; there is no guarantee that a person will do what is right and avoid what is not right.
I write almost every single part of my songs, even the actual drum parts sometimes, whether they be simple or layered with many different instruments.
When I did my solo album, I put on a song that I’d planned for Toto that never made an album constructed from a great drum track with Jeff and a bass track with Mike and the guys loved it.
When I lost the use of my hi-hat and bass drum legs, I became basically a singer. I was a drummer who did a bit of singing, and then I became a singer who did a bit of percussion.
‘The Tin Drum’ is one of my favourite books of all time – I’ve probably got 12 or 15 copies with different covers, different translations – but it’s also just about my favourite film.
I grew up on Dilla, Timbaland, Pharrell, all these drums that are super pocketed, so all those influences come out on a song like ‘Ungrateful Eyes,’ with all the crazy drum swing.
For the second album, ‘Discovery,’ when we had to think about doing a live show I think we were not happy with the way it would look like and sound like. We were not happy coming onstage with just two or three samplers and a few drum machines, you know?
I love the percussion. It’s a right brain, left brain thing. There are different beats, but cooperating together. It’s your whole body doing it, you’re doing the snare drum and the high top with your hands and the bass drum with your foot. You’re this whole motion machine.
Alber Elbaz is just a genius. He’ll be in a dinner jacket and he doesn’t care what time of day it is: I love that about him. He just marches to the beat of his own drum.
I write on the acoustic guitar, I write some on the piano, but I’ve been messing around with these guitar pedals and drum machines, educating myself in that world.
I’m so proud to be on a Kate Bush record; she’s always marched to the beat of her own drum.
I had no idea ‘The Dream Weaver’ would be so successful. Everything just fell into place with that album. I pioneered a number of ideas with that album and subsequent tour. The all-keyboard approach with no guitars was a new one, and I was one of the first to use a drum machine in concert. It was an amazing time.
My drum parts are a song within the song; that’s the way I look at writing my drum parts. They follow patterns, and they’re written to interact with the rest of the band. There’s quite a bit of thought that goes into it.
That’s the thing that we said about the horn before: it’s a focus issue. It’s like a singer versus a drummer. If a drummer’s playing a drum beat, and a singer starts singing, what do you think the audience is going to do?
I have a method of working on music: I’ll get up in the morning and throw down some drums on my drum machine, and then I’ll come back later and try to pop off rhythms to it.
It’s the things that you notice when you’re not actually with your instrument that, in fact, become so interesting, and that you – you want to explore, through this tiny tiny surface of a drum.
We all have those friends that tick to their drum, and you don’t want them to tick to anybody else’s drum.
You can only really hear the beat of your own drum if you give yourself the space to sit in it.
Led Zeppelin was pretty much what made me pick up drum sticks.
When I was a kid, we went to St. Augustine, Fla., and I was lying on the couch one night with a Q-tip, cleaning my ear out after I’d taken a shower. I hit my arm on something, jabbed the Q-tip through my ear drum, busted my ear drum and couldn’t get back in the water the rest of the time we were there.
Movies don’t sit in the theaters for an entire summer like they did in 1982. Now you’ve got a two- or three-week shelf life so you need to have that awareness right off the bat. And in order to make a lot of people know about your movie, you need to be out there banging the drum and showing your stuff.