That said, I had to make a new post because of some new gear that I got into that I said in my last post that I would never get into!
I had always been a fan of large drumsets, and I'm totally impressed when I see folks play their huge drumkits and make great music with 'em, like Billy Cobham, Simon Phillips, or Thomas Lang. But I had never gotten into it myself because for me the groove is king, and I always thought I sounded silly if I had anything more than five drums and a couple of cymbals. Kinda' like a kid a candy store, I'd ultimately be hitting as much of it as I could and being very distracted from the music being made. So, out of pure professionalism, I avoided large drumsets for myself just for that reason.
But eBay entered the equation and I found this insanely great deal on a Drum Workshop lefty-double pedal set-up. The seller bought it from a friend, not knowing it was a left-footed model, and couldn't really use it once he had it. I bought it for a mere $150 off of him. I get it, and find I was kinda' liking having something else for my hi-hat foot to do, and since it was just an addition to my five-piece set, no one knew I really had it, and I could ignore the pedal's usage if I wanted to.
And then I got to thinking how much sheer fun it would be to have a whole mess of drums, not with the intention of ever doing a gig with them, but just to have. I recall before Tony Williams passed away, he actually had a big double bass kit to play on in his house. I tell myself that I'm old enough now to not sound like a kid and I will still be professional in my application of the huge drumset.
Lo and behold, I now have a huge, nine-piece double bass kit! It's a Pearl EXR Export kit in their very retro black strata wrap, and for an intermediate set of drums, they don't sound half-bad. Not as good as my bubinga drums, but drums, nonetheless. At first I had six-pieces of the kit to be a gigging kit with a single bass drum, but when Pearl discontinued the line, all these stores had new old stock to get rid of and I managed to snag another bass drum, an 8" tom, and another 14" floor tom to go with that kit. It looks like this now:
It is amazingly fun to play, and it fills up half of my practice space. It will take me some time to sound like any of my favorite big-kit drumming heroes, but at least the ball is rolling. I'm experimenting with rack tom placement, and like Cobham, they might not end up in an order because I'm trying to keep them as low as possible for comfortable playing. Being vertically challenged, I don't want to have to stretch to reach anything to play!
So I guess this means if you want the look of double bass drums, I can give you that too (nevermind the actual playing of two bass drums, that comes later ;)
