Top 120 Drummers Quotes & Sayings - Page 2

Almost everything I've done, I've done through my own creativity. I don't think I ever had to listen to anyone else to learn how to play drums. I wish I could say that for about ten thousand other drummers.

People who come up to me are drummers or fans of the band. I don't get it too much, but I'll be somewhere and someone will have me take a picture or something.

Madman drummers, bummers, Indians in the summer with a teenage diplomat. In the dumps with the mumps as the adolescent pumps his way into his hat.

Historically, musicians know what it is like to be outside the norm - walking the high wire without a safety net. Our experience is not so different from those who march to the beat of different drummers.

Radical feminism, male lesbians, transsexuals, musical condoms with suspenders, and lotsa drummers drumming are all manifestations of a political agenda with roots in the 1960s. This is all fruit we are reaping from the sexual revolution.

In New York, the drummers rush for a reason - because there's so much energy crackling through everything in that city and so many collisions at a highly accelerated rate.

The records that I grew up listening to had feel, and the drummers that inspired me - like Stewart Copeland, Neil Peart, Phil Collins and Roger Taylor - all had their own voice and individual style.

Art was carrying me a lot of the time. When you're accustomed to playing with Art, and you play with other drummers, it's as if the bottom dropped out.

Michael Sunday and I are the original members of the band. We first did it just for charities and benefit concerts. It was very ad-hoc, and before we knew it, we were really a band. We went through several drummers and guitarists before we were happy with the line up.

The reason [drummers] call things "unison", and they sound unison, is because you actually play two different tempos . . . like you're a little sharp, or a little flat; it's so slight that they call it "unison", but it's not unison.

Puffy's the only guy who's jealous. All drummers want to be singers. I think it's a myth that the singer needs to be the focus. Bands perpetuate that myth. With somebody like Sebastian Bach it makes sense. Look at him. He could be in an Avon ad.

I think that the rhythm sections, drummers in particular, are the unsuing heroes of the music. It's the rhythm section that has changed the styles from one period to the other.

I usually speak with all my drummers so that I write my songs with them in mind, and we'll have bass sounds, choir sounds, and then you can multi-task with all these orchestral sounds. Through the magic medium of technology, I can play all kinds of sounds - double bass and stuff.

With every record, with each band, I just try to make a song good. I'm not so much focusing on my technique. There are a million better drummers than me. I try to adapt to the songwriter; I try to adapt to the situation and retain my sort of melodic power. My goal is for the band to be good.

I wanted to find raw talent and help build it from scratch. I wanted to build from rags to riches. That's the way Ear Drummers did it. We took over the music industry from my mom's basement. That's why my first album is going to be called 'Made It Out the Basement.'

I was one of the original drummers. What everyone likes to do is think of Lynyrd Skynyrd as the band that picked up again in '73. But I was one of the original members, and I was a big part of that.

Like my best friend, I asked for drums for Christmas, and got them. But when he moved on to guitar, I realized two things: (1) guitar is a much more expressive instrument, (2) way more girls pay attention to guitar players than to drummers.

I got an amazing 10-CD set, it's the music that Alan Lomax recorded in Haiti in 1936. And what's incredible is how fantastic the drummers are and how off-the-grid they are. The liveliness is astonishing; they're just totally alive, these recordings. It's very interesting, to me, to be reminded of that, that there was a time when things were not that tight.

When I'm on stage, I turn into this rock person. I give everything I have. I sing with emotion, I'm loving it up there, and I think there's a lot of energy. In the same way that I'm open when I speak, I'm that open on stage. I feed off the energy of the audience too, so they're feeling what I'm feeling. And the set up is great - I have two drummers and a bass guy so it's just us four.

I've never thought too much of 'Rolling Stone.' The first thing I'd do is look at about 50 or 60 of the drummers they have ahead of me and go, 'Oh yeah, right!'

I was always very aware of drummers. My oldest brother Henry was a drummer, and he drummed on everything in the house from the kitchen sink to stovepipes. He was the first drummer in the Gil Evans Orchestra, so you've got to know how great he was.

When I was a kid, I felt like I could do anything and play anything. I just felt super-confident. And then, once I started to play music professionally, maybe it's from being from a small town, but you grow up and then you're suddenly a big fish in a small pond, and I realized that there were a billion other drummers out there that could play as good as you or better, and everybody wants that job.

I read somewhere that drummers are practically Olympic athletes. I feel pretty good, most of the time. After 38 years, I can't expect much better than that!

With 'Iowa,' if you ask me, we really passed up a lot of things that we could have done with the two auxiliary drummers. I mean they hardly touched their drums on that album.

The closest things to an influence would be people like Charlie Watts or Al Jackson. But I didn't really listen to drummers; I basically played what I thought was needed for the Ramones.

If you call someone up on a mistake - if the drummers put an extra beat in a bar or something - you have a lot more authority if you can show them how to do it right.

I think at one time every drummer wanted to play like Krupa or wanted to win a Gene Krupa drum contest. This is the big inspiration for drummers and naturally it has to be the same way for me.

Drummers haven't managed to develop their individuality quite as well as guitarists have. We can be so focused on the nuts and bolts that we overlook the importance of individuality - the broader picture, if you will.

I like to be one of those drummers who actually add to the music, not one of those guys who sit in a room 24/7 trying to outwit or outplay another drummer.

When the album 'Duke' came out, by Genesis, Phil Collins beat Dad in a drummers poll. My dad got me to learn 'Turn It On Again' by Genesis. I'd play it, and he'd go, 'Do it again,' until I got it right. I'd play it until I nailed it, and then he went, 'I don't see what the big deal is. My 12-year-old son could play that song.'

We drummers all know that our mother's heartbeat was the first instrument we heard. As a race, we've all been trying to get back to that womb. That's why rhythm makes us move... dance.

Ringo is incredible. He's the greatest. Simon Kirke is great as well, so is Ian Paice. All of these British drummers from the '60s are great. They were big influences on me.

It's much easier to have a diversified career as an electronic musician than it is as a drummer. Nothing against drummers. If you're a drummer, you just wait around for people to ask you to play drums. But if you have your own studio and can make music, you have the ability to approach music a lot differently.

If drummers are 'anti-solo,' that's up to them. They're musicians, and they can play whatever they want. But my inspirations early on were people like Buddy Rich, seeing him on 'The Tonight Show', or Gene Krupa.

In my last band, Soundgarden, I had a couple of different drummers sit in on some stuff and it was fun for me to kind of take a break and watch the band.

PimpCo is a little business I've got, which basically offers drummers the affordable opportunity to make their drums that little bit more bespoke. I love drums and love how they look, so we offer re-wrapping to reboot your old kit, a hardware lacquering service - the black looks amazing, and bespoke snare drums.

Just to be around that, to feel a part of it and be able to integrate the experience while I was with the Messengers, of going and playing gigs with other drummers, gave me the chance to realize that it was not just me that was making it happen.

I'd rather be entertained and go to a show and watch a drummer and have somebody that makes me actually smile. So I don't judge drummers based on their technical ability; I judge them based on the overall package and what they bring to the music they're part of.

Being a female guitar player back in school wasn't great, and I had to change schools so many times. The male drummers and bass players thought it was cool, but male guitar players said, 'It's a guy's thing. You should be doing something else, like playing the harp.'

Drummers get bored. You tell them to play something simple, and it gets more complicated as they do it. If they're not a composer, if they don't have any kind of investment in the music, they'll just add a bit there and another bit there, and you think no! Don't do that. So you end up using a drum machine.

I based my tuning on Gene Krupa, Buddy and Joe Morello. I knew how I wanted the drums to sound and we did the best we could with a beat up Ludwig kit. I spent a lot of time around drummers learning how to get sound. I knew the sound I was after and what would work for what we were playing.

All do not develop in the same manner, or at the same pace. Nations, like men, often march to the beat of different drummers, and the precise solutions of the United States can neither be dictated nor transplanted to others. What is important is that all nations must march toward increasing freedom; toward justice for all; toward a society strong and flexible enough to meet the demands of all its own people, and a world of immense and dizzying change.

My drummer right now, who was also the first drummer in Weeping Tile, Jon McCann, told me that [Hip drummer] Johnny Fay took drum lessons from [McCann's] dad, who taught a lot of the drummers in Kingston. He said that when he was in Grade 9, the Hip were the model; the goal was to get an agent and gig as much as possible.

It's not so surprising that there are more women in metal bands. And they're not just fronting them. There are drummers and guitar players, bass players.

I think that drummers have come a long way, but they haven't forgotten players like Gene Krupa, or the other jazz players.

There's quite an overlap between musicians - especially drummers - who have an affection and a proclivity towards comedy and comedians who fantasize about being in a band. And a lot of comics play instruments.

And, well of course, Count Basie, and I think all of the black bands of the late thirties and early forties, bands with real players. They had an influence on everybody, not just drummers.

One day I decided to go to a hardware store - I picked up six pieces of wood, a hammer and nails, and built a box. It probably sounded useless at the time but its taken me to where I am today, and its been well received from drummers and percussionists like Josh Devine from One Direction and Robbie Williams drummer.

I would like, with the sun shining through the window on a crisp early-autumnal mid-morning, with a sufficiency of Monster Cappucino flowing in my veins to prompt minimal sentience, to declare my view for the record that Drummer Jokes are a cruel and pernicious form of humour introduced to the world by under-humoured persons lacking in sensitivity and concern for other drummers.

A lot of young drummers have a tendency to really overplay. Sometimes simple is better, and the notes that aren't played between the spaces are bigger than the notes that are.

I'm a street player, and all of my influences come from bands that I was listening to at the time when I was growing up. I was very impressed with guys like Mitch Mitchell. I liked rock and roll drummers, and I loved rhythm and blues guys like Clyde Stubblefield with James Brown. Man, that band blew me away all of the time.

I've always noticed that Old Families, like plumbers and barbers and possibly drummers and detectives, seem to have some kind of reciprocity arrangement in the South. Members of the freemasonry could move anywhere ... and still operate cozily in the local Old Family top drawer.

There's quite a few people who said they couldn't play with two drummers, and I don't understand it. It's no different than playing with two guitar players, two trumpets, or two anythings.

As a drummer, I always approach things as, 'I want to play just enough to keep other drummers interested, but not enough to go over the average listener's head.'

The advice I like to give to drummers is that there's no right or wrong way of playing the drums. I think the drumming community can be very antiquated and very stuck in the past of, like, this Neil Peart style, technical Guitar Center drum video kind of approach. That you need to have played for 15 years before you ever do anything worthwhile.

Drummers - sometimes they play and they listen. And that little listen takes a speck away from the right tempo.

I can understand why some of these drummers and bass players become cult figures with all of their equipment and the incredible amount of technique they have. But there's very little that I think satisfies you intellectually or emotionally.

Reading is performance. The reader--the child under the blanket with a flashlight, the woman at the kitchen table, the man at the library desk--performs the work. The performance is silent. The readers hear the sounds of the words and the beat of the sentences only in their inner ear. Silent drummers on noiseless drums. An amazing performance in an amazing theater.

Stick choice should be every drummers first decision. Sticks are the liaison between you and your creative expression on the drums. Getting there the smoothest way is the reason I'm using Vater.

We auditioned a lot of great drummers; every one of them was world class. We had a lot of fun playing with each of them and had some great jams. With Mike [Mangini] it was just something really special about what was going on.