Suitcase drums

I've spend quite a lot of time looking for portable drum set. I guess it's logical for drummers to do so. If you are a very active drummer and need to move around a lot from rehearsal to rehearsal or gig to gig, you can develop a serious hernia carrying around those double bass drums (if that's your style).

Over the years I found a lot of great ideas (both commercial and do-it-yourself) on the subject of portable drums, including the Yamaha hipgig sets, jungle drums, cocktail drums, the Pearl rhythm traveler, and of course the great and friendly advice of many to just go electronic or plainly use a drum computer.

While looking around on the topic of extremely portable drum sets, I ran into the suitcase drum, a drum set that fits into a suitcase and where the suitcase functions as the bass drum. I believe so far this is the most original and most inexpensive idea I have ran into, so I've added some details here.

 

Mike Reetz, who seems to be the guy who came up with this, has written an extensive tutorial on the topic and has posted this YouTube video explaining where his idea came from.

 

It seems a whole list of people have actually made their own, including:

• David W Robinson
• Danny Hollis
• thebald13579

So, yet another topic on my "do it yourself drum" list.

My portable and compact practice and travel kit

This is my portable and compact travel kit.

Composed of:

• 14" tenor drum (marching band left-overs) on which I mounted two legs
• 10" snare attached to the hi-hat stand
• Tama Iron Cobra hi-hat stand
• Tama Iron Cobra bass drum pedal

    

All the junk in the world

The fact is that over the years I've "collected" (read: picked up) a lot of second hand drum and percussion materials. The objective has always been to "make something out of nothing".

I've added some pictures to illustrate what types of junk I'm talking about.

Children's drum set. Picked it up for 25€(?) of so about 4-5 years back. It's a 20" BD with a single 12" tom and a 13" snare. BD and tom sound pretty good. The snare is utter crap. There's no single sign of what brand this is. Any one who's every seen something like this and can shed some light on the origins of this thing, please add a comment to this page or contact me.

Some left-overs from the marching band in my home town. A huge 2?" "bass-drum", a 14" deep tenor and a 13,5" used-to be snare.  (You cannot see the original shape of tenor and snare any more as transformed the 14" tenor into a mini bass-drum that I use together with a 10" snare as compact practice and travel kit.) This pile of drums also came with a 20" Zildjian Cymbal.

So I hope to show in my next posts, what I'm able to make out of this junk.

Protect us from all rhythmic deviations ...

Boinktaboomski, patron saint of poly-rhythmics, protector of rare percussion instruments, founder of the church of rhythmology, heavenly off-beat advocate, guardian angel of the ghost-note and sanctified icon of the flam, I call upon you to watch over this blog. May it grow out to be the testimony of all rhythmic escapades I undertake with your divine blessings. For years I have dwelled in the realms of drummers and percussionist, without spreading thy message. Gone gone gone those times of ignorance. Every step I take on the path to rhythmic salvation, from now on will be posted here, as a guidance for he generations to come.