Building the Perfect Drummer

I am bored. I also just remembered seeing some stupid thing that Chris Berman did on SportsCenter about six years ago, where he took a different body part from a bunch of NFL players and built a new one- it was honestly pretty awful (on giving the player Ricky Williams's hair, he said "How's that for tough football follicles?"), but it gave me the idea to do the same sort of thing with my favorite drummers. I'm going to take bass drum, snare drum, toms, hi-hats, and cymbals from five different people, based on technical skill with that particular piece of the kit as well as creativity/style.

Bass Drum: John Bonham

Bonzo was also awesome on the snare and toms- and, well, pretty much everything- but his right foot was legendary. He briefly experimented with a double-bass set up but he was so fast with one it didn't really change anything. He played so many hand-hand-foot high speed triplets that I would guess he probably wore through at least a few hundred bass heads in his decade or so with Zeppelin. He also had an incredible little throbbing bass-only triplet (most notable on "Good Times, Bad Times") that sounded like the heartbeat of a coke addict. He was loud but musical with the thing, keeping time and also building on it for truly amazing fills. Unfortunately, due to the fact that heavy metal (and worse kinds of metal) bands extrapolated on many of the worst elements of Led Zeppelin, he also inadvertantly inspired a bunch of drummers to use a double-bass kit as a metronome, something I can't stand. Still, I can't deduct for an accidental legacy.

Snare Drum: Patrick Carney

Pat Carney is the drummer for the Black Keys and probably the most creative drummer (in a fairly-mainstream band) I have ever heard. He is completely self-taught, tends to play a maximum of one fill per song, and has a three-piece kit that almost looks childish. But he really rocks it, and he definitely makes the most of what he has. His snare drum is always doing something interesting- generally syncopated, always powerful, and sometimes spectacular- for instance, the second recurring measure of the beat to "10 A.M. Automatic." It's strange, because he also manages to give it a more musical quality than I thought a snare could ever have: until I saw the "10 A.M." music video, I could have sworn that some of what he was doing involved toms. Nope. Just snare.

Toms: Mitch Mitchell

With a great jazz background, Mitchell really knew how to use the whole kit to great effect. Playing from under the shadows of Jimi Hendrix's sprawling riffs, he filled what would have been radio-silence with these little six-second fills, musical, technical, and exciting. He had a particularly vital sound with the toms. It's a bit difficult to describe, but it probably goes back to tuning- like many drummers of the '60s and '70s (Bonham, John Densmore, and Ginger Baker come to mind) he used high jazz tuning on the toms along with pretty big, open drums- but he also played really cool rudiment-based fills on the snare and toms that enhanced each other. He was also a pioneer of lead-style drumming in rock music, something that had previously been restricted to jazz. He provided a guide for a lot of later rock musicians to break free from the backing-band types who had come before.

Hi-hats: Stewart Copeland

While with The Police, Copeland really changed the way the hi-hat was used, at least for a lot of new groups. His use of sixteenth notes on the hats, along with his strange, gliding, stuttering eastern-inspired rhythms, changed the concept of the hi-hat for the post-punk and new wave crew. It's more or less due to his influence that songs like "Everlong" exist- use of the hi-hat as a racing, fast-paced pulse rather than a stately, 1-2-3-4 metronomic place holder largely comes from him. His style is not my favorite, but he was very impressive and very technically gifted, especially with the hats.

Cymbals: Keith Moon

I am not the biggest Keith Moon fan- I like his playing, but I don't love it the way so many people seem to. However, I always find his use of cymbals sort of enigmatic. In stark contrast to his wild, whirlwind style on the drums themselves, he played the cymbals with a certain stateliness, almost restraint. He often used slight crashes to hold his place during the middle of epic, stretched-out fills and he almost always used the cymbals as the pulse instead of the hi-hats. It's interesting and it lends timbre and nuance to an otherwise wholly bombastic attack. His toms, despite his heavy reliance on them, often seem only haphazardly tuned (especially on the non-remastered albums, there is an audible double-sound to his drums, suggesting unequal tuning on the top and bottom heads), but the cymbals are oddly melodic and almost dulcet.