15 Drum Gear Hacks

Here are some hacks to keep your drum gear in line.

1. Put a little drop of glue inside of the rubber feet on your cymbal stands. Any kind of glue is fine, but probably rubber cement is best. That will keep them from falling off and getting lost, as is their wont.

2. A great place to store your drum key while you’re playing is in the air vent hole on your bass drum. For softer gigs, it may rattle a bit and won’t work, but otherwise, that’s a great place for it. (See image.)

3. Make a soft mallet by using the butt end of a drumstick. Wrap the furry side of adhesive backed Velcro strips around the stick. It works great, very much like a Swizzle stick but at a fraction of the cost. (See image.)

4. Wrap a little bit of duct tape around the middle of Blastix (kind of a cross between a brush and a stick, nylon strands). The duct tape holds them together and fattens the sound. (See image.)



5. Buy a good collapsible hand truck for moving your drums around. This makes wheeling your gear around way easier. Inflatable tires make it easier to roll it over gravel or grass. Glue a couple of 2-inch pieces of plastic onto its rails in order to extend its width. Also, non-skid tape on the hand truck bed helps keep your cases from sliding off.

6. Store your cymbals in an old bass drum case. If you’ve got a million cymbals, you can stack them on their end in the case. It keeps them upright and protects them from dust and moisture.

7. If you have multiple drum sets, color code the cases so that you can easily see which ones go together. Use a strip of different colored tape on each handle.

8. Keep an adjustable wrench in your stick bag. Pliers will chew up your hardware, but an adjustable wrench won’t.

9. Try to use only collapsible stands that you can tighten with your fingers, rather than a tool, memory lock, or any other annoying special locking mechanism.

10. Use car wax on your drum shells. It will protect the hardware from pitting, deepen the varnish/finish, and keep them looking new—or even better.

11. Wear gloves when you move your drums. Especially after the gig, at 3:00 a.m. coming off a four-hour long set is when injuries happen. Gloves will help your hands from getting beat up.

12. For a drum rug, you can get really cheap carpeting by the foot at a big box store, such as Lowes or Home Depot. They sell it by the yard, really cheap. A 4x6 foot remnant will be fine for most kits. Buy only the cheapest rug, and leave it in your car. Stuff will get spilled on it, you’ll forget it, it will get trashed. You want rubber-backed carpet, as thin and as light as you can find, to make it easy to carry around.

13. Earplugs are important! Vater makes good plugs. Use them for anything other than quiet acoustic music. You may actually hear better with them, especially when the volume picks up. Ear plugs make everything dryer, letting you hear the attacks of your drums more clearly.

14. Buy the best cases you can afford. Cheap cases are a waste of money; they disintegrate alarmingly fast.

15. Always keep extra sticks and earplugs in your car. You will forget your stick bag, or you will run into a jam session where you wish you had them.

This article was in collaboration with drummer Russ Gold, author of Phrasing: Advanced Rudiments for Creative Drumming (Berklee Press, 2014).

By Jonathan Feist, source