From Frame Drums to the Drum Kit: The Story of the Drums
New Orleans, around the turn of the twentieth century. A brass band plays for a parade, and two drummers march in the ranks: one carries a snare drum slung at his side, the other a big bass drum with a cymbal fixed on top. When the same musicians move indoors to play for dancers in a crowded hall, there is not always room, or money, for two drummers. So one player sits down behind both drums and tries to play them at once.
Out of that practical problem came one of the most influential inventions in modern music: the drum kit, a whole percussion section arranged so that a single person can play it with two hands and two feet. But the instruments gathered into that kit had already travelled a very long road, through temples, royal courts and battlefields, across thousands of years and several continents.
Drums of the ancient world
Drums are among the oldest musical instruments, although their exact origins are lost, because wood and animal skin rarely survive in the ground. What does survive is art and the occasional remarkable find. Ancient Mesopotamian carvings show large frame drums being played in ceremonies, and paintings from ancient Egypt show women playing round and rectangular frame drums at festivals and religious rites. Archaeologists in China have found drums made with alligator skin that date back several thousand years.
The frame drum, a skin stretched over a shallow wooden hoop, was one of the most widespread designs. It appears across the ancient Middle East and Mediterranean, and its descendants, from the tambourine to the Irish bodhrán and the North African bendir, are still played today. Elsewhere, people developed hand drums of every shape, from the talking drums of West Africa to the paired drums of Indian classical music. Long before anyone thought of a drum kit, drums were used to accompany dance, mark religious ceremonies and carry signals over distance.
Drums go to war
Drums are loud, portable and impossible to ignore, which made them ideal for armies. Kettledrums mounted on horseback, known in Arabic as naqqara, were used by armies in the Middle East and became known to Europeans in the Middle Ages, eventually developing into the timpani of the orchestra. In medieval Europe a small drum called the tabor was often played by one musician together with a pipe, and from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Swiss and German infantry marched to the sound of fifes and larger side drums, the ancestors of the modern snare drum.
Military drumming became an exacting craft. Drummers beat out signals for marching, gathering and retreating, and the rudiments they practised, rolls, flams and paradiddles, are still the foundation of drum technique today. In the eighteenth century, Europeans were fascinated by the music of the Ottoman Janissary bands, with their booming bass drums, cymbals and triangles. European military bands adopted these instruments, and composers including Mozart borrowed their sound for music in the so-called Turkish style. In this way the bass drum and cymbals joined the snare drum in Western bands.
One drummer, many drums: the trap kit
By the late nineteenth century, marching bands, theatre orchestras and dance bands in the United States all used snare drum, bass drum and cymbals. Drummers in New Orleans and elsewhere began practising what was sometimes called double drumming: one player striking the bass drum and snare with sticks, often while dampening a cymbal by hand. It worked, but it tied up the hands.
Inventors patented various bass drum pedals in the late nineteenth century, and in 1909 William F. Ludwig, a Chicago drummer, began manufacturing a practical, durable bass drum pedal with his brother Theobald. With the bass drum now played by the foot, the hands were free for the snare and an ever-growing collection of woodblocks, cowbells, Chinese tom-toms and cymbals. This arrangement became known as the trap kit, the word trap being widely explained as a shortening of contraption.
In the 1920s came another crucial piece: a pedal-operated pair of cymbals, first mounted low to the floor and later raised on a taller stand so the player could also strike them with sticks. This was the hi-hat. Early jazz drummers such as Warren Baby Dodds, who played with King Oliver and Louis Armstrong, showed how inventive one drummer could be, and in the swing era Gene Krupa, with the Benny Goodman orchestra, turned the drummer into a star soloist and helped popularise tom-toms tuned to different pitches.
From bebop to the backbeat
In the 1940s, bebop drummers such as Kenny Clarke and Max Roach moved the steady timekeeping pulse from the bass drum to the ride cymbal, using the bass and snare for sharp accents. This lighter, more conversational style shaped modern jazz drumming.
Rock and roll in the 1950s brought a different emphasis: a strong, heavy backbeat on beats two and four, driven by the snare. As rock grew louder in the 1960s, kits grew bigger, with more toms, larger cymbals and eventually a second bass drum for some players. When Ringo Starr appeared with the Beatles on American television in 1964, playing a Ludwig kit, the moment is widely credited with inspiring a wave of young people to take up the drums.
Electronic beats and the modern kit
From the late 1970s and 1980s, electronic drums and drum machines added new sounds. Pads triggered synthesised or sampled drum tones, and programmable machines such as the Roland TR-808, introduced in 1980, shaped the sound of hip-hop, electronic and pop music for decades. Many drummers today combine acoustic drums with electronic pads, and electronic kits with mesh heads allow quiet practice at home.
Yet the basic layout that settled in the jazz age remains remarkably stable: bass drum under the right foot, hi-hat under the left, snare between the knees, toms and cymbals arranged around the player. It is a design that can play swing, rock, funk, Latin, reggae and metal, which helps explain why the drum kit sits at the back of almost every band.
The beat goes on
The journey from ancient frame drums to the modern kit is a story of people finding ways to make rhythm bigger, louder and more personal. If you want to feel how the pieces fit together, you can play a virtual drum kit free in your browser on HarmonyHub, choosing from standard, rock, jazz and Indian kits, and keep yourself steady with the online metronome. One player, many drums: the idea those New Orleans musicians stumbled on still keeps the world dancing.