Top 10 Best Drummers Of All Time

Top 10 Best Drummers Of All Time

5. Neil Peart


Band: Rush

Style: Rush wouldn’t have been the most successful Canadian band to date for nothing. All of their members are great musicians and Peart, PERHAPS, leads the pack. He is consistently voted by fans as the best drummer in the world. Other critics may have a different opinion. He doesn’t acknowledge himself to be all that great though. Here is a direct lift from wikipedia:

In 1992, Peart was invited by Buddy Rich’s daughter, Cathy Rich, to play at the Buddy Rich Memorial Scholarship Concert in New York City. Though initially intimidated by the request, Peart accepted the offer and performed for the first time with the Buddy Rich Big Band. Feeling that his performance left much to be desired, Peart decided to produce and play on two Buddy Rich tribute albums titled Burning for Buddy: A Tribute to the Music of Buddy Rich in 1994 and 1997 in order to regain his aplomb.
Peart wrote on his personal website that “And yet…I still had a nagging feeling that when I played in that style, I was just imitating it, not really feeling it properly. As the old Duke Ellington standard goes, ‘It don’t mean a thing, if it ain’t got that swing’, and I didn’t think I did.”
In early 2007, Peart and Cathy Rich again began discussing yet another Buddy tribute concert. In response, Peart decided to once again augment his swing style with formal drum lessons, this time under the tutelage of another pupil of Freddie Gruber, Peter Erskine, himself an instructor of drummer Steve Gadd. On October 18, 2008, Peart once again performed at the Buddy Rich Memorial Concert at New York’s Hammerstein Ballroom.



4. John Bonham


Band: Led Zeppelin

Style: Like a thunder from heaven is how Bonham’s style has been described. It’s just draw dropping. So commanding. So domineering. Some regard him as the most influential drummer of all time. They said that no one can take his place and he can cream any other drummer who will challenge him.




3. Keith Moon


Band: The Who

Style: The most dramatic, bordering on overacting, drummer of all time. Wikipedia says: Moon was known for dramatic, suspenseful drumming—often eschewing basic back beats for a fluid, busy technique focused on fast, cascading rolls across the toms, ambidextrous double bass drum work and wild cymbal crashes and washes.



2. Buddry Rich


Band: Band Leader

Style: To date, many of Rich’s techniques are yet to be duplicated. He is considered the father of modern drumming by many. While other drummers on the list would boast of records sold and concerts played, they wouldn’t have all been able to do that without Rich.
Rich is one of few drummers to master the one-handed roll on both hands. He is said to have invented the crossover riffs, where he would criss-cross his arms from one drum to another, sometimes over the arm, and even under the arm so fast, you would miss it if you blink.
He also invented the contrasting sound to hold drum solos. He would go from explosives to slow passages to jazzy sound and then back again. One passage he would use in most solos starts with a simple single-stroke roll on the snare picking up speed and power, then slowly moving his sticks closer to the rim as he gets quieter and then eventually playing on just the rim itself while still maintaining speed. Then he would reverse the effect and slowly move towards the center of the snare while increasing power.
He has also perfected the stick-trick where he does a fast roll just by slapping his two sticks together in a circular motion. When performing a single-stroke roll, Rich could be clocked at up to 20 strokes per second, a feat now only being approached decades later by Mike Mangini, Jojo Mayer, Matt Smith and others.



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