Drums really fascinated me since the first day I got to sit behind a kit that one saturday morning in october 2002 and ended changing my life. It's a "meta-ins

Drums really fascinated me since the first day I got to sit behind a kit that one saturday morning in october 2002 and ended changing my life. It's a "meta-instrument" instrument that has a level of customization to the individual that no other instrument goes near - in many cases you can tell a famous drummer just by looking at the disposition of their set! In many other instruments it's the player who has to adapt to said instrument, but with drums it happens quite the opposite. Despite its avant-garde and ever-evolving nature, sometimes it baffles me that it's us players who sometimes haven't kept "in time" (no pun intended) with the instrument. I find it weird that the main reason people play hi hats cross-handed it's because a limitation in the hardware, namely the hi hat stand. Granted, there are now remote stands and you could place it almost anywhere, but they are still quite rare (and apparently even more expensive) and people just got along with the idea of having to play one of the most used pieces in the kit, precisely in rock styles, in a counter-intuitive place. I think Bill Bruford could solve that drum layout issue perfectly, having his hats exactly on front on him and allowing him to be easily reachable with both hands without something else getting in the way (like Danny Carey). Alas it hasn't catched on because, again, people got so used to have their hi hats in a weird place that I bet many think that _it's the way we are intended to set our drums_. Other of the head-scratching issues that even a century later is still alive is the stick grip thing. For many years they taught people traditional grip and told them that's the intended way to play drums (there's a funny rant from Buddy Rich around youtube about that matter), but as with the rise of rock styles people found that playing with a matched grip allowed them to play with more power, now they are telling people that playing matched is _the superior way_ to play drums (people of the likes of Thomas Lang, Matt Gartska and even the youtuber "the 80/20 drummer" are behind that idea). But in reality even that comes down to the individual. I for one played with matched grip for 16 years and despite how much I did for my weak hand at the end I found my body is just not symmetrical. There's some tension in the tendons of my left hand it won't ever let me go anywhere near the flexibility of my right hand and feeling tension even when playing double strokes, no matter how relaxed. Re-discovering traditional grip was a moment of enlightenment for me and now I can't understand why people try to impose things as a grip as some sort of universal condition in the world of one of the most (if not the most) customizable musical instruments.