How many cymbals did Neil Peart have on his drum kit?
Rock and roll has always been known as the genre of excess. No matter how big one band claims to be, there will always be another that’s leagues better than them and will try to put together something even heavier or more intense than what they had done. While Rush was never known as party animals in that respect, Neil Peart didn’t really understand the meaning of subtlety when fine-tuning his drumkit.
Although his beginnings as Rush’s drummer were modest, he could still make the most out of any tiny kit that came his way. Despite showing up to the audition with some of the most infantile bass drums that Geddy Lee had ever seen, he said that Peart convinced him to become their drummer just from the triplets that he was doing with the kick drums alone.
Naturally, all that energy has to go out somewhere, and for all the lavish cars and expensive jewellery that some rock stars spend their dough on, Peart focused on parking a lot of his money on his kit, to the point where it looked like a small drum village every time he got onstage with Rush.
By the time the group got to their final tour around the world for their fortieth anniversary, Peart’s drum throne included no less than eleven different cymbal heads, including four different crash cymbals, a ride, two splash cymbals and two separate China cymbals. If you thought that that was a little excessive, you just need to look at the other pieces grafted to the kit, including a gong drum, three rack toms, and two brass tambles to help play different melodic fragments.
But why did Neil Peart need so many drums when playing with Rush?
Being in a trio isn’t the easiest thing in the world. No matter how often someone tries to do something new, everyone needs to hold up their end more or less, or the entire thing collapses. So since Peart had his work cut out for him from behind the kit, every one of Rush’s albums had one more piece added to the kit.
Since he was a fan of everyone from Buddy Rich to Keith Moon, many of those influences required to have those massive drum heads, like when they played ‘Closer To The Heart’ and Peart broke out the sticks for the tambles in the back. Even when they started going completely digital in the 1980s, some of Peart’s greatest rhythms came from him tapping out patterns on an electronic drumkit during the Grace Under Pressure period as well.
So how did it affect the sound of Rush?
It’s hard to really do too much melodic thinking when stuck behind the kit. Most people are just used to getting the groove and keeping everything low to the ground, but that’s not how Peart thought. He was a Renaissance man in more ways than one, and every time he got behind the kit, you could hear pieces of Rush’s groove change.
There had been the era of epics like on Hemispheres, but there are also many detours that were driven by Peart’s attention to detail, like when he decided to adopt different reggae grooves from Stewart Copeland during Moving Pictures or starting to come out of his unofficial retirement on Vapor Trails. Although the drummer is usually the butt of everyone’s joke in a group, Peart proved that everyone else was taking cues from him whenever Rush took to the stage.
