Neil Peart Reveals His Favorite Drummers
Neil Peart Moving Pictures Isolated Drums - analogaudio rules / YouTube
Becoming one of the finest drummers ever in the history of music, it was nothing but a title for Neil Peart from Rush. After all, the “professor” of the drum kit was still learning from his contemporaries, a confession that he didn’t shy away when asked by many.
Peart was a puzzle piece that fit the greatness of Rush; without his magnificent and complex drumming, there wouldn’t be Rush as phenomenal and as influential as what they were today. But even though a lot of people say he was a cut above the rest, for him, that did not necessarily mean that he should stop learning the essence of drum-playing.
For Peart, copying a style from a certain drummer couldn’t pass as original, but copying 20 and mixing it as your own could. In his 1993 interview with Modern Drummer, he said: “The best advice for someone who wants to develop an original style is: Don’t copy one drummer, copy twenty! I copied a hundred.”
Neil Peart’s long catalog of favorite drummers was quite obvious in many ways. They are the ones who are expected to turn into a favorite, some are unexpected, and some were also deemed important in the rock industry. The professor’s lists were too wide-ranging, it almost seems too impossible to copy their styles. But for Neil Peart, who was nothing short of extraordinary, he did it extremely well, formulating step-by-step his own designated panache that he will always be remembered.
Below are the few yet extremely important drummers who influenced the great Neil Peart’s impressive drumming.
- Gene Krupa
- Buddy Rich
- Keith Moon
- Hal Blaine
- Mitch Mitchell
- Ginger Baker
- John Bonham
- Terry Bozzio
- Michael Giles
- Bill Bruford
- Stewart Copeland
- Carl Palmer
- Phil Collins
- Freddie Gruber
- Manu Katche
- Peter Erskine
