Dave Grohl | The hardest hitter in modern rock
Dave Grohl drummed Nevermind, then fronted the Foo Fighters. His story, what makes his drumming hit so hard, his gear, and the latest Dave Grohl news.
Most drummers spend a career trying to record one drum sound people remember. Dave Grohl did it at twenty-two, on an album that sold thirty million copies, and then spent the next thirty years mostly playing guitar.
He is the rare case of someone becoming so famous for the second thing they do that the first gets underrated. And the first thing was being one of the hardest, most musical hitters rock has produced.
Here you will find his story, what actually makes those drum parts land, all the gear, and the latest Dave Grohl news. Let’s start with what he has been up to.
Who is Dave Grohl?
David Eric Grohl was born on 14 January 1969 in Warren, Ohio, and grew up in Springfield, Virginia.
He never had a drum lesson. That is not a romantic exaggeration — he taught himself on pillows and on a kit he did not own, working out parts by ear from punk records, and he has said for years that he still cannot read music.
What he did have was the DC hardcore scene on his doorstep. At seventeen he dropped out of school to join Scream, touring America and Europe in a van and playing fast, loud and every night. That is where the engine got built.
Nirvana
When Scream fell apart in 1990, Grohl ended up in Seattle auditioning for Nirvana. He was their sixth drummer, and the last.
Nevermind came out in 1991. The drums on it — enormous, dry, impossibly present — are still what producers reach for when they want a rock drum sound, and the record is more responsible for the modern sound of a snare drum than almost anything else from that decade.
The other side of Nirvana is the live footage. Grohl played with a physical abandon that destroyed equipment on a regular schedule. He was not performing chaos; he simply hit that hard.
Foo Fighters
After Kurt Cobain’s death in 1994, Grohl recorded the first Foo Fighters album almost entirely alone — playing every instrument himself, drums included — and became a frontman more or less by accident.
He has stayed one ever since, with the drum chair going to Taylor Hawkins from 1997 until Hawkins’s death in 2022. The two of them were as close as any pair in rock, and you can hear how much Grohl trusted him.
What makes his drumming so good
Power that is actually controlled
The obvious thing is the volume. The less obvious thing is that it is repeatable.
Grohl hits full stroke, every stroke, with the sticks travelling a long way and the whole arm involved. That produces a fat, dark, fundamental-heavy tone from a drum that a lighter player would make sound thin.
The trap most drummers fall into copying it is tension. He is not squeezing. Hit hard from a relaxed arm and the drum does the work; hit hard from a tight grip and you get a smaller sound and an injury.
The fills are hooks
Grohl writes drum parts the way he writes riffs. The fill into the chorus of “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, the tom pattern under “In Bloom”, the entrance on “My Hero” — you can sing all of them.
That instinct is why the parts survive being played by other people. They are compositions, not decoration.
He leaves the hi-hat alone
Listen to how little he ornaments. Straight eighths on the hats, hard backbeat, no filigree — and then everything opens up at the chorus.
The dynamic jump does the work that busier drummers try to get from extra notes. It is a very punk approach to arrangement, and it is the most portable thing on this page.
Behind the kit since Nirvana
Grohl has never really stopped drumming — he just does it for other people.
- Queens of the Stone Age, Songs for the Deaf (2002) — for a lot of drummers, this is his best work. Relentless, inventive, and enormous.
- Them Crooked Vultures (2009) — with Josh Homme and John Paul Jones. The loosest and funkiest he has played.
- Probot, Killing Joke, Nine Inch Nails, Tenacious D and a long list of guest sessions.
- Foo Fighters, But Here We Are (2023) — he played every drum track on the album himself, his first Foos drum credit since 2005, on the record made after Taylor Hawkins died.
Dave Grohl’s drum kit
The gear story is simple, which suits him.
Big shells, big cymbals, nothing exotic, and a preference for equipment that survives being hit.
The eras, in short:
- Tama (Nirvana years) — a Granstar and later a Rockstar-Pro with a 24” kick, and the piece of gear people actually want: a Tama 14” x 6.5” bell brass snare, nicknamed “The Terminator”, which is the Nevermind snare sound.
- DW (from the Foo Fighters era) — Collector’s Series maple, 26” kick on the Them Crooked Vultures rig, oversized toms, and a DW Collector’s bell brass snare standing in for the Terminator.
Cymbals are Zildjian A throughout — 15” Rock hi-hats, 20” medium crashes and a 22” or 24” ride that he rides like a crash. Heads are Remo Coated Emperors, and the pedal has been a DW 5000 chain drive for decades.
Sticks were aluminium-core Easton/Ahead rock models for years, for the obvious reason: wood did not last.
See Dave Grohl’s full rig, era by era, in the Rig Vault →
Chasing the Nevermind snare
The honest version: it is a heavy brass shell, tuned mid-high, hit extremely hard, in a big room, with a compressor doing the rest.
Tama’s bell brass is long discontinued and collectors have noticed, so Reverb is where they turn up, usually at a price. Any thick brass or bronze shell gets you most of the way, and our Gear Guru can spec one to your budget. The room and the arm matter more than the badge.
Where to start listening
- “Smells Like Teen Spirit” (Nirvana, 1991) — the fill everyone can sing.
- “In Bloom” (Nirvana, 1991) — the tom part, and the best drum sound on the record.
- “Scentless Apprentice” (Nirvana, 1993) — his own riff, and he is playing it on drums.
- “No One Knows” (Queens of the Stone Age, 2002) — probably his finest recorded performance.
- “New Fang” (Them Crooked Vultures, 2009) — loose, funky, nothing like the rest of this list.
- “Rescued” (Foo Fighters, 2023) — back on drums, and it sounds like relief.
Find more Dave Grohl
Final thoughts
Dave Grohl is the best argument going that taste beats technique. There is nothing in his catalogue a competent drummer cannot physically play — and almost nobody would have written any of it.
The one caveat worth stating: copying the power without copying the relaxation is how drummers hurt themselves. Learn the arm, not just the volume.
He is fifty-seven, fronting a band on stadium stages, and still the person other people call when a record needs real drums on it. When that next happens, it will be in the news section at the top of this page.
And for the full gear picture, his rig is in the Rig Vault, era by era.