Modern Drummer opens its whole archive
Modern Drummer Planet puts nearly fifty years of drumming journalism online, browsable by year. Here is how to actually get something out of it.
Modern Drummer has been running since 1977. Every interview, every lesson, every gear review, every obituary — 1977 to now.
That whole thing has just gone online in one place, at planet.moderndrummer.com.
This is not really a news story. It is a resource, and a rather good one, so here is what is in it and how to use it properly.
What is it?
A digital home for the magazine’s archive, built to be browsed rather than searched.
That distinction is the whole point. An archive with a search box is only useful if you already know the name of the thing you want. Modern Drummer Planet is organised around a timeline — you pick a year and see what drumming looked like that year.
Which means you can go and find out what drummers were arguing about in 1983, or what a “new” electronic kit was being sold on in 1997, or which unknown player was getting their first two-page feature in 2004.
Why that is worth your time
Because drumming has a memory problem.
Almost everything a drummer reads online was written in the last eighteen months. Gear guides, technique videos, “the ten best” lists — all of it fresh, all of it about now. The result is that drummers spend enormous amounts of energy rediscovering things that were settled decades ago, and buying solutions to problems somebody already solved in a 1991 issue.
Forty-nine years of primary sources fixes some of that. Not because the old stuff is better, but because it lets you see which arguments actually got resolved and which ones just went quiet.
Three ways to use it
Pick your own year. Whatever year you started playing, go and read it. You will find the gear you lusted after being reviewed by someone who had no idea whether it would last, and it recalibrates how you read reviews now — including ours.
Follow one drummer forwards. Find a player you love and read their features in order across twenty years. Watching someone’s answers change as they get older is worth more than any masterclass. The stuff they were obsessed with at 25 is rarely the stuff they are obsessed with at 50.
Go and read about someone you have never heard of. Every issue is full of players who were the future and then simply had a career instead. Some of the best drumming advice ever printed came from people who never became famous.
Final thoughts
Free access to a nearly fifty-year archive is a genuinely generous thing for a magazine to do, and it is the sort of thing that quietly makes everyone who plays a bit better informed.
Go and lose an evening in it.
If you would rather read about drummers here, our drummer features are the place to start — from Benny Greb on how to actually practise, to Thomas Lang on what total command of the instrument looks like, to Joey Jordison, whose story is exactly the sort the archives do best.