rdavidr built an 11-piece roto-tom kit | And it rules
David Raouf has built the biggest kit of his YouTube career — 11 Weiss roto-toms and a pair of custom 16-inch hi-hats. Here is what he made and how it sounds.
Roto-toms are one of those bits of drum gear everybody recognises and almost nobody owns. Tunable on the fly, no shell, that unmistakable ringing pitch-bend.
So what happens if you build an entire drum kit out of them? David Raouf — rdavidr to most of us — decided to find out.
The build
Working with Steve Weiss Music, David put together an 11-piece roto-tom kit using the whole Weiss roto-tom range, from the little 6” up to the 16”.
It is, by his own admission, the largest drum kit he has ever assembled on the channel. That is quite a claim from a man whose back catalogue includes a kick drum made out of a pizza.
The video does what his videos always do: unboxing, assembly, a lot of stand-wrangling, and a genuinely useful running commentary on why each piece ends up where it does. Roto-toms are awkward to mount at the best of times, and eleven of them is a hardware puzzle before it is a drum kit.
There is a bonus in there too — a custom pair of 16” Weiss hi-hats. Because of course there is.
The internet approved. The video pulled roughly 150,000 views inside 48 hours.
Watch it come together
Should you try this at home?
Probably not the full eleven. But a couple of roto-toms bolted onto a normal kit is one of the cheapest ways to add a sound nobody else at the jam night has, and they take up almost no space.
They also tune in seconds — you spin the drum on its thread and the pitch goes with it — which makes them a brilliant teaching tool for anyone who still finds tuning intimidating. If that is you, start with our drum tuner and work up.
Final thoughts
This is exactly why rdavidr’s channel has lasted. Anyone can review a kit. Very few people can build one out of parts nobody else thought to combine, and make it musical at the end.
Read our full rdavidr feature for the rest of his story.