Making this kind of equipment by yourself teaches you a lot. Of course a lot about drumming and also a lot more about your life and yourself. It brings forth your memories, even the painful ones. And I wan't to share some of them with you.
It's been about 16 years from that when I first played or even stood next to a real drumkit. If I remember correctly it was year 1997 and we were just about to start a fifth grade. That meant our class had to go to bigger school which was located 3 kilometers away from my home. The biggest change for me was that there were more musical instruments, especially band instruments, such as drums, guitars and so on.
I remember we had this old drum kit on our class room and it was missing a bass drum resonant head. Other class room for music class students had a Tama Rockstar drumkit and everyone was hoping to get to it also outside the music lessons. During the playtime in school we used to sneak into the music class and play our asses off. I always wanted to go to actual music class, like my sisters did, but I couldn't get through the entrance exam.
I had played violin in music school for a while and in the long run it was quite boring. By the way, this was totally disproved in last summer by Kronos Quartet when they played at Kuhmo Chamber Music Festival. Violin really is also a percussion! What a show they put up! But during my short career as a violin player, I was so frustrated that I used to hack'n'slash my notes with a violin bow, and "accidently" take a violins bridge away so I couldn't practice anymore.
Me and my friends started to play "air drums" after the school and I even build my first barrel drumkit with the help of my father. After a while I jumped from violin to tenor horn. My teacher was also playing drums and because a tenor horn wasn't my kind of instrument he agreed to teach me drumming privately.
At first he asked me if I would like to learn to play with a double bass drum (I had almost broken my single pedal for trying to use it as a double bass pedal). Of course I wanted, so he carried another bass drum to the room. It was a different size, but it didn't matter. Goddamit, now I had two of them and I could play machine gun patterns all evening! After the first lesson I knew this was the right instrument and path for me. After that he helped me to tune my drum kit and we had many good conversations about metal bands like Sepultura during the theory lessons he held.
After primary school we moved to Southeast of Finland and I gained my access to the music class without entrance exams. There the teacher always said I played too loud, so there was usually some other guy playing drums during the classes, while I was trying to sing my lungs off. But we had couple of school projects where I could play rock and metal style songs. I wasn't interested in other instruments at the time, maybe I've should've.
I never imagined to reach this point when my parents bought me this used drum kit about 15 years ago:
