Tommy Lee Quotes

I studied the Ghanaian drums and bongo drumming.

Lars Ulrich, he was my hero growing up. I wanted to be like him. I played the drums.

I took piano lessons when I was younger and I've been trying to learn how to play the guitar recently. I'd really like to learn how to play the drums. They're a lot of fun and they require a lot of focus.

Percussion is the most adaptable family of instruments. The biggest challenge is to project percussion in a lyrical way.

I actually wanted to be a drummer, but I didn't have any drums.

Drums usually seem to tune themselves.

An uncle gave me a side drum and my mother decided I should have lessons.

As a musician, I don't think I'm the greatest guitar player. I'm a bigger fan of the drums than I am the guitar; I just happen to play guitar. I play drums almost every day at my house. I wrote a lot of songs behind the drum kit, just having the music and vocals in my head and playing the rhythm.

I play guitar, piano, and I'm learning to play the drums.

I like drums, really, if they're under control.

There was always a guitar hanging around the house when I was a kid. It was a much lower impact instrument than me playing the drums, which is what I really wanted to do. My mother put a stop to the drumming.

For me to have the opportunity to learn the darbuka and the tabla in Dubai, it created my own thoughts for music.

I was drawn to West Africa. I did listen to a bunch of different styles of African music, and there was something about the percussion and the drums of West Africa, and the energy, that felt so cinematic to me.

I actually played guitar before I played drums. And I always play guitar on the Slipknot albums as well, as well as being responsible for a lot of the songwriting.

Probably some of the most impressive drumming I've done is on the 'Far Beyond Driven' record.

I took piano lessons and I wanted to play drums when I was six. Luckily enough, my parents let me have a drum kit in my room - which is kind of crazy.

One thing that's always been important to me is to try and build a tool kit, drumming-wise, that was diverse and wide-ranging in terms of what I played.

I learned drumming as a second instrument because I didn't want to sing. Sometimes I would quite like to be left in the back, in the darkness by myself.

I have been drumming my whole life.

I've always been obsessed with drums. They fascinate me. Any other instrument - nothing. I play acoustic guitar a bit. But it's always been drums first and foremost. I don't reckon on this Jack-of-all-trades thing. I thing that felling is a lot more important than technique. It's all very well doing a triple paradiddle - but who's going to know you've done it? If you play technically you sound like everybody else. It's being original that counts.

Some of [drummers] drop time because they want to hear what you're doin'.

I've wanted to be a drummer since I was about five years old. I used to play on a bath salt container with wires on the bottom, and on a round coffee tin with a loose wire fixed to it to give a snare drum effect. Plus there were always my Mum's pots and pans. When I was ten, my Mum bought me a snare drum. My Dad bought me my first full drum kit when I was 15. It was almost prehistoric. Most of it was rust.

In any moment, I guess we could whip out a guitar and start playing old school.

Oh, I'm not a percussionist, I just like to hit things.

I can play the guitar and the keys and the drums. I'm not brilliant at any of them. I can sing too. Some of my friends are proper musicians but I'm a song-writer. I write songs.