Whitney Drums Flexible Positioning

Whitney Drums hardware allows for tremendous flexibility of drum positioning. This drum set has allowed me to achieve an ergonomically superior setup for the first time in my 44 years of drumming.

Standing at 6’4” (193 cm), I’m not overly tall, but since most of my height is from the hips on up, my arms are higher than most drummers of my generation when seated. This means that my drums need to be higher than most other drummers, and prior to my Whitney drums, I’ve never had a kit that actually goes up high enough. The limiting factor has nearly always been the length of the floor tom legs, but sometimes it’s been the rack tom mounts too. Sitting in on other people’s kits, backline kits at festivals, and “drums provided” kits at clubs nearly always come up short.

The Whitney kit lets me achieve a set up that’s better for my physical health while playing than any kit I ever owned. In the pictures of the Whitney drums on my site, you probably won’t notice that my setup is now about 2 to 3 inches higher than pictures of my older Allegra kits (which even had extensions added to the legs of the floor toms). I notice the difference though because I’m more relaxed when I’m playing. It’s taking some time to get used to having the drums higher after four decades of playing on drums that were just a little (or a lot) too low for me.

The other thing I’ve been able to achieve with the Whitney drum kit is nearly flat positioning of my snare and two toms. It’s basically a marching tri-tom kind of setup, with all three drums on a nearly level playing field. My small tom is centered over the bass drum and brought inward until it almost touches the snare and lower tom. I’ve also lowered the small tom a tiny bit so I don’t hit its rim when I’m cross-sticking on the snare.

I saw a video recently showing that I’m not the only one who likes this setup; Drummer Kobie Watkins has been playing this way for at least a decade.

Just as interesting to me is that he’s got his larger deeper ride on his left, and there’s where I’ve had mine the last few months and it’s working really well.

Payton Crossley also sets up this way in this video from 2003.

This drum-cam video from 2024 shows how easy it is for me to move around the drums with this setup while playing a some busy patterns at a very low volume level.