Transporting Whitney Drums

One of the very cool features of Whitney Drums is that the snare and both toms will nest inside of the bass drum without having to retune any of your heads. This is an exceptionally great feature when you need to get your full set of drums to have a smaller traveling profile by reducing the number of cases you have to pack and carry around. All four drums will fit in one bag and (including the bag and packing blankets included with the kit) weigh about 30 pounds.

For medical reasons (I’ve had three hernia surgeries over the years), it’s smarter for me to ensure that none of my individual cases weighs over about 30 pounds. The only exception I make is with the trap/stand bag. It has both skid-rails and wheels on the bottom that help lower the actual weight I’m supporting during transport. Even though I could have all the drums in one bag, I pack mine into two, one for the bass drum and another (a deep 16x14-inch floor-tom case I already had from another kit) for the snare and both toms; one nested within the other. This gives me one 13-pound and one 19-pound bag that is smarter for me to be lifting, and it makes for a pretty balanced load from the car to the bandstand with one case in each hand.

Getting the drums in and out of drum bags is super easy because these drums have no lugs, legs, or tom mounts sticking out of them to get hung up on the bags. The smooth shells, being an inch or two larger than the drum’s head size, make the bags fit these drums like a glove.

The second snare and tom bag comes in handy on the gig, because I use it as a table for my stick-bag. You can’t hang a stick bag on the lower tom of the Whitney kit with these wood rims (also it would be a lot of weight on the low-tom mounting hardware) like you can on most floor toms that have legs to support the weight of the bag, and I set up so high there’s nothing down there to lean my stick bag up against, so my solution has been to make a table out of my snare and tom bag.

To protect my throne seat from getting torn and dirty, I’m putting it into a piccolo snare case I have during transport. When I get to the gig, I put that piccolo snare bag into the larger snare and tom bag (with the two packing blankets for the toms that came with the kit) and it has just enough stiffness to support the snare and tom bag so it can hold the weight of my stick bag. That means I have two cases on stage with me when I perform, but since it functions as a stick bag table, no one even notices it. I could use one of those self-standing stick bags, but they are heavier to pack around than this solution and this works great for me so for now at least, I’m sticking with it.

I recently purchased a cart for those load-ins that are a long way from the car. Having fewer bags to balance on the cart means I don’t even need to strap down the drums when I use the cart. In the third picture, you can see the stand-bag on the bottom, the cymbal bag under the bass drum, the throne seat on the far right, and the snare and toms bag in the middle.