Drumming News :
By Paul Rogne
For nearly 50 years, Modern Drummer has been a central source of information for drummers, documenting the players, music, instruments, techniques and culture that have shaped the instrument. Now, that history is being brought together in a new digital environment designed to go far beyond the traditional magazine.
Called planet.moderndrummer.com, the new platform lets you do far more than read Modern Drummer’s archive – you can listen to any article like a podcast, put questions to any article and get answers (“Ask the Article”), and explore a new way of tracing how drummers have influenced one another across generations. You can search the entire archive for anything and filter the results by decade, article type (ads, features, interviews), author, and more. You can browse any content from a chronological timeline and take it all in across multiple languages.
David Frangioni (Publisher and CEO of Modern Drummer) describes it as a “planet” because the goal is not simply to reproduce a magazine on a screen. Instead, the platform is intended to become an interactive destination where virtually every aspect of the Modern Drummer experience can connect with another.
A New Platform for a Legacy Brand:
PR: Can you start by telling me about the new platform for Modern Drummer?
DF: The new platform is groundbreaking. It’s very exciting. It’s a platform that we’ve been working on for a long time, and it brings not only all of the archive and the things that we love about Modern Drummer and the history of drumming, but it brings all kinds of new experiences and new ways for drummers to be inspired, informed, educated, and entertained.
That’s why we call it planet.moderndrummer.com, because it is truly its own planet. You have this archive, the Drummer Influence Network, the Drum Universe, and all of the drummer profiles for your favorite drummers. And then, of course, you have all 561 issues. Any of them, or all of them, can be a podcast, as well as an interactive conversation that you have with the platform.
The concept represents a fundamental change in how the Modern Drummer archive can be experienced. Rather than being confined to individual paper issues, the material can be searched, listened to, watched, explored and connected in different ways.
An Interactive Experience:
PR: How did this come together? How did the idea come to you to put together something that’s so interactive and seems like it’s really going to draw people together?
DF: Modern Drummer was born in a time period when paper was the media format. That’s how you communicated. You did it via printing, whether it was a magazine or a newspaper. You had television and you had print, and that was it. That was the technology. That was the form with which you consumed information.
As time has gone on, we’re all living more and more in a device-driven world, and print has gone away other than for certain books. Paper offers a very limited format and constricting whereas device-driven is unlimited and has no restrictions whatsoever.
If you can think of it, you can have it. You can integrate it and implement it for the end user.
That was the motivation behind it. I wanted an experience, how this all came together, was from Jason Mehler and myself partnering on this.
We envisioned a platform that would, once and for all, bring the legacy of Modern Drummer and drumming, because they’re really synonymous, into the next century and beyond.
What began as an effort to determine what would best serve Modern Drummer and its readers ultimately developed into a broader platform concept.
According to David, the technology is scalable enough that it could be adapted for other legacy brands with substantial histories to tell.
DF: We were able to create a platform that now we are talking to all kinds of legacy brands about implementing as the platform for their brand, whether that’s an automotive group, whether that’s a fashion brand, whether that’s a sports team, whether that’s a music-related brand, whatever it is.
This platform works exceptionally well and is very, very scalable for any story that you want to tell that has enough history to tell it.
Turning Every Issue Into a Listening Experience:
One of the most immediate changes for Modern Drummer readers is the ability to listen to the magazine’s content.
PR: One of the cool features is that you can actually have the articles be read to you. We can have the articles read to us during the day.
DF: Yeah. It’s great. I agree. I think that’s a game changer because it turns every magazine and all of the iconic interviews, information, and archive into a podcast.
The ability to listen is particularly valuable on mobile devices, where reading long articles isn’t always the most convenient experience.
You get into a car, select an article or create a playlist of articles, and listen to them in much the same way as you would listen to an audiobook or podcast.
On larger screens, however, the experience changes. The additional screen real estate allows users to take advantage of the platform’s visual and interactive elements while continuing to listen to audio in the background.
You can queue up what you want to hear. And if you’re on a device that is a larger screen—I mean, you can do it on a small screen too, but I just don’t think it’s very useful compared to a larger screen.
The larger vision is to make the platform capable of handling many different types of media and experiences.
There’s going to be all kinds of features being rolled out because the whole vision is that the platform is infinitely scalable for audio, video, photos, magazine archives, transcriptions, lessons—you name it, it can be served.
That includes music. Modern Drummer Zone Records is launching with Virgil Donati as a partner, with remasters all set to go to re-release Donati’s iconic solo albums along with other music.
You’ll be able to listen to drumming beyond just articles. It’s really quite a planet to spend time on.
From Reading About Drumming to Experiencing It:
The platform is also designed to address one of the limitations of traditional paper: a magazine article can tell you what a drummer sounds like, but the printed page itself cannot let you hear the performance or link to a richer multimedia experience.
PR: Years ago when I was getting Modern Drummer, if they featured a drummer like Art Blakey, I would understand what an amazing player he is from the words of the article, but I wouldn’t be able to get a sample of what the music he was playing sounded like. Now you can actually pull up a sample of what he’s sounding like as you’re reading an article.
DF: Yes. And that’s growing.
For David, that ability is particularly meaningful because Modern Drummer has always been about more than information. The magazine’s covers and stories have become part of the personal memories of generations of drummers.
DF: I think I speak for many people when I say that the cover archive is so iconic that everybody has memories of certain covers from certain periods of time and those covers are very meaningful to each of us.
David recalls discovering Modern Drummer in the early 1980s and then realizing that the magazine’s history extended well before the issues he had originally encountered.
DF: Tony Williams was there, Carl Palmer, and Peter Criss, and it was awesome to learn and see all of that, and it still is.
Now, however, the archive can go beyond photographs and written stories.
DF: Now we can go even further. So in addition to all of that, now we can put actual drumming inside of it, which to me is as important as anything. So it’s all sides of it.
Sometimes you want to read. Sometimes you want to show your friends pictures. Sometimes you want to watch a video. Sometimes you just want to listen.
We all have different needs at different times from the same subject, and so this is available now to provide for all of those creative needs as you wish.
Interactivity and Community Participation:
The platform is also designed to turn individual articles into interactive experiences.
One example is a transcription of Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” featuring Mark Atkinson.
PR: Can you talk a little bit about the opportunity for users to record or film themselves and upload it, and what the advantages will be for them?
DF: There’s interactivity. Every article and every aspect of the platform can have collaboration and interactive participation, which to me is really important.
What you saw was a transcription of “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” the Nirvana song. It’s Mark Atkinson playing, and you can watch him play it, hear him play it, and look at the notes go by the screen—a very classic educational viewpoint for how the song is played, with an accurate transcription of the drum part.
The experience can then expand beyond simply watching the lesson.
DF: On that one article, we opened up the platform for anybody that wants to submit a video of playing “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” And so the community can learn from how other drummers approach the song.
Users can also vote on performances, adding a gaming element to the educational experience.
DF: They can vote on who they think plays it the best. We’ve gamified the experience because we think that’s important.
For David, that combination of education, entertainment and participation is central to the platform’s identity.
DF: There’s the serious business of being the greatest drummer that you can be and learning, but there’s also a lot to be experienced by gamifying. There’s a lot to be experienced by educating. There’s a lot to be experienced by being entertained.
The platform can also serve users who simply want to explore.
Someone might want to study a particular drummer’s gear, learn about an audition, explore a style of music, watch lessons, listen to interviews or simply look through photographs of drum kits.
DF: It’s kind of whatever you want from the platform, in this case Modern Drummer, it’s there.
The Timeline: Exploring the History of Modern Drummer:
Another important feature is the platform’s timeline.
PR: Can you tell me about the Timeline feature?
DF: What’s awesome about this platform is it’s on the timeline. Modern Drummer started in 1977. And even when we’re telling stories of drumming prior to that, which we certainly are—there’s a lot of stories prior to 1977—it’s all told within this time frame from 1977 to 2026 as we’re doing this interview.
You’ll be able to search articles by years as well.
The timeline provides another way to navigate the enormous archive. Instead of searching only by a drummer’s name, topic or article, users can explore the history chronologically.
That becomes especially significant when combined with the thousands of stories contained in the archive. The platform includes more than 65,000 articles and 561 issues, creating an enormous body of material that can be explored from different directions.
The Drumming Universe and the Chain of Influence:
Among the platform’s most ambitious concepts is the Drumming Universe, which visualizes the relationships between drummers and their influences.
PR: Can you talk about the Drumming Universe?
DF: The Drummers Universe is a way to display and interact with the history of drumming because, as drummers—I think this happens with all instruments, but I think drummers are especially sensitive to this—we’re inspired and influenced by other drummers, and we all are.
And even when you would listen to interviews with Buddy and Louie and the original greats, they would talk about guys before them, Big Sid Catlett, Sonny Greer, and Chick Webb and people that some of us had ever heard of, and there may not have even been recordings at the time when these guys were playing. You had to go see them live in the twenties or whenever.
For David, this chain of influence is one of the defining characteristics of musical development.
DF: There’s always been this really impactful galaxy of influence that’s passed down from drummer to drummer. And it’s how we take this influence, and we apply it to our own drumming. And that’s what makes each of us unique, and that’s what makes each of our playing special.
We’re all inspired by some combination that’s different from every other person’s combination.
The platform attempts to make those relationships visible.
Frangioni describes a visualization as a “Mission Impossible meets Milky Way graph,” where users can see connections between drummers and follow those connections back to their source.
For example, if the platform shows that Tony Williams influenced Vinnie Colaiuta, a user can click on the relationship and be taken to the Modern Drummer article where Colaiuta discussed that influence.
DF: When you click on any of those spheres of influence, it shows you the provenance and you can click right on and go to the article.
That provenance is important to the platform’s philosophy. Rather than simply presenting a relationship as a fact, the system can point users back to the Modern Drummer material where that information originated.
From the Record Store to the Digital Platform:
David compares this experience to the way he discovered music as a young drummer.
He recalls reading Modern Drummer, seeing a drummer mention an album that had influenced them, then going to a record store to find it.
DF: I’d be like, wow, I never heard of that record. I went to the record store. I found the record, and then listened to it and was blown away. “Oh, now I hear what they’re talking about,” and then now I have some new vocabulary to put into my playing.
The new platform, he says, recreates that process—but compresses it from days into seconds.
DF: It’s the same exact thing. Just now everything’s done on a device, everything’s done virtually, and everything is done immediately.
A user can discover a drummer, learn about an influence, read what the drummer said about that influence and then find the music associated with it.
DF: We can just go to Spotify or Apple Music in that moment, and you can find the record and listen to it and hear exactly.
So it all happens the same way. It’s just in seconds instead of days.
A Searchable Home for the Drumming Community:
The platform’s usefulness extends beyond the archive. David envisions it as a central place for information about drummers and events.
PR: This would be a powerful platform to have, like, drum clinics. Are you thinking about including those kinds of things too?
DF: Definitely part of the plan. And not only drum clinics in a real-world sense, but the portal for where you’ll learn about drum clinics, where you’ll hear about them.
Frangioni sees this as an alternative to the fragmented nature of social media, where information about individual drummers and events can easily get lost.
DF: Social media is a powerful tool, and it’s an important aspect of all of our lives, but it’s very fragmented. And you can’t follow every drummer in every band in every city, or all you’ll do all day long is scroll. And life’s too short to just scroll all day.
Instead, the platform can organize information into categories and make it searchable.
One example involves drummer Todd Sucherman. A user could discover his profile, watch his educational material, see his clinic schedule and discover that he is coming to their city.
The underlying need, David says, is not new. The way people find the information has simply changed.
When he was growing up, Modern Drummer and local newspapers were among the ways drummers learned who was playing where.
He recalls being 16 and wanting to know when his favorite drummers were coming to Boston. He would sometimes arrive hours before a performance, hoping to meet musicians as they loaded equipment, showed up for soundcheck, and trying to learn from being around them.
DF: My point is that that whole experience happened because I went out and found the information. It was, of course, very hard to find back then, but it was still available.
The difference now is that information can be brought together in one place.
DF: The need to want to know is greater than ever. How you serve that need is more fragmented than ever.
If it has to do with drums, Modern Drummer has always been the go-to place for fifty years now. This platform now brings us full circle.
Twenty Languages and a Global Audience:
The platform also expands Modern Drummer’s accessibility beyond English.
PR: What’s really interesting to me is that the content can be converted into different languages. How many languages are you offering currently?
DF: Twenty languages.
The languages listed are: English, Spanish, French, German, Portuguese, Italian, Dutch, Polish, Russian, Ukrainian, Swedish, Greek, Turkish, Arabic, Hindi, Mandarin, Japanese, Korean, Indonesian, Vietnamese, Thai
Users can listen to the magazine and navigate the platform in any of those languages, while the original magazine content remains in English.
David points out that when Modern Drummer was being distributed in physical form, it reached 62 countries, but the magazine was not printed in the native language of each country. English-language issues were shipped internationally. The new platform is designed to remove some of that friction.
DF: You love the drums. You only speak Polish. You can come and enjoy the platform and learn and be inspired and listen to 561 issues of content in Polish.
The sheer amount of material is also part of the appeal.
DF: I don’t think there’s any one lifetime that could consume all the content on the Modern Drummer planet. If you literally spent every minute for your whole life, I don’t think you could consume it all.
And that’s the point. We want there to be a lot for everyone, not just one thing for everyone.
A Platform Designed Around Community:
Another central idea is creating a place where the Modern Drummer community can participate rather than simply consume.
Users can submit performances, vote, explore drummer profiles and interact with the material. Future features are also expected to allow users to follow favorite drummers and receive information about them.
PR: Am I able to just put in my favorite drummers and it’ll always give me the news of my favorite drummers? Like current news?
DF: All of that’s coming, the foundation is there.
The broader goal is to make Modern Drummer a place where a drummer can not only find archival information but also discover what’s happening now regarding the drummers and music they care about.
Modern Drummer prints special editions and books.
The pandemic forced a difficult decision around magazine printing and shipping. The cost of producing an individual issue became too high, and we did not want to pass that cost along to readers.
If it’s a book, you’re going to have it forever. But a periodical that’s thirty days of physical reading and then it’s outdated and there’s another one—there are no links in it. There’s no zoom in and zoom out. There’s no rich media. There’s no archive. There’s no bookmark. There’s no audio. That experience ultimately helped push the development of the digital platform.
I also heard from Modern Drummer members who had stacks of old issues but sometimes struggled to find the exact article, transcription, drum setup or cover they remembered. We wanted to solve that. And since you always have a device, here it is. The archive can now travel with the user. You can be in Antarctica. You can be on the North Pole. You can be in Asia. You can be anywhere. And if you have Internet, you have hundreds of issues plus, plus, plus.
We’re going to have cover-on-demand printing in the very near future. So you’re going to be able to get the cover. You’ll be able to get something that you can display. You can get it signed.
The planned physical cover will also include a QR code that can take users directly to the digital platform. Our community wants a cover because either they wanted to display it, or they wanted to give it to their friends, or they wanted to get it signed. The physical cover, then, becomes a collectible and a connection to the digital experience rather than a replacement for it.
Browser Today, Dedicated App Coming:
The platform is currently accessible through a web browser, with a dedicated app planned.
PR: Is this an app that we download, or do we log in to our account online?
DF: Both. We’re releasing it as an app soon. Today, it’s browser-based.
Users can go to planet.moderndrummer.com, log in and access the platform through their browser. It will also have a dedicated app very soon. It’s already done. We’re just rolling it out in phases.
Membership and Access:
The platform includes a free tier, allowing users to enter the Modern Drummer community without immediately committing to a paid membership.
PR: So this is currently live now?
DF: Yes, So anybody who signs up today can actually work with it at planet.moderndrummer.com. You can join the community right now. It’s live and the basic membership tier is free.
David emphasizes that existing subscribers were a priority during the transition.
DF: The first thing Jason and I focused on was, okay, how does the current subscriber get all of this in the most loyal way we can deliver to them?
The existing subscribers retain what they have received previously, while the expanded platform creates a higher tier of access. At the same time, new users can enter through the free tier.
DF: Everybody gets in for free.
For users who are not currently members of the Modern Drummer community, Frangioni says full membership is available for $14.99 per month.
The idea, he says, is to make the platform accessible while continuing to build additional benefits for both free users and members.
The Personal Connection: A Life Built Around Drumming and Technology:
This been a great informative interview, but I wanted to learn something more about David. What’s his personal history with drums and technology.
PR: Where did it all start for you? Where did you get so passionate about gear?
DF: I’m definitely into it. I’m a gearhead. I started playing the drums when I was two.
David says his passion for drumming developed around the same time he was diagnosed with Retinoblastoma and had his right eye removed at the age of two.
He describes music and the drums as a refuge during a difficult period.
DF: I think it just brought me closer to the instrument. I was a little more isolated than a lot of other kids might be at that age, and the drums were a refuge. Music was a refuge.
It was a place that was not only safe, but it was very inspiring, and it was something that I never got to the end of.
His curiosity eventually expanded beyond playing acoustic drums and into technology. In the 1980s, electronic drums became a major point of interest.
DF: I was like, electronics are going to be a big part of where all of this goes.
He immersed himself in electronic drums, learning about triggering, programming, sequencing, sound design, sampling, synthesis, layering and other aspects of electronic music technology.
That interest then expanded into keyboards, MIDI, digital audio, hard-disk recording, digital studios and ultimately Pro Tools.
DF: And so I kept going and going, and it kept leading me to these places of bigger and bigger possibilities.
That progression—from drums to electronics to digital technology—also provides a useful context for understanding his vision for the Modern Drummer platform.
Will Electronic Drums Eventually Outsell Acoustic Drums?:
The conversation naturally leads to the future of electronic drums.
PR: A number of years ago at the DW 50th anniversary party, I met the soon to be CEO of Roland, Masahiro Minowa. He said something to me that was really interesting. In the 1970s, Ikutaro Kakehashi, the legendary engineer and founder of the Roland Corporation, firmly believed and famously predicted that electronic/digital pianos would eventually outsell traditional acoustic pianos. Everyone laughed at him. And within a decade, it that was the actual case.
Masahiro Minowa is now making the same prediction for the drums, that soon electronic drums will outsell acoustic. Do you feel that as well?
DF: I think it’s highly likely.
David sees the fundamental advantage of electronic instruments in their ability to continually expand.
DF: You have a core set of features and hardware, and you have an unlimited set of possibilities not only as an end user but as a programmer.
An acoustic drum remains what it is, while electronic technology can be upgraded, changed and expanded.
DF: An acoustic drum, if it’s a six-ply maple drum, it’s a six-ply maple drum from today till forever, and that’s a great thing. But if it’s an electronic device, it’s many things all the time, and those things can also be upgraded and changed.
However, he doesn’t see electronics as a replacement for acoustic drums.
DF: We need both, especially with drums.
For Frangioni, even the modern acoustic drum experience already depends on electronics once the instrument enters a recording or amplification environment.
DF: Even if it’s as simple as a microphone going through a really good channel strip and then going through really good A-to-Ds (Analog-to-Digital) and a great system to record, all of that is electronics.
So it’s important, that entire signal path, to deliver the greatest experience that we can to the listener.
A Digital Planet Built Around the History of Drumming:
At its core, the new Modern Drummer platform is an attempt to connect several things that previously existed separately: the magazine archive, the history of drumming, audio, video, education, music, drummer profiles, community participation, events and the relationships between generations of players.
The Timeline provides a chronological way to explore Modern Drummer’s history beginning with the magazine’s 1977 launch. The Drumming Universe provides a visual way to explore influence from one drummer to another. The archive provides 561 issues and more than 65,000 articles. Articles can be listened to, and content can be explored through multiple forms of media.
The platform also creates opportunities for participation, such as submitting performances and voting on other drummers’ interpretations.
For David, however, the larger idea goes beyond technology.
It is about preserving the history of drumming while making that history immediately accessible to the next generation.
The old experience might have involved finding an issue of Modern Drummer, reading an interview, discovering the name of a drummer or album, going to a record store and searching for it.
The new experience can happen in seconds.
A drummer can discover an influence, read the original source, listen to the music, watch the drummer play, study the transcription, explore related players and perhaps even contribute a performance of their own.
And all of it can begin from the same place.
PR: Do you have any closing points you’d like to make?
DF: I think that anybody who’s into drums should check this out. And at the very least, go in and get the free tier and check it out.
That’s what I’d like people to get from our conversation: that it’s, available now and it’s available for everyone, and you sign up for free.
You become a member, a free member, and then you can unlock whatever you want from there, or you can just stay at the free tier.
The key is that you’re a member, a part of the community that embodies the spirit of drumming as only Modern Drummer does.
PR: It’s fantastic platform. I wish you all the success with this, and I’m excited to use it myself. It’s a great vision you have.
DF: Thank you.
