On the subject of converted floor toms… it seemed a good time to post a couple of photos of my Bop Tart cocktail drum set. It was a couple of years back. Mark Haynes had been building lovely personalised Bop Tart kits for a while and they proved very popular. Bop tarts featured smaller Base drums and were either cheap drum sets with the floor tom conveyed to a portable bass drum or a kit built from quality parade and tenor drums. I wanted something a bit different – a cocktail drum set to use with the jump blues band I was playing with at the time, The Deuces. I had always fancied a cocktail kit but those on sale commercially were either too expensive or had a tiny snare drum or, more likely, both! I wanted a full size snare drum and had seen a set up produced by Peace that would fit the bill if only it wasn’t so prohibitively expensive. Enter Bop Tart. One afternoon I visited The Haynes at his workshop and we brainstormed some ideas for my own Bop Tart cocktail kit. I wanted a full size snare drum mounted centrally above the sixteen inch floor tom which would become the kit’s bass drum. After a quick search we managed to lay hands on a cheap Sonor kit which would be the basis for the kit. Then Mark got to work making a custom iso mount using two Rims mounts which would act as a cradle for the snare drum. In no time at all the kit was finished with my Tama Iron Cobra converted to strike the underside of the floor tom. I used it for four months with the group before I decided that particular group dynamic wasn’t for me. It was a lovely kit to play; I spent some time experimenting with mounting cymbals and a cowbell in different places. I also swapped the ear-splitting Sonor snare drum out for my Ludwig Rocker to experiment with the sound of the kit. Not used it for a while but its always ready! @boptartdrums #cocktaildrumkit #boptartcocktail #boptartdrums #boptartfloortom #boptartsnare #boptartsnaredrum #boptarttom #boptarttoms #cymbals #codedrumheads #custom #custombuild #custombuiltdrumset #customcommission #customdrum #customdrumset #customfinish #customdrumsetfinish #drumbunkerstudio #drumbunkerworkshop #drumrefurb #drumrefurbishment (at The Drum Bunker)
