DogBreath said:
Big kit = big possibilities. More options, more musicality. You can play small on a big kit, but you can't play big on a small kit.
Cheers.
I call you on that one. There's plenty of guys getting huge numbers of sounds out of tiny kits, but I don't honestly hear many big kit monsters using the full breadth and depth of sounds available in even their snare drums.
I used to be a pretty big kit kind of a guy - 6pc drum kit, two rides, three crashes, two chinas, hats, three splashes, double pedal etc. But I've recently dropped back to a kind of amalgam of two small sets:
Set 1 - 4pc drum kit (12-16-22 with 13x5 snare) with a K-Custom Dark Ride, a 16" "Old K" turkish-made Zildjian, a 16" China Boy Low and hi-hats, drums all tuned to a wide open kind of sound.
Set 2 - A percussion set including bongos, 2x Yamaha electronic pads + brain (plus a sampler via MIDI), a wood block, an 8" splash and a 10" Istanbul mini-china on top of a 10" K splash.
Depending on song sections I tend to pretty much pick between which section of the larger kit I'm playing and then treat that as an individual instrument. Each of those kits has enough possibility that you could play it for years without running out of new amazing stuff to do with it in terms of new tones, combinations and approaches. I used to just consider my snare drum to be a thing that made a "snare drum sound", now it's an instrument that has a wide range of possibilities. So is everything else on the kit. If I took an expansionist approach - I need a new sound, let's add more gear - I'd end up taking up the whole stage without developing in any particular way as a musician.
For my money, the best small kit guys (Joey Baron and his ilk) win hands down on taste, musicality and creativity over the likes of Mike Portnoy. Terry Bozzio gets to be an exception in my book though, since he's actually bothering to tune that stuff into a chromatic scale and you therefore *need* that much gear to make that approach worth bothering with at all.