A drum kit is commonly described by the number of pieces it consists of. To work out how many ‘piece’ drum kit you have simply add up all the drums, ignoring cymbals and other hardware. Another method is to count the toms and then add 2 (for the snare and bass drum). So if your drum kit has 5 toms then it’s likely to be a 7 piece kit (assuming it has one snare drum and one bass drum). If a kit has one bass drum, one snare drum and one tom then it’s a 3 piece kit. The most common configuration is a 5 piece kit consisting of a bass drum, snare drum and 3 toms (high, mid and low) – and then of course you also have the hi-hats, cymbals etc. but these don’t count towards the number of ‘pieces’. You could have a 5 piece kit with 100 cymbals – it’s still a 5 piece kit.
