The drum kit exists because theatre pit orchestras could not afford several percussionists
Military bands and orchestras once needed a separate player for every drum and cymbal. Cash-strapped theatre pits could not pay for that, so drummers rigged pedals, stands and trays to cover everything alone. The result, first called a trap set, became the engine of ragtime, jazz and eventually almost all popular music.
Drummers began experimenting with foot pedals in the 1840s, though mass production was about 75 years away, and by the 1860s they were grouping drums into kits. Early players used double-drumming, striking bass and snare with sticks while tapping cymbals with a foot on a low-boy. Marching beats grew more syncopated, helping give birth to ragtime. The name trap set came from the contraption tray on top of theatre consoles, which held whistles, klaxons and cowbells, and drummers were called trap drummers until the 1930s.
Pedals changed everything. New Orleans drummer Edward Chandler patented a system around 1904 or 1905, letting players work the bass drum with their feet, hence kick drum. In 1909 two brothers, Theobald and William F. Ludwig Sr., set up their own drum company and went on to patent the first commercially successful bass drum pedal. By 1912 some drummers swapped sticks for wire brushes, and even metal fly swatters, to avoid drowning out other instruments.
The modern kit took shape in New Orleans jazz of the 1920s. Baby Dodds, playing riverboats with Louis Armstrong in 1918, struck drum rims and woodblocks as quieter alternatives when crude recording equipment distorted loud sounds, hung a cymbal over the bass drum, the future ride, and helped establish the broken-triplet ride pattern. After watching him, Ludwig built a low-mounted sock cymbal; Dodds asked for it to be raised nine inches, creating the hi-hat. Stands for it appeared around 1926.
The 1920s also employed drummers as live sound-effects artists for silent films, their kits swelling to cover every cue. By 1930 talkies with recorded soundtracks had put thousands of them out of work, though some found jobs creating effects as Foley artists. Today the kit has no fixed layout, but usually means a bass drum, snare, toms, hi-hat and cymbals played from a throne.
Source: Drum kit
