His work with early Genesis was very demanding and skillful, and quite creative. Take The Cinema Show's groove later in the song, Dancing with the Moonlit Knight's ride patterns, Supper's Ready and The Musical Box. He also has great dynamic control and fantastic rolls and double strokes. His cymbal work is also fantastic.

Queen and Queen II drumming is pretty on par with that imo.

Nobody is arguing that Roger isn't a great drummer. He just isn't top 30, others beat him fair and square.

I admire your passion, so please dont take offense to this, but do you EVER talk about any bands besides Queen?

Don't worry, I'm not absolutely offended I just liked to get your opinions (sadly this forum and the bass one are almost dead lately) and I thought the video I posted would have helped Roger's case for the top 30 hehe.
What do you think about the link I posted Neg?

Roger Taylor is Top 30 worthy for sure

Mr. Morello, I presume?

Anyway, Junkie explained that pretty well on the previous page...

gonna try and spend some time up here. good times. regain my faith in music once more.

Been really enjoying Brad Wilk's drumming lately...'specially on Out Of Exile and Man Or Animal.

Man Or Animal and Snakecharmer are easily his two best drumming tracks, I'd say. Love all of his playing tho, cuz it's Rage.

I will make this forum far more active once I'm back from Japan, I just have very little time on the internet. Honestly, we have these choices to make, go by the criteria or make exceptions for famous and popular drummers. The criteria just doesn't favor Taylor. I actually think he could move down more, if not then move John Densmore way up, because Densmore destroys him in nearly every criteria but influence. His tom tuning by removing the bottom heads and using old, beat up heads in order to get a loud, low barking sound to match Morrison's voice was quite innovative, as well as his swing-rock adaptation and us of rivets for rock at the time. He's also more skilled, versatile, original, and creative. He only loses in influence, so why is he so much lower? Maybe Densmore just needs to move up a ton?

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJ9_e-InNFo

I'm sure I posted that before but yeah Densmore's more than just The Doors.

Yeah John was great, I always loved his playing. He's a minimalist, but still manages to be incredibly unique and creative (When The Music's Over), and has some admirable versatility as well.

I agree Taylor could move down a notch....

Well Taylor is a famous and popular drummer for sure and I'm still sure he's underrated on skills and originality...I think you are a very clever guy and I really hope these choices will not follow your personal tastes.

I'm trying very hard to avoid my personal tastes, but of course as objective as we make it, there's still some degree of subjectivity. However I believe technical skill with this particular instrument is the closest criteria on the whole site to completely objectivity. Even sales numbers can be misleading and not cover the full extent of artists popularity. However drum skill can be accurately determined. I'm open to everyone's opinion and anyone who wants to call me out on these. You are more than welcome to share more videos and make as many cases as you feel necessary to convince me of Taylor's skill and creativity. With skill though try to describe what he does etc. instead of just posting a video, or you can use the skill criteria that we have for the skill thread. I'll give you an outline of how to make your argument most convincing:

It's clear he is very influential and no need to debate that, so

Innovation: What did he innovate? What new did he bring to the drums or what did he popularize that was either not done before him or which things did he build upon and bring to new heights in drumming? This is a hard one for most drummers out of the top 20
Originality: Self explanatory. What did he do, either stylistically or technically that was different from drummers before him?
Creativity: What about his playing was unique, savvy, or out of the box? What did he do to step out of the norm? How were his beats and fills compared to others? How are the complexity of his beats, grooves, and solos?
Skill: Using either our criteria in the skill list or explanations, what do you think of his technical ability in those areas?
Stylistic Versatility: How varied are his drum lines? Did he use the same rudimentary, derivative beats or was he constantly coming up with new, unique, and inventive drum lines for his material? How well did his drum lines accommodate the differences between songs? How many different styles and genres of drumming did he incorporate into his playing?


Those are the questions to examine (or I examine) when ranking these drummer. I don't see, outside of influence, him doing any of those particularly better than say Michael Giles, or even Mogenstein or Jarzombek?

Also since this list was made many new things have come to light about Gavin Harrison, who easily deserves a top 30 placement, scoring extremely well in every criteria except influence, which he actually does well in, but not great. His influence is spreading with his innovation and new original approaches to genre blending and meter movement. He is currently innovating new way to cross meters and time signatures while keeping certain beats polyrhythmic without changing the original rhythm. It's quite......nuts. It pretty much uses a new musical theory approach to subdividing.

Well..I've already posted what I thought it showed off the best from Taylor but you found them as nothing of special so I would have liked more opinions about these.
As I told you the drumming on bass and the drum assembling was really original cause it was born from a Roger's idea and like it or not it has to do with drumming; as for innovations I'm not so sure about it but the video where he was talking about his sound trademark could involve some innovation cause he spoke like he was the firts to do some things to get new sounds. I'm also not sure if he was one of the first to play live electric drum solos.
His stylistic versatility has more to do with Queen versatility but going to play songs like Another One Bites the Dust through something like Stone Cold Crazy is not exactly the same thing.
Anyway I'll leave this to more experts on drums, it'd be cool to hear more opinions to come.

I agree he does pretty well in Stylistic Versatility, never complained about that aspect. I don't count playing on someone's bass a drumming thing, sorry I don't. If other people think it should be, okay. If he decided to put that string part of the bass on his actual kit and use it to play melodic patterns like the keyboard on Peart's set, but I'm not sure about actually tapping your bandmates bass strings. I'm not sure when Taylor started using electric parts on his drum kit, but Palmer was using them in 71 (maybe experimenting with them as early as 70) and Bruford was working with them in 73+.

Also about the sound trademark, which video are you talking about, the Half a Sonic Volcano video? All he says in that entire video is pretty much I play bass or snare with the crash, like every other drummer (which he says), and I have toms that make sounds and roto toms which make other sounds. The only thing he said was a trademark thing he did was open hi-hat on back beat, which I believe every drummer does, but not all the time of course. Open hi-hat placement is one of the more complex things you can do on the drum kit, so most people don't like to get messy with it and just either do it on the on beats, or the back beats. Open hi-hat on off beats is tricky, but doing polyrhythms with the open hi hat while keeping the pedal going and poly rhythms on hands are really restricted to people like Bruford and Harrison. I'm currently working on developing my open hi hat technique for fills and groove emphasis. But playing it on the backbeat, as far as I know, is at the beginning repertoire of every drummer who uses the open hi hat, which is (should be) every drummer.

maybe I'm missing something here, it would be useful if you pointed out specifically what in the videos you are getting at, and I'm sure it would be helpful for the other members. Not implying this in any sort of derogatory way, but don't pull an Echoes as in post only videos with no explanation and say 'it's all in the videos', because that doesn't really help us understand what you see in the videos. If you say this video shows his skill, well I'm not sure what about it you are getting at, unless you are saying his whole drumming in the video is skillful, which for most drummers is not always the case.

Also, you asked me (I believe) what I considered skilled. The last Nicko McBrain video posted (the one with them rolls), that's skilled. People really under rate McBrain's ability, he has superb rolls, relatively good polyrhythmic ability, and can do plenty fine cymbal work various ride patterns. His pedaling speaks for itself.