Drummer to Drummer

Drummer to Drummer is exactly what it sounds like – drummers, talking drums. Host Adam Nimmo sits across a pair of kits with biweekly guests to talk shop, then plays a double drum session from a medley of their best songs.

Coming back after the hiatus

The show had gone quiet for a few years when I came on as co-producer with a simple brief: make it land like it never left. That took a few months of planning before we rolled a single frame (format, kit, the look, the whole release machine), because with a show like this the planning (and practicing) is a major part of the project.

Two rooms, a light crew, heavy hitters

We’ve shot in two main locations – DC Music Studios in Toronto and Evil Empire Studios in Hamilton – both excellent to work with. We kept the crew deliberately small. Directing from the floor, I wanted the space to feel open and natural, much like the conversations, which we ended up showing as much of the behind-the-scenes setup banter as the main interview.

The small crew setting up the kit in the sunlit brick studio — Small crew, big room – setting up between takes.

Rigged from every angle

Having tight windows to film, we focused on maximum coverage, planning sessions to be shot from every useful angle at once (including a pair of Meta Ray-Bans, which proved handy). This way, a single day in the room could feed more than one episode. We clamped cameras to the kits as well as the drummers, so the footage lived where the playing did.

Adam wore a chest cam, so we always had the guest from his eyeline. On a couple of takes we sat him behind Meta Ray-Bans (he wears glasses anyway), which added a frantic POV direct from the drummer’s eyes – which turns out is remarkably different than a POV from the chest.

A GoPro clamped to the snare, its screen showing the live shot

Adam at the kit wearing a chest-camera harness

A graded frame from the finished cut - a drummer at the kit in warm light — Cameras on the kit and on the drummer helped us maximize coverage per take.

The 360 in the middle

Every episode ends the same way: Adam and the guest stop talking and just play, two kits locked in harmony. We put a camera dead-center between them and shot in 360. That goes out on its own as the midpoint drop of every two-week cycle. Viewers can drag to look around and get between the two kits, turning from one player to the other, zooming in on specific fills and hits to get a sharper sense of how they’re played. As a side note, I’m increasingly blown away by how versatile and capable 360° video has gotten since my days shooting on the Nokia Ozo. Shooting 360 on a Nokia Ozo rig in a stadium

The midpoint 360 – drag to look around the room

Shoot once, release many many times

The show settled into a two-week guest cycle. As editor and everything post-production (except the drum mixing, which we hired our very talented sound recordists to do), there’s a lot to manage. Everything comes off one shoot: the episode, the trailer, the reels, the 360 video, the teasers, the contest posts (more on that below), and still images. Over time the cadence tightened into a set list we run for every guest:

Social first. The window opens with a teaser, often something from behind the scenes.
The episode. The main release lands on YouTube (and podcasts) with a launch trailer cut for social.
Reels through the fortnight. A run of shorts pulled from key moments in the conversation and the drum session, spaced out so the show never goes quiet.
360 at the midpoint. The “you’re in the room” piece to anchor the middle of the cycle.
Teaser. A sneak peek at the upcoming episode’s guest.
Contest. Social reels announcing a chance to win signed sticks the guest played in the episode (plus a Drummer to Drummer t-shirt).
Carousels & image posts. Behind-the-scenes moments and a group shot thanking our guest.

Add it up across 5 platforms and it lands near 100 unique uploads a month. That fell on me (willingly) to post, run social, and manage the paid ads behind any promo pieces. Nobody edits their way out of that by working harder. So I built an agentic workflow wired into all 5 channels to handle the upload, the tagging, the posting, and to support with thumbnail gen and copy suggestions.

Win the sticks

Enter-to-win contest promo - drumsticks signed by Justin Peroff of Broken Social Scene

Every cycle ends with a giveaway, and it’s turned into one of the most reliable ways we pull new subscribers. The guest signs the sticks they actually played with during the session, we add a Drummer to Drummer shirt, and one subscriber wins the set. Sometimes it’s more – Tim Oxford of Arkells and Justin Peroff of Broken Social Scene threw in the handwritten setlists from our double-drumming sessions, signed. The draw is that you can’t fake it: nobody else can hand you the sticks that were used on that take, so the people who enter are exactly the people we want subscribing.

A contest prize - signed drumsticks, a handwritten setlist, and a Drummer to Drummer shirt — One cycle’s prize: Tim Oxford’s signed sticks, the setlist from the double-drum session, and the shirt.

Now it’s a podcast too

The conversations always worked with your eyes closed (as did the drumming), so we started cutting audio-only versions and pushing them to Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, iHeartRadio, and more. Same room, more front doors. The social channels have been climbing right alongside it.

Listen on SpotifyListen on Apple PodcastsListen on Amazon Music

What’s next

The Drummer to Drummer crew together on the studio floor — The crew that makes it.

The show has partners now. Sennheiser and D’Addario have signed on to help produce future content, and there are 10 more episodes already in the editing bay. Not bad for something that was meant to be a weekends-and-evenings project (it’s getting back to that slowly, thanks largely to the agentic workflow above). Build the machine that runs the release, and the only work left is the part worth doing – which, for a show about drummers, is mostly just being in the room when they play.