About Us

Total-Drums.com

So, you want to know about us huh? Thanks for taking the time! Total-Drums.com aims to give drummers (and drummers to be) a useful online resource including equipment reviews, lessons, articles, info, videos and...well you get the idea!

It's our goal to give you the best drumming web site on the net by offering as much useful, fun, and interesting drumming info as possible.

Who's Behind It?

Total-Drums.com has been designed and written by me, Mark Brownlee (that's me on the left). I set up the site because I love drums (don't we all?!). I've been playing for many years and have a good deal of experience hitting the skins live and in the studio.

Among other things, I've studied for a BA Hons degree in popular music studies, with drums being my instrument of choice (my second instrument being really, REALLY badly played guitar lol).

Over the years I've had the chance to use a lot of drumming gear, learn a lot about drumming, and get plenty of valuable experience. My passion for everything drums is put into this website.

Our Reviews

The reviews on Total-Drums.com are written after testing the gear first hand. Most of the reviews come from myself, and some others come from my drumming pals and colleagues.

All reviews are written completely independantly and give an honest view of how the gear perfomed, and how it compares to other gear available.

The aim is to offer you OUR opinion, which will hopefully help you choose the right drumming equipment for YOUR needs.

I hope you find the site useful.

Happy Drumming!
Mark Brownlee.

Contact Us

Got a question? Or a comment? Or just want to give us some feedback? Then get in touch with us! We value your comments and will do our best to get back to you within 48 hours.

Total-Drums.com
Privacy Policy

We recognize that your privacy is important. This document outlines the types of personal information we receive and collect when you use Total-Drums.com, as well as some of the steps we take to safeguard information. We hope this will help you make an informed decision about sharing personal information with us.

Total-Drums.com strives to maintain the highest standards of decency, fairness and integrity in all our operations. Likewise, we are dedicated to protecting our online visitors' privacy on our website.

Personal Information

Total-Drums.com collects personally identifiable information from the visitors to our website only on a voluntary basis. Personal information collected on a voluntary basis may include name, address, and email address.

This information is collected if you request information from us, participate in a contest, and sign up to join our newsletter email list or request some other service or information from us. The information collected is internally reviewed, used to improve the content of our website, notify our visitors of news and updates, and respond to visitor inquiries.

Once information is reviewed, it is discarded or stored in our files. If we make material changes in the collection of personally identifiable information we will inform you by placing a notice on our site. Personal information received from any visitor will be used only for internal purposes and will not be sold or provided to third parties.

Use of Cookies and Web Beacons

We may use cookies to help you personalize your online experience. Cookies are identifiers that are transferred to your computer's hard drive through your Web browser to enable our systems to recognize your browser. The purpose of a cookie is to tell the Web server that you have returned to a specific page. For example, if you personalize the sites pages, or register with any of our site's services, a cookie enables Total-Drums.com to recall your specific information on subsequent visits.

You have the ability to accept or decline cookies by modifying your Web browser; however, if you choose to decline cookies, you may not be able to fully experience any interactive features of the site.

A web beacon is a transparent image file used to monitor your journey around a single website or collection of sites. They are also referred to as web bugs and are commonly used by sites that hire third-party services to monitor traffic. They may be used in association with cookies to understand how visitors interact with the pages and content on the pages of a web site.

We may serve third party advertisements that use cookies and web beacons in the course of ads being served on our web site to ascertain how many times you've seen an advertisement. No personally identifiable information you give us is provided to them for cookie or web beacon use, so they cannot personally identify you with that information on our web site.

Some third-party advertisements may be provided by Google, which uses cookies to serve ads on this site. Google uses the DART cookie, which enables it to serve ads to our users based on their visits to this site and other sites on the Web. You may opt out of the use of the DART cookie by visiting the Google ad and content network privacy policy.

Browsers can be set to accept or reject cookies or notify you when a cookie is being sent. Privacy software can be used to override web beacons. Taking either of these actions shouldn't cause a problem with this site, should you so choose.

Children's Online Privacy Protection Act

This website is directed to adults; it is not directed to children under the age of 13. However, the content of this site is family friendly and safe. We operate our site in compliance with the Children's Online Privacy Protection Act, and will not knowingly collect or use personal information from anyone under 13 years of age.

Non-Personal Information

In some cases, we may collect information about you that is not personally identifiable. We use this information, which does not identify individual users, to analyze trends, to administer the site, to track users' movements around the site and to gather demographic information about our user base as a whole. The information collected is used solely for internal review and not shared with other organizations for commercial purposes.

Release of Information

If Total-Drums.com is sold, the information we have obtained from you through your voluntary participation in our site may transfer to the new owner as a part of the sale in order that the service being provided to you may continue. In that event, you will receive notice through our website of that change in control and practices, and we will make reasonable efforts to ensure that the purchaser honors any opt-out requests you might make of us.

How You Can Correct or Remove Information

We provide this privacy policy as a statement to you of our commitment to protect your personal information. If you have submitted personal information through our website and would like that information deleted from our records or would like to update or correct that information, please use our Contact Us page.

Updates and Effective Date

Total-Drums.com reserves the right to make changes in this policy. If there is a material change in our privacy practices, we will indicate on our site that our privacy practices have changed and provide a link to the new privacy policy. We encourage you to periodically review this policy so that you will know what information we collect and how we use it.

Agreeing to Terms

If you do not agree to Total-Drums.com Privacy Policy as posted here on this website, please do not use this site or any services offered by this site.

Your use of this site indicates acceptance of this privacy policy.

What Is Social Media?

And what do these 'share' buttons do?

Social media lets you use the Web to interact with others. This could be through social networking sites like Facebook or MySpace, where you can visit with friends and acquaintances. Or it could be through social bookmarking services, like StumbleUpon, Yahoo! Buzz and Delicious, where you bookmark Web pages you like and share them with other users of the same service.

Social media also lets you tailor the Web to suit the way you prefer to use it. Some of the ways you can tailor it include...

tagging the content you like, so that you (and others) can quickly find it with particular tags (keywords).
saving it for later reading.
contributing to the Web by making thoughtful comments or easily creating short pages about your favorite topic.

These 'share' buttons let you easily share the Web page you just read on www.Total-Drums.com by adding it to your favorite social media tool (like MySpace or Facebook). How? Simply click the share button on the Web page and then select the service you currently use. There's nothing to download or install.

If you're not yet using any of these social media services, you can set one up for free after clicking on its icon. Once your account is up and running, you'll be able to share the Web page with friends and family, or save it for later reading.

All of the main social and bookmarking services are included on our share button so it's quick and easy to use.

So, what are you waiting for...go try the share button on Total-Drums.com

Enjoy!

What Is RSS?

You may have been seeing those little orange RSS or XML buttons around the Internet. If you were wondering what they are...it's "the next big thing".

You can use it to get newsfeeds from CNN or BBC, as well as just about anything else, including news on upcoming movies, DVD releases, your favorite musician's tour updates, or it can let you know when new pages have been added to your favourite web site.

Once you get started, it's like having your favorite parts of the Web come to you. No need to go out and check for updates all the time.

"RSS" means "Really Simple Syndication." What it means to you is that when you subscribe to a site that has an RSS feed, you can keep up-to-date without having to check the site every day or week.

How do you get started? Easy!

Download a free RSS Reader first. This is special software that reads the RSS feeds...

Windows -- RssReader
http://www.rssreader.com/

Mac -- NetNewsWire
http://ranchero.com/netnewswire/

Once you've downloaded an RSS reader, here's all you have to do...

Left-click (control-click for Mac users) on any orange RSS button on a site, blog or news source that interests you. Start by left-clicking on the orange button below. Then...

Select Copy Shortcut ("Copy Link to Clipboard" for Mac, "Copy Link Location" for Firefox browsers), and paste that URL into your RSS Reader. And that's it! You're subscribed. Left-click on this orange RSS button to go to our RSS/Blog page and subscribe.