Check Out Kayleigh Moyer’s Story

Today we’d like to introduce you to Kayleigh Moyer.

Hi Kayleigh, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstories.
I’ve always had a fascination with rhythm. For as long as I can remember listening to music, the drums are always what has pulled me into a song and drawn my attention. Thankfully, I was blessed with extremely supportive parents who also have killer tastes in music to guide my ears early on.

The summer before 5th grade my parents took me to someone’s house for a barbeque party, and I found a drumset with a radio in the garage. Drumming just clicked for me – it felt so natural and the next thing I knew, I was playing along to songs on the radio. That was the moment I knew I wanted to play drums. It had always kind of been there in the back of my mind, and it’s hard to explain the feeling of that first day, but everything just felt right for the first time.

My parents surprised me with my first drum set that Christmas -I was 10 years old. Drumming became my focus instantly, and I was heavily involved with every band and music program my school district offered in Phoenix, NY. Through my dad’s travels as a pilot, he discovered Fork’s Drum Closet in Nashville, TN, and that iconic drummer Chester Thompson taught private lessons there. My parents took me on vacation to Nashville when I was about 13 so I could visit the shop and take a lesson with Chester, and I didn’t realize how much that would influence where I am now.

I think everyone has a different learning style, and the right teacher’s teaching style can click really well with your brain. Chester was that teacher for me. I was able to click with and learn much quicker with him, and he motivated me as no one had before. I begged my parents to take me back to Nashville each summer so I could take lessons with him, and when I was about 16 Chester finally asked if I had thought about colleges yet. At that point, I knew I wanted to go to school for drums, and that I liked the city of Nashville, but when I found out Chester taught at Belmont University in Nashville -I realized I could live in Music City and study with him FULL TIME.

Long story short, I auditioned for and ended up going to Belmont as a Commercial Music Percussion major with an Emphasis in Performance. Studying with Chester Thompson full-time skyrocketed my passion and obsession with drumming, and his incredible influence and guidance in my personal life made him like a second father to me. He helped me realize that simply practicing drums wasn’t going to be enough to lead me to success -I was living in Nashville now and I had to start networking with producers, musicians, and other music professionals outside of school so I could set up a career for myself after finishing college.

My first break happened my senior year of college when I got to play drums for Keith Urban on the CMT Artists of the Year Live TV awards show 2014. That performance was later nominated for CMT’s Performance of the Year. I remember getting the email about this opportunity while sitting in a class, but they needed my resume, headshots, video/recording examples within the hour to be considered! Thankfully, I had just taken a PR in the Music Industry class that motivated me to already have that information assembled into a nice package. That was my first lesson in just how important preparation and professionalism were going to be in this town.

I graduated with my Bachelors in Commercial Music Percussion from Belmont in 2015 and immediately went on a 2-year world tour with the group Barrage 8. While I was home from touring, I started working with country artist Ashley Clark -recording videos with him and playing at the Grand Ole Opry. I had made it my mission in college to get out and network at least 2 nights a week to start integrating myself into the music world for post-college life, as well as make great relationships with my fellow Belmont musicians -which led me to this particular job.

This is something I would recommend to any student looking at colleges – find a school in the city you want to live/work in professionally after college and then spend your entire time there meeting people in the industry in that city and preparing yourself for the moment you walk out with your degree. Then you’ve already laid the groundwork for your career and can start immediately.

My 2 years touring with Barrage 8 helped get my name out there and the ball rolling for other gigs in Nashville, and I learned that what made me diverse as a musician would help push me forward. Here are a few examples: Some things that shaped me early in my drumming career in high school were classical percussion, marching with a snare drum in the drumline, and my love of playing in a jazz band. I never forgot those parts of me -I’ve embraced them and let them continue to shape what I get to do in my career.

I got the call to play marching snare on ESPN College Gameday’s intro video alongside country legends Big & Rich, which has been aired weekly across ESPN and ESPNU for several years now. I got to travel to China with the Hollywood Film Music Orchestra for the Nanjing Forest Festival where I performed 2 hours of film music with a 45-piece orchestra and moved between the drum kit and the classical percussion section from piece to piece.

I also got to record drums on a few videos with Post Modern Jukebox -who take modern songs and arrange them with an old-school jazz flair to bring back the popularity of jazz music. These skills (marching snare, classical percussion, jazz drumming) were all things that made me slightly different than your average drum set player, and I never realized what they might lead me to in the future.

Here is where I started hitting snags.

I was learning the hard way what it feels like to work in not just a male-dominated industry, but an image-obsessed industry. From auditions to phone calls about gigs, I was starting to realize how being a female was affecting what I could and couldn’t do. On one hand, I was getting certain gigs because I was a female (and they were specifically looking for that but I didn’t know it yet) and on the other hand, I wasn’t getting specific gigs because I was a female (and me being so would take attention away from the artist, or they just didn’t want to travel with a “girl” in their group). Not to mention the gigs that wanted me because I’m a female (not because of how I play), and then wanted to sacrifice my values by wanting to dress me up “sexy.”

I got burned a few times, and I started resenting being in an industry that would control what I wanted to do because of my gender. What finally broke me was auditioning for a major artist, crushing the audition, and then getting the phone call that “Hey, you had the best audition! But we had to go with someone else” and knowing what that means.

This chased me towards wanting to be a studio musician.

When you listen to music in a recording, and you listen to the drumming, you CAN’T TELL if it’s a guy or a girl playing, right? But you can tell if the drumming sounds great and if it feels great. For me, that’s the beauty of music. I grew up listening to music -not watching it. When it all boils down, isn’t the way music sounds the most important part?

I also realized how exciting it is to be the brain that comes up with the drum part that gets put on a recording. I love to write rhythms and drum parts – to take my experience and create something new. So naturally, I fell in love with recording in the studio. I’m thankful for now having had the pleasure of working with legendary producers Glenn Rosenstein (U2, Madonna, Talking Heads) and David Kalmusky (Journey, Shawn Mendes, Keith Urban) out of legendary studios Addiction Sound and Ocean Way Nashville. The Nashville studio drumming community is a small and very tight-knit group of incredible players, but I am thankful every day to keep working towards becoming a regular part of that. Nashville is a competitive and exciting town -and I don’t think I will ever have to stop improving and working hard to be a part of this scene.

Through recording drums at the studios, I discovered a new passion for the tech side of this art. In some instances, I wasn’t happy with how the drums sounded in the final recording. I had come up with a cool drum part, I had new heads on my drums and had tuned them perfectly, -everything on my end was giving them the best sound quality I could give them. I just wasn’t happy with how they mixed and treated my drum sounds after that. Naturally, I wanted to learn what goes on in that process after I record the drums to how they sound in the final product.

In 2019, I built up my own home studio to the greatest professional degree I could (and I loved all the research that went into learning how to do this!) My goal was to learn how to record and mix my drums myself, to see if I could control the overall sound quality of my drumming product from start to finish! Through the help of my audio engineering friends and lots of internet research/trial-and-error, I was starting to get somewhere with this goal.

When Covid-19 hit in 2020, all of my touring -and really everything I had been working on to this point- all dropped away in an instant.

Thankfully, I already had this studio built in my house. I shifted my focus to recording drums and teaching from home. I edited my website to allow anyone around the world to send me their music without drums, and I could add drums and send the song back. This opened a whole new realm of possibilities and excitement -working with musicians from all over and supporting myself through the pandemic.

I started teaching drum lessons virtually over Facetime and Zoom but realized many drummers wanted to know how I was recording my own drums at home. I started getting really passionate about teaching drummers how to record and mix their own drumming in their own spaces. Being able to record yourself as a drummer is incredibly empowering, and allows you to be creative in ways that were never possible before. This whole topic gets me extremely excited and I know this is only the very beginning of this particular journey for me.

College auditions also went virtual, so I helped several of my high school drum students work on their virtual college auditions and get them into great music schools. I definitely see myself opening up to more college audition-prep for more students in the coming year.

One of the biggest things to happen to me musically during the pandemic was my new endorsement of Pearl Drums. Their American headquarters is based in Nashville, and they reached out after seeing the recordings and videos I was making out of my studio.

Pearl has helped me immensely marketing-wise to get my name out there and share my videos with the world. They have given me amazing support as a company so far -supplying me with incredible drums and accessories that are changing up my thinking as a creative. One of these products is their MalletSTATION -a midi mallet controller. It looks like a mallet instrument (ex. marimba, vibraphone) but through my computer, I can program it to sound like any instrument or sound I want. It’s been inspiring me to lean more into the electronic world of music and incorporate it into my drum setup and every project I am a part of.

This all brings me to the present, I believe. The world is beginning to open up again for live music -slowly. All the virtual/at-home stuff with recording and teaching I’d still like to keep a big part of what I’m doing. I auditioned for and started working with several new artists. One of which, Ian Flanigan, I’ve already been rehearsing with, playing a few shows, filming music videos, and getting ready for a touring season in 2022.

I also recently started working on a new project named Elevado. They’ve really started motivating me to cover synth parts using my MalletSTATION live incorporated into my drum setup with tracks. This year I’m all about pushing outside my comfort zone to use technology in more ways. Elevado brought me with them to play on the Rock Boat this past fall -a giant floating music festival on a cruise ship. These were some of my first shows post-pandemic and really got me excited about performing music again after the dark year we just had as musicians.

It’s exciting getting back into the groove of working with an artist and preparing for live shows again. As much as I love recording, there’s definitely a huge performer bug inside of me who likes to fly out and put on a show -and share my excitement for music with an audience. I’m looking forward to what this new year brings to my story.

Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way? Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
There have been moments when everything gracefully fell into place, and moments the road got rocky in parts. The work and preparation that go into being a professional musician are hard. The rejections are hard. Every struggle and rejection has motivated me and been the fuel to my fire.

I think the most important thing about the struggles is how you turn them around and arm them to work for you. For example, I was hired to play the CMT Artists of the Year award show with Keith Urban because I was a female. Sure, I think I deserved to be there on a musicianship level as a player, but I definitely got backlash and was degraded by many saying “you were only there because you’re a girl” and then completely wrote off. I didn’t let it end there, is my point.

I used that opportunity, the press from it, and the connections I made backstage to my benefit to springboard me into my next professional and high-level opportunities. I could have taken that rejection by some and believed them, but I used that chance to get other gigs that wanted me for my abilities and not for my gender.

The “gender problem” has been a struggle that has popped onto my path over and over and in many different disguises. My greatest hope in sharing my experiences with it is to encourage and empower other females in the pursuits of their passions. The music industry’s overwhelming reliance on “sex appeal” in female performers is not a secret to anyone, and I think that discourages and scares away lots of talented young female musicians.

I want these women to know that you don’t have to give in to “sex appeal” to be successful! If a gig makes you uncomfortable or sacrifices your values -just walk away. There will be more opportunities with people who want your talent and energy. Nothing beats a good work ethic. If you develop your talent and out-work everyone, you WILL be successful. Embrace who you are as an artist.

The pandemic starting in 2020 has been a huge struggle to me and many musicians. All the tours were canceled, the studios closed, and all of the work we were used to doing fell away out of nowhere. I personally had to get really creative with my career to have any hopes of that career surviving. What that looked like for me was mastering my home studio setup, recording drum tracks for artists remotely, teaching drums, and how to record drums virtually.

Can you tell our readers more about what you do and what you think sets you apart from others?
If I’m allowed to say it, I think I’m most proud of the fact that I’m called into many gig/recording situations because I’m an out-of-the-box thinker. I thrive in being the drummer/percussionist you call when you want something different and creative for your project.

This comes from my many different experiences and studies in classical percussion, world percussion techniques, mallet playing, marching/drumline percussion. and experiences playing jazz, Latin, pop, electronic genres. For example, if I’m recording a country tune, my experiences in other genres still poke through in my playing -resulting in me sounding different than another drummer you might have brought in.

I want to continue capitalizing on this. My favorite drummers to listen to and study are so unique and different. With how many incredible drummers there are in the world today, and how many ways the internet and social media give you access to them, I have to stand out if I have a prayer of being successful.

What was your favorite childhood memory?
My mom took me to see Rush on their 30th Anniversary tour for my first concert in Buffalo, NY. Rush is my favorite band, and since my mom introduced me to their music, it’s kind of our special thing to share together. It was an outdoor amphitheater, and I remember tearing up when I saw the sunlight hit the gold hardware on Neil Peart’s kit for the first time.

It was inspiring hearing the magical way only a 3-piece band could cover so much musical space. And Neil’s drum parts were unlike any I’d ever heard. He wasn’t afraid to use electronic drums, a midi mallet controller, a vast array of percussion, and every size of drums and cymbals available to compose these drum parts that could never have been created or even thought up by anyone else in the world.

My mind exploded and was opened to a whole new universe of possibilities, and from that night on I wasn’t afraid to try anything new in drumming, because I could see the possibilities they would lead to in my playing.

Contact Info:

• Email: eat.sleep.drum@hotmail.com
• Website: www.kayleighmoyer.com
• Instagram: @kayleighmoyer
• Facebook: www.facebook.com/kayleighmoyer.drums
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCR8L1sB6nLz2FkSO88q-z8w/videos