Conversations with Chris Ellison

Today we’d like to introduce you to Chris Ellison.

Alright, so thank you so much for sharing your story and insight with our readers. To kick things off, can you tell us a bit about how you got started?
School bands led to drumlines, drumlines led to drum set, and pretty soon I was looking for any way to get behind a kit. I went to Indiana University as a Jazz Studies major, and I started teaching privately and working with high school drumlines while I was still in school — those first private students hooked me on teaching just as deeply as performing did.
After music school I spent thirteen years on the road touring as a live drummer, and even then I made time for teaching whenever I was home. When I came off the road, I went back to school to catch up on technology and ended up with a software engineering degree. Teaching never stopped — it’s been the through-line my whole life.
Cincinnati got pulled into the story along the way. Friends asked me to help start Fretboard Brewing, a music-themed brewery here in town, where I’m still the acting sales manager. The CFO was a private drum student of mine years before any of that existed — that’s the kind of long arc this work creates.
NowDrum started because I wanted to write a few method books. AI made me realize I could do something much bigger: a platform that finally captures the hybrid rudiments that have been handed down for generations but were never properly notated anywhere, and a place where students at every level and the instructors who teach them can build, share, and grow material together.

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?
Honestly, no — it hasn’t been a smooth road, and I don’t know any working musician who’d say theirs was either. The biggest challenge for me has been the constant balancing act between teaching, performing, helping run a brewery, and building. Performing requires you to be available when the calls come. Teaching requires you to be present and consistent for your students week after week. Sales at Fretboard means showing up for accounts that have come to count on you. And building software at the level NowDrum is operating at requires deep, uninterrupted focus that doesn’t always come on a schedule.
What I’ve learned the hard way is that you can’t fake any one of them. Students notice when your head isn’t in the room. Producers notice when your chops are rusty because you’ve been at a computer for two weeks straight. And software can sit broken for a long time before anyone catches it if you take your eye off the ball.
NowDrum is also a one-person operation — it’s just me, working in partnership with AI as my collaborator, building something that would have taken a team of engineers a decade ago. That’s both the gift and the challenge. There’s no team to spread the load to, but there’s also no one slowing the vision down. The struggle becomes the structure: figure out what only you can do, and design the rest around it.

Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
What sets me apart, I think, is the combination of perspectives I get to hold at once. As a working drummer in Cincinnati, I’m in the music — I know what playing real situations actually demands. As a private instructor at the Evendale Cultural Arts Center, I’m watching real students struggle with real concepts in real time, which means I know where the gaps in traditional drum education actually are. And as the founder and sole builder of NowDrum, I’m partnering with AI to address those gaps in ways that weren’t possible even a couple of years ago.
The teaching informs the playing. The playing informs the teaching. And both of them inform what I build at NowDrum. The platform is in its early days — right now the free entry-level tier is live, with much more rolling out — but the vision is much bigger than any single feature. The first big win is closing a real gap nobody else has touched: hybrid rudiments, the kind that have been handed down between drummers for generations but were never properly notated anywhere. That’s the hook. From there, NowDrum is being built as a full educational platform for students at every level and instructors who want a place to organize, generate, and share material with the people they teach.
Most drum technology comes from software people who don’t drum, or drummers who don’t build software. I’m trying to be the rare third thing — a drummer-teacher-builder partnering with AI to make tools I actually wish I’d had at twelve years old.
You can find more at nowdrum.com or reach me directly at chrisellison@nowdrum.com / 513-259-9664.

How do you define success?
Success for me has always been measured one student at a time. When a kid who came in three months ago barely able to hold sticks plays a paradiddle cleanly for the first time, that’s success. When a former student calls to tell me they made the drumline at the college they wanted — or comes back fifteen years later as the CFO of a brewery I’m helping launch — that’s success. The numbers and the press are nice, but they’re not the thing.
The bigger version of that, the one that drives NowDrum, is the idea that the technical depth of drumming has been gate-kept by access. You needed the right teacher in the right city, or the patience to grind through century-old method books alone in a basement. If a platform can take that wall down, even a little, then a kid in a small town with no drum teacher gets to learn things that used to require living near one — and an instructor anywhere gets a place to build and share material with the students they care about.
So my definition of success is honest impact at the scale you can hold. For me right now, that’s keeping the studio at Evendale full of students who are getting better, staying in the music as a performer so I never lose touch with what playing actually feels like, and building NowDrum into the educational platform I wish had existed when I was learning. Live to drum, drum to live.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://nowdrum.com