Forking my packing list for a baby drum set
May 29, 2026
Here's a real thing that's been happening over the last couple of months. I have a pinned checklist in Reuse Lists for packing my drums for gigs (yes, I eat my own dog food). Recently I built a smaller, lighter drum set, and the standard packing list stopped fitting. This is how I used Reuse Lists to handle the variant without losing the original, and how the branched copies have kept stacking with every gig.
The smaller drum set
Lately I'm getting older, and I've had a couple of health things, so I decided to build a scaled-down kit out of drums I already had from a practice set. Smaller drums all around, and I converted one of the floor toms into a bass drum. That bass conversion, by the way, is genuinely great. Punchy, sounds fantastic.
The whole point was lighter, so the hardware got pared way down too. I swapped my heavy hardware for the lighter stands on the practice kit. And instead of two cymbal stands on the right side of the kit (one for the ride, one for the right-hand crash), I'm running one stand for the ride with a clamp and an attachment for the crash.
So I forked the pinned list
Different drums, different sizes, different hardware, fewer stands. It was easier to start from the regular pinned list and modify than to make a new one from scratch, so I hit Reuse and started cutting and changing.
That gave me a new list: the baby drum set list. The original pinned list is still there, untouched, ready for the day I go back to the full kit. If ever.
Then each gig became a branch
For the next gig with the smaller setup, I hit "Reuse" on the baby drum set list (not the pinned one), named the new version, and made a couple of small tweaks for that night. The gig after that, I reused that version and tweaked again. And so on, gig by gig, up through tonight: a 50-foot extension cord, added to tonight's version only.
Now I have a chain: the original pinned list, the heavily modified baby drum set list off it, and a fresh dated versions for each gig. Each one is a frozen snapshot of what I actually packed that night, and the "from" link on every version traces it back through the chain. If I notice three gigs later that I forgot something, I can see exactly when it got dropped from the list. Once the baby drum set list feels settled, I can pin it as a new starting point.
Why this works
I built Reuse Lists for exactly this kind of thing: a stable starting point you can fork from, a working version you can mess with without destroying the original, and a paper trail of every version. The baby drum set experiment hit all three. The pinned list is the source of truth I trust. The baby drum set list is my fork. Each gig has its own snapshot. Nothing got destroyed to make any of it work.
If you've got a routine that mostly repeats but occasionally needs a big variant (a different car, a smaller pack, the holiday version of the grocery list), give it a try.