The team
The people behind the academy
Academic leadership, drum faculty, business development, technology and academic advice. Six people, each with a clearly defined responsibility.
Tim Rustemeier
Founder and academic leadershipFifteen years of teaching, twenty thousand hours of coaching — and at some point the decision to stop passing on what he had been taught and to question what counts as normal in drum tuition. Out of that came the Split Flow method: it works on the nervous system, not on practice hours. A trained mechanical engineer, he thinks in fault diagnosis.
Jakob Zenzen
Head of the drum facultyA bachelor’s and a master’s in jazz/pop from the Conservatorium Maastricht, where he now teaches as a guest. Eighty to a hundred performances a year: Cologne Opera, Düsseldorfer Schauspielhaus, Circus Roncalli, productions for WDR, plus big band, musical theatre and pop. That range is the yardstick for the curriculum he is responsible for.
Rico Horber
Business developmentMore than twenty-five years internationally as a musician, producer and entrepreneur: touring worldwide, and building several drum schools and franchise structures, among them the Swiss Drum Academy in 2007. He has already built what is being built here. His focus: partnerships, accreditation, curriculum.
Maksim Suras
Chief technology officerSelf-employed in IT for over a decade, working on building and running infrastructure. At the academy he is responsible for the architecture, security and operation of the learning platform: protecting course videos against redistribution, keeping the public website and the signed-in area apart, and the question of which data is stored where.
Nico Böhmelt
Head of platform engineeringBuilds and runs the learning platform: course structure, video delivery, session management, access. His yardstick is the practice room — anything you cannot operate there one-handed on a phone does not ship. That includes what nobody sees: that two people never get the same slot and that a quota adds up.
Dr. Gunnar Schomaker
Academic adviceAdvises on the methodology and didactics of the programme and on how progress at an instrument can be measured at all — what an examination can show and what it cannot. He is also the person who objects when a claim about learning outcomes sounds good but is not evidenced — which happens more often than is good for a training programme.
Who runs the programme
Drum education with a structure: a certificate in twelve months, a diploma in twenty-four — with a dedicated tutor and sheet music for every lesson.