Christoph Schneider

He was born on May 11, 1966, in Pankow, East Berlin, into a house where music was the family trade: his father was an opera director and his mother a music teacher. They pushed him to learn an instrument and sent him to a music school attached to the Pioneers’ orchestra, where he studied trumpet. He describes himself as a very talented trumpeter: he joined the orchestra and was playing concerts within a year.

The drums came later, and on his own. He built his first kit out of tins and buckets until, at fourteen, he could buy a real drum kit.

Before Rammstein he played in Keine Ahnung, Frechheit, Die Firma — an underground new wave band with gothic leanings in the late eighties — and Feeling B, which he joined in 1990. In 1984 he served in the East German army: he is the only member of Rammstein to have done military service.

In 1993 he founded, with Richard Kruspe and Oliver Riedel, the project that became Rammstein in 1994. Since then his drumming has been the metronome everything else hangs from: the march, the heavy kick, and the exact timing that lets the pyrotechnics fire on the beat.