Is a drummer the same as a percussionist?
Drums vs. Percussion - What's the difference?

Percussion' is a category of instruments which are played by striking them with hands, sticks, mallets, or beaters, brushes etc etc… or by shaking them. Idiophones are a class of musical instruments that produce sound when a resonant solid material, like wood, metal, or stone, vibrates. The eight basic types of idiophones are:
concussion, friction, percussion, plucked, scraped, shaken, stamped, and stamping. 
Idiophones are different from other instruments like the guitar and flute, which produce sound through strings and air columns, respectively. 

Idiophones include.

Maracas
A shaken vessel idiophone that produces sound with internal seed beaters. Maracas are often used in Latin American and Afro-Cuban dance music. 
Cowbell
A hand percussion instrument used in many styles of music, including Latin and rock. 
Gong
A circular metal disc that can be flat or curved, and have a definite or indefinite pitch. 
Kalimba
A percussion instrument with a simple structure that produces sound through vibrations in its body. 

Handpan

Handpan is a term for a group of musical instruments that are classified as a subset of the steelpan.

Is a DrumKit an Idiophonic Instrument?

A drum kit is not quite an idiophone…although a kit does have idiophonic qualities…hoops, sticks, woodblocks, cowbells, cymbals are all played in a drumset.

 A Drumkit is stereotypically seen as a membranophone.

Membranophones.
Instruments that produce sound by vibrating a stretched membrane, such as kit drums, congas, djembes, dunduns, bodhrans, cajons.

Membranophones  divide into five categories:

•  struck membranophones, 
• plucked membranophones, 
• friction membranophones, 
• singing membranophones, 
• other membranophones. 

There are many membranophones…. including 

• kettle drums, 
• hourglass drums,
• frame drums, 
• barrel drums, 
• cylindrical drums, 
• goblet drums. 

There are a lot of instruments included in this category, and a 'percussionist' is expected to play a large number of them. 

A 'drummer', on the other hand, may only play a few and specialise in/on drumkit and may well be unable to play other percussion instruments listed above…Mastering percussion instruments takes years…and some are in themselves quite sophisticated to play in a texture, dynamic musical manner.

And so…

A drummer plays membranophones which are cylinder drums arranged into a kit…they also play idiophonically on the hoops of those drums, the sticks they use imbue an idiophonic quality to the sound and drummers add instruments to their kits such as cowbells and cymbals to create a range of textures and frequency mixes when playing

Therefore a drummer is a percussionist! A specialised percussionist. Drumkit is a subset of percussion!

Percussionists however are seen as the Non-kit drummers…but is this true? There are such things as percussion kits…and some percussionists use their feet as well as their hands.  The quesion is what do you call a percussionist that plays a kit like a drummer (with the snare and toms replaced by djembes and congas.

You call that percussionist a drummer also.  Mark Campbell is an example.

Some Drummers are Percussionists as well…and, indeed, playing percussion brings subtlety, tone, texture, timbre, and pitch to your DrumKit sensibilities. The membranophones catch all the headlines and are the stereotypical image of a drummer but the idiophones (even on drumkit) are essential to a broad spectrum groove.

Mark Campbell, at Symmetrical Drumming, is a Drummer and a Percussionist and has 45 years experience in coaxing textured grooves out of dozens of percussion instruments…his first love was DrumKit…he's a fan of drummers such as, Stewart Copeland, Steve Gadd, Annika Nilles and online legend Emma Taylor.

Expanding your palette  from ‘just a drummer’ to a drummer that plays all the percussion instruments too, takes a lifetime.

And we have merely touched upon the arcane world of orchestral tuned percussion! The world encompassing marimbas, Timpani, huge bass drums, and tubular bells!

Mark at Symmetrical Drumming,  plays, teaches, composes-for, records, builds, repairs, and modifies Drumkits (Left Right and Symmetrical including pedals), Djembe, Conga (Quinto and Tumba), DunDuns, Bodhran, Cajon, Handpan and myriad handheld percussion including Agogo Bells, Clave, and Tamborim.

Get your drum tuned, repaired, tweaked to perfection and learn how to play it musically with touch and texture at:

https://symmetricaldrummingaustralia.org

Many thanks

Mark