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Minneapolis, Minnesota (CNN) -- Jason Gerling always knew he would make a major impact as a musician.
An accomplished drummer, he was at the top of the local music scene in 1994, winning local drumming competitions and performing regularly at hot spots in the Twin Cities.
He was 23 years old, and planned to move to New York, or perhaps Nashville, to launch his music career.
Then one night, everything changed.
Heading home from a late night gig, Gerling fell asleep at the wheel.
"The car flipped over five or six times, that's what they told me," he said. "They said I looked like something out of a horror movie ... They had to use the jaws of life to snip through the car doors to get me out."
He was lucky to be alive. But then came the bad news.
"[The doctors] said 'you're probably never going to walk and probably never going to play the drums again,'" he remembered.
"It was like a nuclear bomb was dropped on my life. I thought my career was over."
The accident had left him paralyzed from the chest down.
Gerling refused to give up his passion from drumming. Within a few years, he regained the use of his arms.
But he never got back the use of his legs. To this day, Gerling remains in a wheelchair.
That has hampered his ability to play a drum set which requires a foot pedal to operate the bass drum and the hi-hat cymbal.
For a while, he got by with a special setup that triggered a bass drum noise when he hit a certain pad with a drumstick.
That didn't cut it for Gerling.
So he invented a system that allows him to trigger a bass drum sound while continuing to play the snares, cymbals, and the rest of the drum set.
