Rock and Roll Drums: All You Need to Know | Hacker News Reader

Rock and Roll Drums: All You Need to Know

schoolofrock.com

84 pointsakbarnama53 comments

Okay, they really did themselves in by mentioning examples because all I can think about now are some of my favorites they didn't mention. One of my favorite breakdowns of not only drums but also the writing and recording process is Donald Fagen, Walter Becker, and Bernard Purdie talking about the drums on "Home At Last" off the Aja album[0]. Not going to debate if Aja is actually a rock album in the classic School of Rock sense but, my god, what a great track and drum part.

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ldtieSEyQM

Steely Dan has had a lot of great drums on their records! Guitars and bass too. Their song FM is just brilliant...

Steely Dan spent over $100K in the 1970s to have a more accurate atomic clock invented to improve their own drum sequencer's timing. The "drum machine" itself may have been invented for them. They wanted to be able to fiddle with each drum hit individually to avoid multiple takes.

In some interview I read, Donald Fagen or one of his session leaders mentioned that he liked working with LA drummers better because they almost all had trailers to carry their larger sets and were pros about coming on time and setting up quickly, whereas their NYC counterparts tended to have major issues getting their gear out of storage and transporting it to the studio in a timely manner.

As for faves not mentioned: Alex Van Halen, Britt Walford of Slint and the Breeders, Bill Stevenson of Black Flag, Earl Hudson from Bad Brains, and Dave Lombardo and Paul Bostaph from Slayer.

One more thing you'll need to know: you'll need a big car. Also, your garage will probably be the band's practice space.

I played professionally while driving a Camry! A 20” kick drum and a mic for it is all you need, and that fits in the back seat of a Camry. Everything else can go in the trunk, at least with a reasonably-sized kit.

Same, but a two door '89 Grand Am with a 24" Kick drum in the front passenger seat.

Gigging with a 24” kick drum is something I will never do

One thing to note is that "big car" is not a universal classifier. To a Canadian or American, Camry is not a big car. To many Europeans, Camry is a mind boggingly MASSIVE car :->

Lugging drums around is the biggest pain of playing drums - set up, tear down, etc. Don’t forget packing a carpet too!

Or playing any instrument in a band that also has a drummer. I’ve never played drums but I have set up/packed up/wrangled many dozens (hundreds?) of drum kits

That's what a backline is for! Don't love playing a different kit than my own but sure beats having to bring everything.

Exactly. If you have a solid monitor tech and in ears, you're barely going to notice the difference.

A Honda Jazz (Fit) will hold a kit easily with the back seats down, and not-so-easily with the back seats up.

I'm a gigging jazz drummer and just cause you mentioned "with the back seats down", I gotta say: I always wish there was a car that was optimized / defaulted to having the back seats down. But in a pinch, on those rare occasions where you actually have more than two people in your car, you could pop some seats up.

Every car I get (currently have an Hyundai Elantra GT), I end up with the back seats down 75% of the time, and it just looks crappy. If the default mode was back-seats-down, with no big seams or gaps or unlevel parts, I'd be in heaven.

The Jazz's seats would fold completely flat, and I just left them like that most of the time. But if you cared about looks it wasn't the car to get anyway.

I run community drumming workshops where each participant gets a single kit drum (snare, tom or bass) strapped to them. We strip the resonant heads and mounting hardware off the drums so they nest inside each other. My Jazz (Fit) will hold enough drums to run a medium sized workshop: five bass drums, five floor toms, five rack toms, five snares, and a bag of sticks/straps/cowbells/blocks/other misc equipment. It's truly a Tardis of a car :)

My dad used to tell me to buy a van because I'm always hauling around drums but I never did. I could always manage to fit my 4 piece kit (with 20" deep bass drum) in any old sedan type car, including a small 03 Jetta.

>>>> How much do drums cost?

Not much, until you get to the cymbals.

Most of the drummers I've worked with are willing to put up with pretty much any drums, but always bring their own bag of cymbals. I don't think it's just a portability issue.

The drums themselves get to a point where it is diminishing returns on sound as you get more expensive. But you can always get another cymbal to fill a niche!

No, it's very much a taste thing and not about portability.

I sometimes work backline for festivals, and we usually will have an acrolite and whatever snare came with the shells (which are usually mid-line pro kits). The company has a black beauty and some other nicer stuff as well.

We also bring a fairly complete set of Zildgian A and a set of K.

Rarely do we pull that stuff out. Drummers almost bring their own cymbals, snare, and pedal. If they are flying in, usually they will still bring their brass.

I'd like to see some more science behind the claims about frequency responses of different types of wood. While they must resonate differently, I'm very skeptical of the claim that this leads to a qualitatively different sound.

edit: I will say there is an obvious influence of the wood type on the drums' response to temperature changes, and thus their tuning, so to the extent that that influences things, yes, there will be a difference. I'd like to see experiments controlling for all except wood type, however.

I'm not a drummer, but the ones that I know (some professional session musicians and audio engineers) seem to agree with you. It all comes down to heads and tension (and the person playing, of course).

However, I do wonder about snare drums. I've heard a few different Noble & Cooley snares in studio settings, and the wood vs metal definitely sounded a lot different. But they _did_ have different heads on them...

Wood vs Metal snare drums sound way different even with the same heads on them. There is definitely a difference from the construction of the shell. (I left a comment higher up too but snare drums are just so obviously different based on the material)

Metals sound extremely different too.

I've got two snares, an aluminum Acrolite and a steel unknown-origin snare, and the character of each is extremely different.

I ran sound for a band where my roommate played drums, and he had a Noble and Cooley snare. But not just any Noble and Cooley… he had one of the Zildjian bronze snares. Those are rare in part because they can crack… and I'll tell you, the backbeat on that thing could absolutely take your head clean off. Diabolical. I imagine that they're so scarce because they simply explode onstage, killing everyone :D

I see there's one on Reverb for sale. AS DESCRIBED (so, use your eyes to see if there's a crack because no backsies) and still, $5,577.75 and $272 just to ship it. I can well believe it.

I am a former pro drummer (now a programmer which is why I hang out here)

The wood definitely matters. Beginner kits are usually made out of poplar and even with good heads and tuning they just sound bad compared to a kit made with a wood known to sound better. Maple and birch are quite popular, oak, bubinga, and ash all make appearances on high-end drum sets. I used to work in a music store and saw a lot of drum kits come through, and high-end kits even with the same heads and tuning as low end kits do just sound better.

Also, in the rest of musical instruments, particular woods are valued for their acoustic properties especially on string instruments. So I don’t think it is that far-fetched to say that it makes a difference in drums too, unless you also want to argue that an acoustic guitar made of particle board vs one made of maple are the same. (They do not sound the same at all)

I don’t think the shell material matters in most rock drumming.

If all your drums are wearing pinstripes and are covered in moongel, your bass drum has a duvet in it, everything is close-miced and heavily EQ’d, etc, I’ll bet there’s no discernible difference between exotic wood types, or even other shell materials.

Nobody can tell that Danny Carey’s shells are forged from melted down Paiste cymbals. After all is said and done, it sounds the same as his older bubinga kit.

Most of the sound is going to come from heads, tuning, technique, microphones, mixing, the room, etc.

Hell, I bet even the bearing edge accounts for more sonic difference than shell material.

This is semi-true. It all depends on what kind of music you are playing and how the kit is being mic'd. If you are close micing a kit. Then it really doesn't matter what the drums are made of. I have an old 1984 Tama kit with shit wood. But since I play rock and close mic it. It sounds great on recordings. Now the one thing you can't fix with close micing and EQ is your snare. No matter what I did I couldn't get any of my snares to sound good. I finally got a custom hammered brass snare and it made a HUGE difference. Now if I wanted to do rock but capture more of the drums natural sound. Like the low tones of the rack and floor toms or the front of a bass drum with no hole in the head. You really need to have drums with top notch wood. Plus you combine that with a good high ceiling room. You get some really nice sounding drums.

I'm a drummer but not a gear head. Tuning matters more than type of wood (assuming we're not talking about other materials like metal or acrylic.) You can make pretty much any drum sound good if you put a decent set of heads on it and tune it right.

Very true (rookie drummer here). I find de-tuning also important, for example to obtain a fatter sound by having tuning pegs set in a slightly different way in order to create more harmonics and also dampening the natural resonance and reduce sustain. This is highly subjective though, as many drummers probably would aim to longer sustain and perfectly tuned pieces.

Yeah sometimes detuning one tension rod makes for a cool sound. My rough tuning pass is to crank the snare and tighten everything else until it just starts to resonate. Fine adjustments from there.

Same applies to other instruments like violins. There’s a reason certain types of wood are sought after.

Drums really fascinated me since the first day I got to sit behind a kit that one saturday morning in october 2002 and ended changing my life.

It's a "meta-instrument" instrument that has a level of customization to the individual that no other instrument goes near - in many cases you can tell a famous drummer just by looking at the disposition of their set! In many other instruments it's the player who has to adapt to said instrument, but with drums it happens quite the opposite.

Despite its avant-garde and ever-evolving nature, sometimes it baffles me that it's us players who sometimes haven't kept "in time" (no pun intended) with the instrument. I find it weird that the main reason people play hi hats cross-handed it's because a limitation in the hardware, namely the hi hat stand. Granted, there are now remote stands and you could place it almost anywhere, but they are still quite rare (and apparently even more expensive) and people just got along with the idea of having to play one of the most used pieces in the kit, precisely in rock styles, in a counter-intuitive place.

I think Bill Bruford could solve that drum layout issue perfectly, having his hats exactly on front on him and allowing him to be easily reachable with both hands without something else getting in the way (like Danny Carey). Alas it hasn't catched on because, again, people got so used to have their hi hats in a weird place that I bet many think that _it's the way we are intended to set our drums_.

Other of the head-scratching issues that even a century later is still alive is the stick grip thing. For many years they taught people traditional grip and told them that's the intended way to play drums (there's a funny rant from Buddy Rich around youtube about that matter), but as with the rise of rock styles people found that playing with a matched grip allowed them to play with more power, now they are telling people that playing matched is _the superior way_ to play drums (people of the likes of Thomas Lang, Matt Gartska and even the youtuber "the 80/20 drummer" are behind that idea).

But in reality even that comes down to the individual. I for one played with matched grip for 16 years and despite how much I did for my weak hand at the end I found my body is just not symmetrical. There's some tension in the tendons of my left hand it won't ever let me go anywhere near the flexibility of my right hand and feeling tension even when playing double strokes, no matter how relaxed. Re-discovering traditional grip was a moment of enlightenment for me and now I can't understand why people try to impose things as a grip as some sort of universal condition in the world of one of the most (if not the most) customizable musical instruments.

Most of the time, the rock drums you hear are recorded in the studio. This will sound different from live drums.

My experience mixing drums is limited… the way I’ve done it is by starting with overhead microphones to capture the sound of the full kit. This sounds kinda like what you hear live. I then mix in kick mics and snare mics, and run those through compressors and EQ. The compression you put on the kick and snare is a big chunk of the formula for getting drums to sound like rock drums. I was shocked the first time I heard it, because it goes from sounding like drums to sounding like rock drums.

Rock and roll has a very compressed sound to it. In the 1960s and 1970s it was a matter of necessity—you compressed so you could record a clean signal on tape, and then compressed some more because you liked it. Nowadays we use software to get similar results, either through emulations or new designs.

Turning up the volume a whole lot can help a mediocre guitar player sound somewhat competent.

This does not apply to drums.

(source: crappy drummer me)

Really? I feel the opposite. All the poor string muting really shines through :(

(source: crappy guitarist me)

I think this says more about the general state of guitar playing than anything else.

The converse is also true, and applies to both guitar and drums. Being able to play quietly, with intensity and energy, is one of the hallmarks of a better player. "Good player but plays too loud" is a euphemism for "bad player."

Preserving your hearing is a factor.

Source: Bassist. ;-)

I’ve found the opposite. Turning down the volume helps tremendously. The further from 11 you get, the better a bad player sounds.

> I'd give my right arm to be ambidextrous — Bill Bruford https://billbruford.com/wp-content/uploads/2017/10/interview...

Would be nice to see something about amplifying and recording drums.

Do a search for "drum miking", there's a lot of material out there along with articles about experimenting various techniques.

I swear by the Glyn Johns technique if you need something relatively simple!

https://musictech.com/tutorials/technique-of-the-week-glyn-j...

Glyn Johns setup made my drums sound alive. Such a basic setup but it does so much. Makes small rooms sound bigger too.

From my insignificant experience as an amateur recording engineer, drums can be effectively mic'd with as few as one or two mics or as many as twenty. A bare-bones rock recording setup might have a single overhead condenser mic capturing the cymbals and shell drums (snare and toms) and a dynamic mic pointed at the outer head of the kick drum. Regarding the choice of microphone, condenser mics have better sensitivity and fidelity at high frequencies (cymbals produce harmonics that extend well past the upper limit of human hearing); dynamic mics perform better at high amplitude.

A four-mic setup will have two overhead mics for stereo imaging and another dynamic mic on the snare drum; I would consider this the minimum for achieving a professional sound. Most mics introduced after this point will be additional spot mics like those already on the kick and snare drums; most drum sets will have two or more tom drums which benefit from a close-mic, and it is very common to mic the bottom head of the snare drum, against which the wires rattle, to combine with the more percussive sound of the top head.

My personal experience (and amount of equipment) runs out at this point; but one might add additional overhead microphones, or place microphones elsewhere in the room to capture more of the natural ambiance. A maximally-mic'd up drum set might have clip-on mics on the top and bottom of every shell drum (including the kick), two or three distinct models and placements of microphone on the snare, and spot mics for groups or even individual cymbals in addition to the overheads.

Regardless of the number of mics, the overhead microphones provide the foundational sound, and the spot mics sweeten the result. A comprehensive description of drum mixing goes beyond the scope of this comment, and for that matter I can only speak of how I mix drums for rock music. I would begin with compressing the feed from the overheads to bring forward the cymbals and the ringing of the snare, and then add punch from the spot mics. It's generally impossible to completely eliminate bleed between microphones, but isolation can be achieved in effect by gating the feed - muting the signal from a spot mic when it falls below a certain threshold. This way you can, say, run the feed from the snare through your favorite distortion effect without also amplifying the bleed from the cymbals that lies between them.

Modern day recording techniques are much different than older, but that would make sense. Listen to some Led Zepplin compared to how it’s done now. John Bonham recordings sound like your in the room of a drummer where Danny Carey recordings sound like you are the drums. I’ve been fascinated with this topic after spending too much time with recording studio types

This is very true. When I first heard The Darkness's I Believe In a Thing Called Love, I figured it was some track from the 80s I'd missed the first time around. There were a lot of those, after all. When I discovered how relatively recent it actually was I was quite surprised. Then I went back and listened to it again, and realized that since I'd first heard it I'd learned a ton about recording techniques. There's no way a recording from the 80s would have drums sound like that. They just didn't record or mix them that way back then.

Slightly OT: Been wanting to get back into drums after a ~15 year hiatus. Electric kits still seem pretty pricy - does HN have any recs?

I bought one of the Alesis kits (the Nitro Mesh kit I believe its called) this Christmas (guess why) since some of my drum friends (I'm a bassist) had positive things to say about them. They've been a riot so far, the hardware quality is plenty good for a bunch of hacks banging around on them, lots of good samples in the controller. I have played some of the really cheap Simmons branded ones, which were also a lot of fun but these are more fun for not much more money.

I think alesis can be found used for $200ish, roland vdrum is usually 500 to 900.

I think most people prefer mesh rather than rubber, but with a bit of luck and patience you can find a good budget used kit.

Three general thoughts.

As a honkytonk sound guy I love good electric kits, but I have subs. They work great, though perhaps I'm just running into the really good kits.

I know a pro drummer who gave himself tendonitis from the rubber head kits, and having owned an octapad and similar triggers, I don't think I'd want to own anything that isn't a mesh headed kit.

I live in an apartment and have thought about getting one so I can rehearse a band in headphones, but they can often be quite loud just hitting em and they transmit noise through the structure. I don't think my downstairs neighbors would be okay with it; I don't enjoy it when their kiddos sometimes slam kitchen cabinets. So if that is your motivation, you might be careful about that.

My son had an electronic kit in our apartment. I made a tennis ball riser for him, which seems to have helped with noise. Here's an example (although I used pool noodles as well): https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dcPE_lTga-A

The Octapad can be improved immensely by adding an external mesh headed snare trigger, plus a cymbal pad for the hi hat so you can play with the hat in the traditional position. That's the setup I use at home - it's super compact and easy to put away when needed.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com