Drum Related

Another thing worth mentioning about acoustics is how playing in different rooms with different monitoring systems (or lack there of!) can really affect a performance.

I’ve played many gigs in many places and have learned to deal with many situations with regards to sound, but when they catch you off guard it can be VERY off putting and can really affect your performance (and usually not in a good way!)

If the sound on stage is great it’s very easy to play well as there are very few distractions, but when the sound is nasty it can have disastrous effects. For example, I played a set years ago for a friend of mine back in high school. We hadn’t really rehearsed at all and we were due to play a few songs in front of a live audience for a school showcase in the main hall. As many of you will know school halls are renowned for being “boomy” and “echoey” and not really great for sound. On the night the drums were set back behind the p.a. speakers and there were no monitor (NOT GOOD!) and all the other guys playing were in front of me AND the speakers. Basically, I just had to play the songs from memory and have no real clue as to what else was going on. I couldn’t hear them at all, and what little sound hit me was whatever had rebounded off of the back wall and come back, so there was a delay! They had their backs to me so I couldn’t even lip read the singer to tell whether or not they were in the same place in the song! If anyone would have made a mistake I wouldn’t have known and couldn’t have compensated! To cut a long story short, we played, and it was pretty bad! I just had to play and hope for the best. It’s SOOO hard to play a track when you can’t actually HEAR anything! Monitors are very important in such a set up. If it were a smaller room it wouldn’t have mattered as much because the sound would have been all around, but as it was a big hall the sound was just bounced around and lost.

With the band I’m currently in it’s not usually necessary for me to have my own monitor as the singers’ monitors are at the front and just fine for me.  However a gig I did recently I was sat right next to the sax players (who have their monitors up very loud!) and I was unable to hear the singers’ monitors because of the style of the room. I couldn’t hear the guitar or vocals. All I could hear was sax! Also, because the room was pretty big and bare with high ceilings I had to play real quiet as my drums were very boomy. With all this combined I found it hard to play how I normally would and therefore, for me anyway, the gig didn’t go all too well!

These kind of situations are things that you should be aware of if you are, or thinking about becoming, a gigging drummer. People generally just think that if they can play it in their room or studio then all will be well on the night. But this is far from true. Many things can affect your playing, and sound is most definitely one of the biggies!!

If you have more of a purpose built room you can add acoustic tiles to the walls. They can be the “spikey” or “egg box” style foam tiles that people often mistake for “sound proofing”. These tiles can very in size and density, but basically, the thicker they are the more “bass” low frequencies they cut out. The thinner they are the more “treble” or high frequencies they cut out. If you are gonna do this, just randomly dot them around the room. I’m certainly no expert on the matter, but I’ve read that you’re better off completely deadening one wall than you are dotting them around. I personally like to deaden the wall the drums are facing, then slightly deaden the two side walls, and leave the back wall slightly more open. I think it gives quite a nice balanced sound. Having said that, with acoustics, you have to take into account the size and shape of the room. It can get very complex and people who specialize in it for a living can make a pretty good one! 

Bass gets trapped and hangs around in corners, so it’s advisable NOT to have your seated position in a corner, as you’ll get a very uneven and distorted sound. It’s a good idea to dampen down the toms and bass drum in some instances, as they will be far to “ringy” even if you treat the room. A pillow in the bass drum usually works a treat and a bit of carpet tape on the toms works well too.

A BIG kit in a small room is not recommended as the sound will be almost unbearable! The same goes for big cymbals. Small room = small kit.

Now, I’m no physicist, so I’m not gonna bombard you with figures and formulas. Like the sound proofing article, I’m aiming to giving you some simple, practical, everyday, D.I.Y ideas.

Sorting out “acoustics” basically aids with the quality of sound being delivered to the ear by reducing certain frequencies within a room. For example, in an old style church it’s likely to be VERY “echoey”.  This is because there are little to no soft furnishings to absorb some of the sound. The walls are usually made of stone and are bare, the floors are the same and the ceiling is usually bare wood. The pews are also made of solid bare wood, and all of these things just reflect or “bounce” the sound straight back off and round the room!

As much as carpet is bad in the way it can take away the rich sound of the drums, sometimes it’s the lesser of the two evils when it comes to tiled floors! If you have a kit in a room with bare walls and bare floors it’s gonna sound pretty nasty. If you have wooden or tiled floors try to bring some form of soft furnishing into the room with regards to sofas, armchairs and cushions. Another good concept is to hang frame-less pictures or coloured canvass on the walls. (You can class it as “modern art”!) This will help to absorb some sound and especially trap bass.