Until very recently I was using the just about the biggest drum kit that I could buy. The biggest drum kit I could buy in 1984, when Van Halen were in the charts. And that was pretty big. I had a nine-piece white Maxwin kit. It started life as a 'Funky 405' kit with 12" x 8" and 13" x 9" rack toms; a 16" x 16" floor tom; a 22" x 14" bass drum; and a 14" x 5.5" steel Pearl snare drum.
In addition to the basic kit I had some 'melodic toms': a 8" x 5 1/2" and a 10" x 6 1/2" on one stand, and a 14" x 10" and a 15" x 12" on another stand. The toms and the bass drum all had Remo Black Spot skins fitted: an awesome, powerful rock-and-roll impact when hit squarely in the sweet (black) spot; but absolutely no subtlety or nuance. Hey, it was a single-skin kit! Who expects subtlety?
I also added a Pearl 14" x 8"" steel snare. No, that's not a misprint. Eight inches deep. No, it wasn't the deepest you could get: there was a Premier 14" x 9" brass and steel snare available at the time, but it sounded like you were forging horseshoes when you hit it. A lot of metal drum and not a lot of skin by comparison. At the time heavy metal ruled, and the dimensions of your drum kit were more important than the size of the aubergine stashed in your lycra jeans (Spinal Tap reference there...).
Maxwin was a brand name that was put on Pearl Forum series drums, which at the time (late 1970s, early 1980s) was their 'pile 'em high and flog 'em cheap' range of drums. They did use the Pearl hardware, which was always good. At the time nearly all stands were only single-braced, and a more (ahem!) physical drummer could expect to get through a few sets. By the time I acquired the kit, Pearl were doing double braced cymbal stands, so I bought a few and used the bottom halves for my rack toms. Big improvement.
I tended to use somewhere between seven and nine cymbals not including hi-hats. I had a mixture of Paiste, Sabian and Zildjian cymbals, ranging from a 6" Paiste splash cymbal up to the mighty Zildjian Earth Ride: 20" of un-milled, unfinished bronze that sounds a bit like hitting a pressed steel car wheel with a cricket bat whilst taking LSD inside a washing machine. Subtle it is not. Oh yes, I forgot. I don't do subtlety. Partly from memory (which is not the best), the complete list goes like this: 20" Zildjian Earth Ride; 20" Zildjian Avedis Heavy Ride; 20" Zildjian Avedis China Boy High; 18" Zildjian Avedis Rock Crash; 18" Paiste Fast Crash; 16" Paiste Medium Thin Crash; 16" Paiste Dark Crash; 8" Zildjian Ice Bell; 8" Sabian AAX Splash; 6" Paiste High Splash. I used either 14" Paiste 3000 Sound Edge (the bottom cymbal had a crinkle-cut edge) Hi-Hat cymbals, or 14" Zildjian A Hi-Hats, depending on the mood of the event. The Paistes were full-on mental, but then so was I, most of the time...
I used Ahead alloy sticks, the 'Matt Sorum' signature variant, which are apparently invisible to radar, like stealth bombers. They are virtually unbreakable: I broke loads... For more subtle playing, I also used a mixture of brushes, hotrods, soft-headed sticks (timpani mallets), rubber-headed mallets (glockenspiel & vibraphone sticks), and wooden sticks, principally Vic Firth 5As with nylon tips.
In the course of its illustrious career my old kit has been: dropped out of a window; thrown out of a moving van; set fire to; pissed on; puked into (no, really); immersed in the White Cart River during a flood; and been immersed in the contents of a backed-up sewer. It is old and past it, and it is embarrassing to play and inconveniently knackered to set up. So I bought a new one.
Equipment: modern
I now have a five-piece Tama Superstar kit in black (12" x 9" and 13" x 10" rack toms; 16" x 16" floor tom; 22" x 18" bass drum; 14" x 5 1/2" wooden snare), with a few old cymbals I didn't want to part with (6" Sabian splash; 16" Zildjian Medium Thin Crash; 18" Paiste Fast Cash), along with a set of Sabian AAX series cymbals (20" Stage Ride; 16" Stage Crash; 14" Stage Hi-hats). I also have a couple of LP cowbells, a couple of LP 'jam blocks' which are plastic replacements for wood blocks, and an LP tambourine mounted next to the hi-hats.
The Superstar has cast rims on the toms and snare. Cast rims do not bend as much as pressed rims, so they should keep their tuning better than other drums. The Superstar was the only kit in its price range which offered cast rims. The rack toms are mounted using the Star Cast system, which hangs the drums by the top rims rather than drilling the shell and attaching a conventional mount, which would affect the resonance of the shell. Again, the only kit in its class to offer this sort of system. Apparently the floor tom spurs have an air gap in the feet to isolate the drum from the damping effects of the ground, but I'll reserve judgement on that.
Technique: tuning
My old kit had single-skin toms, so tuning basically consisted of picking a note and setting the tension the same all round the head. I never really paid too much attention to tuning. Now that I have a kit with resonant skins I need to do it properly. I was taught classical percussion techniques as a schoolboy musician, so I know the theory, but I was amazed to discover how many drummers do not understand the fundamentals of tuning.
Terminology
Some terminology first:
The batter skin is the skin on the top of the drum which you hit with the drum stick.
The resonator skin is the skin on the bottom of the drum which you do not hit with the drum stick.
The shell is the body of the drum, made of wooden plies like plywood, but the plies are glued together round a mould to make a round plywood tube: this makes it much stronger than 'real' wood or bent plywood.
The bearing edge is the edge of the shell where the skin touches it.
The rim is the metal or plywood ring that holds the skin in place (wooden rims are built the same way as shells: one ply at a time round a mould).
Tuning screws go through holes in the rim and screw into the lugs to control the tension of the skins and therefore the tuning.
The lugs are attached to the shell and hold the rims and skins in place.
Sizing: a 12" x 9" drum has a shell with a 12" outside diameter and it is 9" deep between the top bearing edge and the bottom bearing edge. The deeper a drum is the louder it will be, but the less subtlety and dynamic range it will have. A 12" by 12" drum would be called 'square'; a 12" x 14" drum would be called 'over-square''; and a 12" x 9" drum would be called 'under-square'. Most drums are under-square since this gives greater dynamic range, but some rock drummers like a deeper drum for the extra brute volume.
Wood: The denser and stronger the wood you make the shell out of, the less wood you need to use. Less wood gives you more volume and resonance, but costs more. It's like buying a bicycle, I suppose: you spend more money to get less drum. The more holes you drill in the shell, the more you interfere with the resonance. This is why you want a drum that is hung by the rim, and is tensioned through the hardware rather than through the drum's shell. Hence my choice of the Tama Superstar.
How to use a drum key to tune a drum
You tension drum heads in a pattern in order to keep the tension constant. You start by tightening all the screws finger-tight so that the shoulder of the screw is touching the rim (the screws should always have washers fitted: this is important for maintaining a decent tune). Then you push down on the exact centre of the skin with your fist to seat the drum head properly. You finger-tighten the screws again. Then you start to tension them with your drum key (if you use two drum keys simultaneously it's even better).
Decide on a system to work around the drum head, and always stick to that system: that way, you won't get lost when someone distracts you and you end up tightening one screw twice and another not at all. You always tighten one screw and then the one opposite to it. I work from the top and bottom (12 and 6 o'clock positions) and go round clockwise for 6-lug drum shells (2 and 8 o'clock, then 4 and 10 o'clock). For 8-lug drum shells, you start at 12 and 6; then 3 and 9; then 1 1/2 and 7 1/2; then 4 1/2 and 10 1/2.
Tighten each screw half a turn each time until you get close to your desired tension, then use smaller increments like a quarter or an eighth of a turn each time. If you tune the drum too high, then do not tune back down: back off the tuning screws half a turn all the way round the drum and tune back up to your desired tension. Tuning down is an inaccurate way of setting the tension: always tune up to the note.
How a drum works
I know this sounds like a stupid thing even for a drummer to be saying, but this is probably a good point to discuss what happens when you hit a drum with a stick. The batter skin does not produce the majority of the sound of a drum: a lot of the sound of a drum comes from the shell and the resonant skin; and only a small part of this is transmitted by the physical contact of skin-on-drum. Most of the sound is generated by the movement and pressure of air inside the drum itself.
The initial movement of hitting the batter skin produces an air pressure wave which moves across the drum towards the resonator skin at the speed of sound (340.29 m/s at sea level, which is where I play most of my drums. I've played bass 8,236 feet up in the Rockies, but I'm strictly a sea level drummer). The resonator skin should, if tensioned correctly, take most of the energy of that pressure wave and reflect it back towards the batter skin. The batter skin should, again if tensioned correctly, then reflect the energy of that pressure wave back towards the resonator skin. Because you've got this air pressure wave 'bouncing' back and forth between the skins, you get a vibration, which if it is at the right frequency, will resonate with the shell of the drum.
This process is necessarily inefficient: the whole idea is to produce a sound, which disperses the energy outwards anyway, so the sound will die away, but an efficient (i.e. correct) drum tuning will 'ring' for longer because it uses the energy in the most efficient manner. That is why you tune a drum to resonate for the loudest, most sustained sound.
Tuning a drum (specifically a tom tom)
If you have a new drum, or are installing a new head, you need to bed in the head. Place the head on the drum, put the rim over the head and tighten it up as tight as you dare using the technique described above (I can't help you with this bit. Buy a few skins. Break them. It's all on the learning curve... All I can tell you is tighten the resonant skin to compensate for the extra tension and even out the stresses). Leave it there for 24 hours. Then take it off. Then re-fit it and tune it up.
Tuning the drum. Start with the resonant skin only (i.e. take the batter skin and the batter-side rim off the drum shell). The drum shell has several resonant frequencies (or notes), and the resonant skin should be tuned to one of them. If you're in a tight-assed funk band, tune the resonant skin to a high note that makes the shell 'ring' to a high note. If you're in a more raucous band called something like 'Oedipus and the Motherf***ers' (like I used to be), then you need a lower resonant note to match up to the shell's shape and size. You do not need to touch the resonant skins again once you're done.
Once you've tuned all your shells to similar resonant notes (slightly higher on the smaller drums, slightly lower on the bigger ones), put the batter skins on, and tune a set of notes you're happy with (I favour intervals of approximately major fourths for that 'suitcase falling down the stairs' sound (© Helen Reeves, 1997)). Do not adjust the resonant skins at this point! If you were happy with the sound of the resonant skins on their own, then you probably don't have an issue with resonant skin tension: sort out the batter skins. The batter skins will sound best tuned to a note that 'rings' with the rest of the drum, in much the same way that you tuned the resonant skins to 'ring' with the drum shell.
I should probably have mentioned earlier that drums don't exist in isolation: the room you are playing in is important to the sound. A bright sounding room (bare walls, no carpet, no sofas or beds) will sound very different to a more muffled environment like your living room with carpets, curtains, a three-piece suite and shelves of books to soak up the sound. I would tend to tune up in a bright-sounding room since most live venues are pretty un-cluttered, and every recording studio I've ever been in has a special bright-sounding corner or room for recording drums.
Snare drum
Tuning a snare is exactly the same as tuning a tom tom in terms of the resonator skin, but because you probably use the snare for more complex rhythms than the toms, you need to pay more attention to the batter skin. Most players favour quite a tight batter skin on the snare drum, and if you play with brushes or other types of softer sounding beaters, the texture of the skin surface is important too.
Snare drums are very shallow compared to toms, and that has a lot to do with the greater dynamic range of an under-square drum (which, as you remember, means less brute volume). In order to regain some of the volume, the snare drum has steel or brass wires stretched across the resonator skin which create a loud snapping noise when the skin moves against it. You've probably guessed by now that the tension of the snare wires is the crucial bit. You need the snares to resonate at a similar (or sympathetic) frequency to the resonator skin.
But there's a problem: if you want the snares to resonate with the rest of the drum, they're going to resonate with anything else that creates enough noise, like a bass or guitar amplifier, the bass drum, singing coming through the monitors. So you need to damp the snares in some way. Many snare drums are fitted with a batter-side damper built in, or else you can buy all sorts of specialist stuff to do the job (including the fantastically named 'Gorilla Snot' that Richard Colburn introduced me to). I tend to use a bit of gaffer tape on the edge of the batter skin if I have a snare buzz problem.
Bear in mind that you might want to use the snare drum with the snares switched off, so don't forget to try the drum that way when you're tuning up. I used to have a problem with my 14" x 5 1/2" Pearl snare where the drum sounded great with the snares switched on, but was virtually unusable switched off because they buzzed so badly. If I slackened off the snares so it didn't buzz when they were switched off, they buzzed when they were on. With hindsight and experience, I now realise that I should have put a different snare on the drum, either change the material (brass or aluminium) or change the number of strands, but hey, at the time it was an excuse to buy a bigger snare drum...
Bass (kick) drum
Tuning a bass drum uses the same principles, but the desired outcome is not the same. You don't want the bass drum to ring: you want a loud but punchy sound that dies away quickly. There are other factors at work too, like the amount of internal damping, and whether you have a port in the resonator skin. A further complication is the context: are you playing for recording; are you playing un-amplified in a small venue; or are you playing 'miked up' in a large venue? These contexts all require a different sound.
Let's start with the context. For recording, you want a controlled but natural sound from your bass drum. If you tune the drum using the principles described above, you should get a good natural sound with a balance of skin sound and wood sound. It's then up to your engineer to mike the drum properly to get the best out of it, and then use EQ to accentuate the resonant frequencies going down on tape (or DAT. Or CD. Or hard disk. Or whatever they use next...). The only variable you might have to worry about is damping: you need the drum to sound 'right' in the room, and depending on the size and the 'brightness' of the room you may need to add or remove damping (more on damping later, though).
For un-amplified live work you want volume, and plenty of it. If you're playing in anything bigger than your living room to more than twenty people, then forget about the size or 'brightness' of the room: the human body absorbs a ridiculous amount of sound energy and will make the room sound as dead as a doornail. Remember this when you're sound checking too: the sound in the empty venue will be completely different to the sound when it's full, and you'll be able to pump up the PA much louder in a full venue without feedback. Except you're not through the PA, so you need to batter away much harder. That's when you need to get the most volume out of your drums. Internal damping cuts down on ringing, but also cuts down the volume you produce, so don't worry too much about damping the bass drum for live work.
When you are playing miked up, you are looking for a completely different sound. You want a single, solid thump that stops dead as soon as it's hit. This is usually obtained with a slack batter skin and loads of damping. The problem there is that your pedal doesn't bounce back from the batter skin the way it usually does after you strike, so your double strikes and patterns don't feel the way they usually do and, in my case at least, there is more scope to mess them up hideously. Very loudly. In a big venue. In front of loads of people. Never mind, water under the bridge...
Damping and porting: Internal damping basically means putting a cushion, pillow, or bit of acoustic foam inside your drum; porting means making a hole in the resonator skin. Now let's examine how and why...
Damping: a drum skin resonates between any and all points of contact on the bearing edge. The longest wavelength (lowest note) available is between one side of the bearing edge and the exact opposite side, but it also resonates between shorter wavelengths like the distance from one lug of the drum to the next. Here comes the technical bit! Longer wavelengths require more energy to sustain them, so they die off sooner. Shorter wavelengths can sustain longer with the same amount of energy, so once the 'kick' sound has dissipated, the high-pitched ringing is still sustained. The high-pitched ringing comes from the edge of the skin, near the rim, so if you damp that bit of the skin, you should damp the shorter wavelengths without affecting the longer wavelengths too badly.
If you place a soft, sound-absorbent damper (a pillow, cushion, bit of acoustic foam) inside the drum touching the edge of the skin around maybe 60º of the circumference, it will effectively absorb all the high-pitched sound that rings round the edge of the skin, but will only minimally affect the low-pitched sound which is produced across the centre of the drum. Placing the damper against the batter skin affects the sound immediately it is produced, making it quieter and more controlled at source; placing the damper against the resonator skin takes less off the volume, but allows the drum to ring for a bit longer (it also sounds terrible from where you're sitting playing, facing the batter skin, but only you hear that: the sound from out front is usually quite acceptable, where the audience or the microphone is facing the resonator skin).
Porting: there are a number of good reasons to make a hole in the resonator skin of your bass drum; and there are a number of bad reasons too. If you make a hole the right size in the right place, it will take a lot of the high-pitched sound out of the resonant skin while accentuating the bottom-end 'kick'. This also makes a sound engineer-friendly place to mike up your bass drum. If you make a hole in the middle of the skin to make it look cool, you will kill the sound of your drum entirely.
There is a lot of extraordinarily boring mathematical theory surrounding the size a bass drum port, but since only about a quarter of drummers can read, and only about 2% of them passed their maths exams, I'm likely to be the only person to read this page who would understand it, so I'll not bother. All I will say is that the port allows a lot of the air moved by the batter skin to escape rather than rattle back and forth across the drum, thereby making the sound a lot sharper and crisper without sacrificing volume. When you're playing miked up, a port offers a good percussive slap of moving air to whatever microphone you place in front of it
For a fairly standard size of bass drum (22" diameter), you might want a port of 4" or 5" diameter. A 6" port is pushing the limits a little. 7" or more, and you might as well take the resonator skin off altogether: the hole is too big to allow the skin to move properly. If you put the port in the middle of the drum, you kill the deepest sound. If you put the port right at the edge of the skin, you make it structurally unsound, and it will rip. The right place is probably about 2-3" out from the edge of the skin, and traditionally it is placed near the bottom of the drum.
I have a 5" port in the resonator skin, and I use a small throw cushion from Ikea as a damper. I find the blue cushions give the best results. The cushion is held in place with hook-and-loop fastenings so I can remove it or adjust it through the port. Because there's likely to be a bit of traffic through the port, I use a 'Holz' hole reinforcer to stop the edges of the skin tearing.
