Why It Might Not Be Your Fault Your Drums Sound Bad…

I was on a gig recently where I was reminded that it isn’t always our fault if our drums don’t sound their best.

I tuned up my kit at home, got everything sounding good, and I set up at the venue. I started hitting the drums, listening as the sound echoed throughout the fairly large room. The rack tom sounded way lower than it did at home, and the floor tom sounded strange, and the snare had this weird hum going on. Everything sounded fine at home! I had even used that snare at a gig previously where it worked great. Why did the sound of the entire kit suddenly change on me?

This gig was teaching me yet another lesson on “tuning for the room.”

It’s basically a drumming truth that your kit will sound different in every room you play. That’s a given that we can’t avoid. What we have to do is learn how to adapt to different rooms, making the most out of our kit sound in less-than-ideal circumstances. Whether the room’s awkwardly small, there’s not really a dedicated front-of-house guy, the drums are enclosed in a shield…the list goes on. We have to adapt and make things work. Problem solving is what being a drummer is all about half of the time!

So what did I do to solve the issue? I ended up doing a few things…

I actually tuned my snare totally differently than I normally would have, and I discovered that a deader snare sounded great in that particular room, running through that particular system. I also ended up tuning the rack tom higher, and I had to mess with the floor tom for a while to find the sweet spot. I had to intentionally “mix myself” differently, going extremely light on cymbals, but heavy on kick and snare. I even added some tape to the cymbals to reduce certain frequencies.

The point is, I had to listen and do what worked best in that place, in that setup, playing that music. Be flexible! Always be open to adjusting your sound to make it work for that particular gig. If anything, you’ll learn a lot in the process.

Stephen