I recently played a gig in the most “live” room I’ve ever played in. When I say live, I mean that the room is very loud, reverberant, and there’s nothing in it to absorb sound. The opposite of this would be playing in a closet where all the clothes make the room extremely dead. You get the picture.

The problem, though, wasn’t just that this room was very live. It was also very small. While I was setting up I placed my foot on my hihat stand to close the hats, and the hihat chick echoed right back to me off the back wall. I was also set up in a cube-shaped nook in the corner of this venue, so the drums sounded a little like they were in a bathroom. If you know anything about room acoustics, you know that a cube-shaped room is the absolute worst shape a room could be. Weird things happen to the low end, and the high end gets slapped around in annoying ways. Basically this setup was becoming the perfect storm of everything you...