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...

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...