Absolutly amazed to see this article on Hacker News.
This guy (the author) is the real deal. I once had the pleasure to visit his workshop and he had me test a bass drum he recently made. An amazing piece indeed. Just a gentle tap from the beater and it produced a rich and powerful but quiet sound!
I often hear famous and extraordinary drummers on Youtube state that playing quiet is a skill every drummer can acquire. Yes, but no: It really does depend on the instrument as well if that sounds good! And most drums just aren’t made for it.
I'm glad that the "loudness war" in general seems to be over, and people focus more on quality, mixing and mastering rather than making things sound as loud as possible, especially when it comes to electronic music. Similarly as what you said, you know when a mix is very well made when it sounds good when you're playing it on low volume, not when it sounds good on high volume.
Drum sets are pretty weird in general. I play the drums but I don't know much about their history or development and I've always felt the kit feels like an arbitrary arrangement of circles for me to hit. There's nothing "unifying" about it for want of a better term.
I was a pro drummer for years. There is a general balance of factors:
- history, drum set evolved kind of organically bringing marching band percussion, orchestral percussion and other drums into the theater / concert halls / dance halls
As a consequence things like temple blocks were often placed above the bass drum which, before toms were really a thing. They were loosely pitched in similar way.
As the drums evolved they became a thing unto themselves and not just a collection of percussion instruments.
3 or more toms was rare historically. The "floor Tom" and "high tom" allowed a drummer to make a high and a low sound with their hands, which has numerous musical applications
Then as kits got more toms key factors become:
- reach (you cannot fit a low tom above a bass drum)
- style: rock generally suited looser and lower tension tunings, bigger drums, jazz tended to be more tightly tuned toms, and smaller sized drums, more open resonance, pop and funk generally wanted more dampened staccato sounds.
- feel. Drummers balance tuning of their drums with how it feels to play. You will not pick a tuning that feels bad, or sounds bad to you.
- mountings: you can either mount toms directly on bass drum, with legs on the floor or off cymbal stands (and the latter option was bolstered by modern hardware), but so to balance space, mount points and reach there isn't really many other places for them to go.
I'm being brief here, and the musical motivation was sort of natural and evolutionary and not prescribed by music theory.
Finally, if you play tuned percussion like timpani, you go to great lengths to retune them quickly between different passages and pieces. You cannot re-tune toms to an exact pitch while playing it with 4 limbs, and so it would be repeatedly out of tune with the music, and that would be worse than the approximate high mid low you get today!
That's my impression, too. I once did some research on toms for some audio code.
Toms are pretty tonal, as far as drums go, yet, as far as I could tell from my research there's no standard tuning for them. That would make sense if pop musicians all tuned their toms according to the music they were playing, but to the extent that they do, the tunings I read about were mostly flakey (ie: ungrounded in music theory)
The history here seems a bit cherry-picked and rock-focused. Hard to imagine that a lot of the work in establishing tom dimensions wouldn't have happened during the big band era, especially since for quite a while drummers were often the band leaders and there were even staged drum battles. Louie Bellson in particular had some epic drum sets with double bass drums and odd tom arrangements.
Well in fairness Jazz went small ensembles and kits before Rock metastisized?
I'd say the modern mainstream jazz aesthetic is you bring you symbols and play with whatever drums are at the gig, and toms, at least beyond one floor and one rack, are gauche.
> Just as guitarists have cut back on amp power and now focus on tone
As much as I would like to think that this is true, all the concerts I went to prior to Covid had WAAAAAY too much freakin' bass. These were bands with vocal and guitar gods and the bass was cranked up to like 9000 such that you could barely make out the vocals and guitars if the bass was playing.
The best audio at a concert I had was the one where the house amplification system died, and band had to play with their on-stage amplification and nothing else. The sound from the band was amazing--the vocals were clear, the guitar parts were articulated, and the bass and drums were reasonable.
Funny how the bass levels are something reasonable when the bass player has to stand in front of the bass amplifier.
To be fair, I'm being a touch uncharitable. Most of the fault lies with the person running the sound mixing board. It seems most sound mixers are so used to dance, pop and rap that they can't conceive of the idea that something other than bass and drums exists in music. It also doesn't help that modern solid-state amplifiers can drive amazingly low frequencies and really high amplitudes that the old tube amplifiers with transformers simply couldn't deal with.
This is one of the reasons I always wear ear protection when going to live concerts. With the right kind of earplugs you can have very clear sound and in a way hear the vocals and guitars better than without. It also comes with the added benefit of no ringing ears in the morning.
I started doing it after the doctor at my annual medical check mentioned I had frequency loss at 24 years old that he would associate with a 40 year old. Should probably have worn ear protection earlier... But wearing them consistently helped a lot because the measurements were mostly "normal" now 10 years later.
In my experience, it depends on the band and the venue. Indoor venues are a lot harder to get the bass resonance right. I don't think I've ever had bad sound (for whatever style of music was being performed) at an outdoor venue. One band I saw at both an indoor and outdoor venue. At the indoor venue, the sound was a constant woom-woom of bass resonance from the kick drum, with the snare poking through. At the outdoor venue, I was able to hear all the instruments well balanced with one another.
I think the bass and drums in live performances are intentionally exaggerated to make people feel more 'part of the music', by having their bodies vibrate to it.
Many years ago I went to a Fun Lovin' Criminals gig that was completely ruined by the idiot sound guys: way too much bass and way too much drums (bass drum in particular). Given that Huey's main vocal style is low-pitched chilled out rapping it meant that you could barely hear anything he was singing. I was really pissed off. Easily one of the worst gigs I've ever attended, and this is including pub and small club bands, but it wasn't the band's fault at all: they were absolutely tight.
Interestingly, that used to be the rule rather than the exception… at the time when rock bands grew in importance to dominate the music scene and built an industry to sell their products to listeners.
Back when people went completely nuts for rock music, the PAs were generally so inadequate that they were just for vocals, and monitoring wasn't really a thing. Most gigs of the era ran off each instrument generating its own stage volume, hence the Marshall stacks and such.
The Grateful Dead famously scaled this concept up to insane heights with the Wall Of Sound system, where each instrument and voice had its own speaker stacks even at stadium levels. It really worked exceptionally well, but was cumbersome and didn't last that long.
This can be done in electronic genres, as well: it just isn't, for the most part. I daresay there have been sound installations that did it.
>> As much as I would like to think that this is true, all the concerts I went to prior to Covid had WAAAAAY too much freakin' bass. These were bands with vocal and guitar gods and the bass was cranked up to like 9000 such that you could barely make out the vocals and guitars if the bass was playing.
That's not a band. That's a bunch of people playing at the same time.
Well it’s also about who goes to concerts. Unless you have the audience etiquette of a symphony orchestra, you’re going to be able to hear the actual music much better on the recording. So people who want the bass and the dancing and the sweaty libido go to the concerts and the people who are most interested in the actual waveform listen at home (except for unamplified acoustic music).
I tried to find the answer in the text but wasn't able to. It seems to be stuffed to the extreme with related information and anecdotes. Making the central point almost impossible to grasp. If it is in there at all. As I said, I could not find it.
Was text written like this before the days of SEO?
As a (wannabe) prog rock drummer I prefer to damp toms a lot to reduce their decay, so that their tonal characteristics while remaining audible don't get in the way of other instruments. Jazz drummers will probably (and rightfully) disagree.
My summer semi-fun project is to experiment with building Tabla [1], the most popular of South Asian percussion instruments. I will make the wooden base, while the membrane will be made and fitted by a professional Tabla maker.
So my principal task is to understand the physics of the depth, radius and other features of the base. This I will do both theoretically and experimentally to see how well I can model and predict. I would appreciate thoughts on the matter.
One thing cool about Rick is he has access to a lot of original multitrack recordings and can solo tracks to isolate them, even on older stuff like John Bonham/Led Zepplin like in the above video to isolate drum tracks.
The title doesn’t match the article. It’s not about why toms descend in tone (typically - unless you are Jimmy Chamberlain and a handful of others). It’s about why toms have variable lengths.
The thrill of a percussionist striving against physical limits is real, but the absolute sound pressure level produced depends on the limits of the total instrument. Consider a conga player slamming as hard as they can, versus a rock drummer flamming with both sticks on a snare drum.
I'm not sure that it's possible to design something that sounds like a traditional rock drum kit that doesn't cause hearing damage when a drummer is mashing. It requires a different percussion instrument.
Back when I was a kid, I made a four-tom drumkit out of a normal kit by sawing all the toms in half and making them shallow single-headed drums :)
I would love to have a 'pancake' kit with all the drums double-headed but shallow. Maybe someday I'll try to get that made. The article suggests you could simply do that: everything gets the same very shallow drum depth, like a kit composed of snares without snare wires.
On a related note, anyone have insight into the purpose of crash and ride cymbals? They seem unnecessary to me (i.e., I think I would like a song just as much without them, if not more), but I've failed to find much to educate myself on the topic in the past.
I hope I don't get downvoted for this. I'd really like to know.
I don't really understand the question because they both seem so essential to me. I'd say very often the ride cymbal keeps your basic groove. Especially in latin-jazz, if it's a swing or salsa pattern or whatever, the ride drives that pattern continuously. Which helps the band (and listeners) stay in sync with the groove, and lulls you into hypnosis with the repetition, and sounds super cool imo. Whereas the crash adds hype/power/emphasis to your important moments.
danck|4 years ago
This guy (the author) is the real deal. I once had the pleasure to visit his workshop and he had me test a bass drum he recently made. An amazing piece indeed. Just a gentle tap from the beater and it produced a rich and powerful but quiet sound!
I often hear famous and extraordinary drummers on Youtube state that playing quiet is a skill every drummer can acquire. Yes, but no: It really does depend on the instrument as well if that sounds good! And most drums just aren’t made for it.
capableweb|4 years ago
monkeyfacebag|4 years ago
sammorrowdrums|4 years ago
- history, drum set evolved kind of organically bringing marching band percussion, orchestral percussion and other drums into the theater / concert halls / dance halls
As a consequence things like temple blocks were often placed above the bass drum which, before toms were really a thing. They were loosely pitched in similar way.
As the drums evolved they became a thing unto themselves and not just a collection of percussion instruments.
3 or more toms was rare historically. The "floor Tom" and "high tom" allowed a drummer to make a high and a low sound with their hands, which has numerous musical applications
Then as kits got more toms key factors become:
- reach (you cannot fit a low tom above a bass drum)
- style: rock generally suited looser and lower tension tunings, bigger drums, jazz tended to be more tightly tuned toms, and smaller sized drums, more open resonance, pop and funk generally wanted more dampened staccato sounds.
- feel. Drummers balance tuning of their drums with how it feels to play. You will not pick a tuning that feels bad, or sounds bad to you.
- mountings: you can either mount toms directly on bass drum, with legs on the floor or off cymbal stands (and the latter option was bolstered by modern hardware), but so to balance space, mount points and reach there isn't really many other places for them to go.
I'm being brief here, and the musical motivation was sort of natural and evolutionary and not prescribed by music theory.
Finally, if you play tuned percussion like timpani, you go to great lengths to retune them quickly between different passages and pieces. You cannot re-tune toms to an exact pitch while playing it with 4 limbs, and so it would be repeatedly out of tune with the music, and that would be worse than the approximate high mid low you get today!
Hope that makes some sense.
uniqueid|4 years ago
Toms are pretty tonal, as far as drums go, yet, as far as I could tell from my research there's no standard tuning for them. That would make sense if pop musicians all tuned their toms according to the music they were playing, but to the extent that they do, the tunings I read about were mostly flakey (ie: ungrounded in music theory)
horsestaple|4 years ago
daviddaviddavid|4 years ago
https://louiebellson.info/early-drumsets
Ericson2314|4 years ago
I'd say the modern mainstream jazz aesthetic is you bring you symbols and play with whatever drums are at the gig, and toms, at least beyond one floor and one rack, are gauche.
bsder|4 years ago
As much as I would like to think that this is true, all the concerts I went to prior to Covid had WAAAAAY too much freakin' bass. These were bands with vocal and guitar gods and the bass was cranked up to like 9000 such that you could barely make out the vocals and guitars if the bass was playing.
The best audio at a concert I had was the one where the house amplification system died, and band had to play with their on-stage amplification and nothing else. The sound from the band was amazing--the vocals were clear, the guitar parts were articulated, and the bass and drums were reasonable.
Funny how the bass levels are something reasonable when the bass player has to stand in front of the bass amplifier.
To be fair, I'm being a touch uncharitable. Most of the fault lies with the person running the sound mixing board. It seems most sound mixers are so used to dance, pop and rap that they can't conceive of the idea that something other than bass and drums exists in music. It also doesn't help that modern solid-state amplifiers can drive amazingly low frequencies and really high amplitudes that the old tube amplifiers with transformers simply couldn't deal with.
t0mas88|4 years ago
I started doing it after the doctor at my annual medical check mentioned I had frequency loss at 24 years old that he would associate with a 40 year old. Should probably have worn ear protection earlier... But wearing them consistently helped a lot because the measurements were mostly "normal" now 10 years later.
korethr|4 years ago
vanviegen|4 years ago
bartread|4 years ago
Applejinx|4 years ago
Back when people went completely nuts for rock music, the PAs were generally so inadequate that they were just for vocals, and monitoring wasn't really a thing. Most gigs of the era ran off each instrument generating its own stage volume, hence the Marshall stacks and such.
The Grateful Dead famously scaled this concept up to insane heights with the Wall Of Sound system, where each instrument and voice had its own speaker stacks even at stadium levels. It really worked exceptionally well, but was cumbersome and didn't last that long.
This can be done in electronic genres, as well: it just isn't, for the most part. I daresay there have been sound installations that did it.
YeGoblynQueenne|4 years ago
That's not a band. That's a bunch of people playing at the same time.
nicoburns|4 years ago
One of my favourite bands to see live actually take their own sound guy on tour with them. They sound incredible.
spoonjim|4 years ago
ArtTimeInvestor|4 years ago
Was text written like this before the days of SEO?
dhosek|4 years ago
wombatmobile|4 years ago
The pitch of the sound of each drum?
The softness or hardness of the drum when hit with a certain force?
The height of the surface of each drum above the floor?
What point/s is/are the article making about these characteristics?
squarefoot|4 years ago
bayindirh|4 years ago
A long decay from an instrument reaching to second next note, to be picked up by another musical instrument makes me giddy.
It's possible to make the same thing in rock and metal, but genre structure doesn't allow it much.
rorykoehler|4 years ago
abdullahkhalids|4 years ago
So my principal task is to understand the physics of the depth, radius and other features of the base. This I will do both theoretically and experimentally to see how well I can model and predict. I would appreciate thoughts on the matter.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabla
cronix|4 years ago
One thing cool about Rick is he has access to a lot of original multitrack recordings and can solo tracks to isolate them, even on older stuff like John Bonham/Led Zepplin like in the above video to isolate drum tracks.
nataz|4 years ago
lc9er|4 years ago
Hackbraten|4 years ago
rectang|4 years ago
I'm not sure that it's possible to design something that sounds like a traditional rock drum kit that doesn't cause hearing damage when a drummer is mashing. It requires a different percussion instrument.
Applejinx|4 years ago
I would love to have a 'pancake' kit with all the drums double-headed but shallow. Maybe someday I'll try to get that made. The article suggests you could simply do that: everything gets the same very shallow drum depth, like a kit composed of snares without snare wires.
unknown|4 years ago
[deleted]
pottertheotter|4 years ago
I hope I don't get downvoted for this. I'd really like to know.
nfoz|4 years ago
chubot|4 years ago
That said, the point he makes is a good one, and one seems obvious in retrospect!
darkwater|4 years ago
thedeepdive|4 years ago