Recording - January 2015 - 38

Last month (December 2014) I brought you a few
ideas about choosing and setting up a guitar and
amp/cabinet combination to achieve the sounds you're
hungry for in the studio. As I explained last time, in my
experience as a recording engineer I see a lot of bands
that simply don't know enough about how their equipment works to get the sounds they want; it doesn't matter

I see a lot of the more technical metal
bands' drummers playing through smaller
kick drums. They have a tighter sound,
and require less power from each foot to
get a full sound so the drummer can play
more intricate kick parts without wearing
himself out.

By Frank Marra

if you're talking about a group of kids in a garage just
getting started or a major label act. This is true with guitars and amps, but it's just as true-and often more
painfully obvious-with drums. Anyone can buy a kit and
set it up. And guess what? Anyone can set up a kit to
sound great, too. You just have to know how.
In most cases, especially with rock music, the drums are
the core of the song; if you can get good drum sounds from
the start of a session, the rest will fall into place pretty easily. So how do we get a good drum sound?
The right drum sound for the session starts with the
right kit for the job, and that starts with the sizes of the
drums. We will start with the kick, and work our way
around the kit from there while looking at what may seem
like a perfectly obvious thing that nobody thinks about
enough: The bigger your drums are, the harder you have
to hit them to get a good sound!
The most common kick drum size I see is 22 x 16 inches; that's a good size, with great punch and a nice lowend tone. Think of the drum width like the woofer size in
a monitor. The more surface area you have, the more air
it's going to be able to push at really low frequencies.
The depth of the kick drum is going to affect how hard
you have to hit it to get a fuller sound out of it. That is why
38

RECORDING January 2015

Next are the snare and toms. The same
rules apply when talking about width and
depth; you should experiment to find the
drums that you think sound best for you.
With these drums, choosing tone doesn't
begin and end with just the size. You can
tune the snare tighter or looser as well. A
tighter tension is going to give you a
punchier, higher-pitched sound. Loosen
the drum up a little and it drops in pitch
while also becoming a little fatter. Find
the perfect size snare for your style of
playing, and then learn to tune it correctly for the track. This simple trick can make
one snare sound like, and do the work of,
a small collection of them.
Many drummers don't think much about
tuning their toms, if they even understand
the idea at all. I don't see it nearly as
much as I should. If you know the key a
song is in, and actually have the time and
patience to do it, you can tune your drums
to the song. This is by no means necessary
but will lend a more cohesive sound to the
overall track. Other drummers like to tune
their toms to be separated by intervals of
a fourth between drums (e.g. if your smallest floor tom is tuned to a particular pitch,
your largest rack tom will be a fourth
above that and the next rack tom a fourth
above that, and so on).
There is no single agreed-upon method
for how to tune drums. I've seen a bunch
of different people tune a bunch of different ways; what I'm going to explain here
is how I do the job. It works for me and
hopefully it will work for you too.
Start with one lug and tap next to it on
the tom head. Tune to the pitch you want
at that one spot by tightening/loosening
that lug. Go to the lug directly across from
the one you just tuned, and tune it to the
exact same pitch as the last one. Then go
to the lug to the right of the one you just
tuned, and tune that one. Then go directly across from that one, and so on and so

Recording - January 2015

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