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M123 Drum and Percussion Tech Tip

The traditional 5-piece drum set

Many drummers have brought the thunder with a simple 5-piece drum kit. This setup uses a snare drum, a kick drum, 2 rack toms, and a floor tom. The drum sizes include a 5" x 14" snare, 22" x 14" kick, one 12" x 8" rack tom, a 13" x 9" rack tom, and a 16" x 16" floor tom. As with the 6-piece drum kit, you can change any of the drum sizes to suit your preferences.

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M123 Drum Tech Tip

Picking out cymbals

Absolutely make sure you know what the cymbal you are going to buy sounds like before you buy it. It's a classic mistake to buy a cymbal that looks good to the eye but sounds terrible once you get it. You can visit manufacturer's websites for sound clips or go to a local music store to hear what sound the cymbal you are looking for produces. Word.

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Music123 Drums Tech Dude

Music123 Question: I’ve been trying to get my drum tracks to sound like the Power Station. I’ve tried every combination of microphones and compression, but I’m not getting close. [The Power Station was a recording studio at 441 W53rd Street in Manhattan, NY, now Avatar studios. Ed.]

Music123 Answer: The easiest way is to book time at Avatar Studios, use the drum room in studio A, and hire Tony Bongiovi to produce. Shy of that, here are a few tricks to get your drums slammin’. First of all, compression doesn’t make your drums sound bigger. Compression makes everything smaller. Remember, when you set a ratio of 4:1 that means for every 4 volts coming in, only 1 volt comes out. See? Smaller.

Keep in mind that compression is multiplicative, not additive. If you record with a 4:1 ratio and mix with an 8:1 ratio on the stereo master bus, you’re really compressing at 32:1, and that’s before mastering, which multiplies it even further—your sound gets smaller and smaller. If you’re going to record with compression, do so with only a few dB of compression and only on your overheads. You can use more compression on the room mics, but leave the other drum mics alone. In mixdown, use Parallel Compression.

To be totally PC, take your drum mix and send it to a stereo submaster in your mixer or DAW. Insert compression on the submaster (you can smack it pretty hard—8:1 or more) and send the submaster output into 2 open channels panned hard left and right. Sneak the compressed submix up to blend with the uncompressed drums (but not overtake them), and voilà, you now have the New York Power Station drum sound.

You can also insert an EQ on the submaster and boost at 10kHZ and 80Hz while leaving everything else flat. Gated reverb is another trick the Power Station used to make drums sound larger than life. Add a short, gated reverb to your kick drum to add body. Use the gated reverb on the snare drum as well and add a hall reverb and plate reverb for dramatic effect and some high-end sizzle.

One last Power Station trick is to ride the snare fader throughout the song. In rock, the snare usually hits on beat 2 and 4. Push the fader up on 2 and pull it back on 4. Make it louder in the choruses, but use the same relationship between beat 2 and 4. This creates musical drive in the rhythm—and is a very significant part of the Power Station’s signature drum sound.

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M123 Drums and Percussion Tech Dude

How To Hold Drumsticks in the Traditional Grip

The traditional grip for drumsticks—favored by drummers who learned their trade at the hands of a crafty jazz veteran—consists of holding one stick in your right hand with all 4 fingers wrapped around the stick and the thumb supplying the grip. In your left hand, you hold the stick between the 2nd and 3rd finger with the thumb relaxed. Some drummers I know will switch between grips, in order to supply the musicalal feeling that they want to produce.

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Drum shells come in a variety of thicknesses. Some are pretty light while others are really heavy, with gradations in-between. These thickness levels change the rigidity of the drum shell and therefore its sound.

Usually 6-ply drum shells are described as medium-thick, putting them on the stiffer side of the drum-shell spectrum. They offer less vibration but have a lot more projection than thin shells making them great for punchy, rock-style drumming.

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