Farewell (old) drum head my friend: imPerfect Sound Forever

I have lost my snare drum sound, probably forever. Oddly enough, this all started about a year ago when I went to one of those week-long management development courses designed to improve my “leadership” skills. I highly recommend it. It had very little to do with the daily stuff of management (how to hire good workers, how to prepare a budget, how to speak in front of a large group, etc. etc.) but rather was a week of self-reflection. One of the last things we focused on was the famous “work-life balance”, but in a very personal way. This wasn’t a discussion on telecommuting or how if you work too many hours a day or week you won’t be a truly happy person (well, it was a little about that), but rather the focus was on the quality and nature of what you do outside of work. More importantly we all had to come up with a plan (like a mini-business plan) for stuff we were actually going to do to demonstrate a change in different aspects of our personal life to make it closer to what we want it to be, and yes, to balance it out better with all that time we actually spend thinking about and doing “work work.” It’s a very good approach to both work and the rest of life. Having a good attitude or a new attitude or a better mindset or whatever you want to call it isn’t enough: it’s about what you actually do to demonstrate who you are that really counts. So….we’re getting closer to the drum sound issue here…. My personal plan coming out of the development course included a concrete action item called something like: “spend more time working on writing and recording music”. Sounds simple enough…

One of the bullet-pointed tasks to implement that goal has been to improve my recorded drum sound: I haven’t been happy with it for a while now. So I messed around with mic placements, soundboard settings, software settings, etc. and finally my recording buddy got me this amazing little book, aptly titled Recording and Mixing Drums. Who knew there would actually be a book on this mysterious subject. It’s a short little book, actually, a fast 79 pages in very large type with illustrations. The basic points in the book have probably changed the way I’ll play and sound, forever, somewhat unintentionally. I ran home to implement about a dozen of the fast fixes in the book, mostly about “x-y” mic placement, and a whole bunch of other stuff that was all new to me, but easy to do. Emboldened by the instantly improved results on a test drum track recording, I then took the next concrete step (remember, it’s all about doing real stuff, not just attitude) and followed the advice of Chapter 1 of the book. Basically it says (my paraphrase): “Your drums will sound crappy on a recording if you don’t tune them, you idiot!” And fundamental to tuning, you need good fresh heads (and this is a direct quote): “If the drum heads are dented and stretched out, cancel the rest of your appointments for the day.”
Drum tuning is a very touchy subject for us drummers. Every drummer has their own ‘philosophy’ on this and the most stubborn viewpoints are probably held by the self-taught variety such as myself: in summary, “Naahhh, I don’t worry about tuning. I’m not gonna spend time getting a drum head to sound like some kind of piano note or get the head on perfectly straight. That’s bull. My drums sound great just the way they are, see…” at which point you thwack away as usual. So, I took a pretty big leap personally, I thought to myself, by actually listening to the book’s suggestions on tuning, since I never really had ever tuned my drums properly all these years. This was a great moment of listening, self learning and self progression, a step into a discomfort zone: all that great stuff I’m supposed to be doing in both my personal and work life according to my leadership development class.

Did I really need to change the heads, “they’re still pretty new”, I thought to myself. OK, hold on a second: as I looked at my “new” drum kit it dawned on me that it wasn’t so “new” anymore. I knew that my “old” drum kit was from my teenage years (1979 or so), but my “new” drum kit was….hmm….”new”, isn’t it? Actually, it was a gift from my wife on my 30th birthday, which was 13 years ago, and add to that the fact that my main snare drum predates that kit by 5 years or so, and it was bought off the floor at Sam Ash so it was probably there for about a year = I’m playing on about a 20 year old drum head?!?! This required changing, literally, and quick:

So I took the next concrete step and actually ordered new heads (nice Remo pinstripes) and as soon as they arrived, started to work right on the snare, the most important basis for the kit’s sound. I quickly removed the head, put on the nice crisp, clean, snappy new one and started tuning it up with my new drum tuner gadget thingy to get that evenly mounted effect and perfect balance between top/bottom head tension. I finally gave it a good thwack to see where I was in the tuning, and then it hit me: my snare drum was never, I mean NEVER, going to sound the same again. There was no point in trying to tune the new head to sound like the old one: first of all, it had never been tuned “right” and looking at the old head I could see that the combination of age, dents, stretching, and grime must have given the drum head and therefore my whole snare drum sound a particular character that couldn’t be reproduced.

Drummers know that when you play someone else’s drums, you play them differently: the drum placement and drum sound affect how you attack the whole situation. You adjust your technique, your sticking, and everything else. This can actually be fun and exciting – you find yourself playing things that you know you’d never be playing on that old familiar kit of yours, which is kind of like a well-worn pair of shoes, or a baseball glove that’s broken in. So here I am, feeling both terrified and excited at the same time that I’ve ripped the heart out of my old friend the drum kit and she’ll never sound the same again, which means that I will never sound the same again. It’s like not being able to go back home again. Where to go? What to do? Well, I moved forward and changed all the other heads too. With each change came the pain of losing that old familiar sound and the joy of hearing them do something new and different. A whole new world of possibilities is opening up here. It’s kind of daunting.

So my good friend and recording buddy who got me the little book that started the whole thing here called me up a few days ago to report that the hard drive on his multitrack recorder was officially “Dead”. He hadn’t backed it up in a few years, which means he has lost whole bunches of finished and unfinished recordings, including things I’ve worked on but never heard the work-in-progress. He was surprisingly not completely distraught. I mean, this is beyond the little change in a snare drum sound that I’ve been whining about here: this is real mixed, mastered, finished product, gone forever! He wasn’t happy about it, mind you, but he suggested we embrace the situation: a new beginning, isn’t it? Now we can leave all that stuff behind and just do some new things – what do we want to start working on? And so begins the next chapter, musically anyway. It’s kind of exhilarating.

Words of wisdom from the last sentence of my little drum book (another direct quote): “Have fun developing your drum sound.” I’m sure the author didn’t overthink the point the way I’ve been doing here, but I’m taking that bit of advice to heart. This has to be fun - there’s no turning back now anyway, so here we go! Farewell old (drum) head. And more.