from Hacker News

Why do drum sets have descending toms?

by antibland on 4/25/21, 4:30 AM with 71 comments

• by danck on 4/25/21, 1:05 PM

  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.

• by monkeyfacebag on 4/25/21, 5:53 AM

  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.

• by daviddaviddavid on 4/25/21, 2:03 PM

  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.

  https://louiebellson.info/early-drumsets

• by bsder on 4/25/21, 6:17 AM

  > 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.

• by ArtTimeInvestor on 4/25/21, 8:18 AM

  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?

• by squarefoot on 4/25/21, 9:10 AM

  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.

• by abdullahkhalids on 4/25/21, 9:01 AM

  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.

  [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tabla

• by cronix on 4/25/21, 7:08 PM

  Rick Beato has some really good videos on drums (and guitars, and ....). Here's a quick 7 min one on bass drums: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EFjZ1QaKHdk

  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.

• by lc9er on 4/25/21, 6:05 AM

  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.

• by rectang on 4/25/21, 3:05 PM

  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.

• by Applejinx on 4/25/21, 11:37 AM

  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.

• by pottertheotter on 4/25/21, 6:51 PM

  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.

• by chubot on 4/25/21, 8:40 AM

  Hm the author mentions several times that he builds drums. And I would like to check out his drums, but there isn't a clear place to view them?

  That said, the point he makes is a good one, and one seems obvious in retrospect!

• by thedeepdive on 4/25/21, 2:58 PM

  This was a fascinating article. I haven't drummed in years, but it suddenly made me want to again. Thanks for sharing. Loved this!